Just One Thing with C. Zhang

C. Zhang’s memoir piece “Artful: How to Navigate 1591.7 Centimeters” recasts architecture (and its artful ways). Here, she shares just one thing about the piece:

For most of my life, I considered the primary purpose of art to be one of beauty. The intimate turn of a phrase, a haunting image, a clever trick—those are beautiful things. The purpose of art is to conjure pleasurable simulations of fear, grief, yearning, violence, and transcendence, all of which contained in an artifice that proves to be mesmerizing and enlightening. Although invariably rooted in real-life experiences, the pieces themselves should be unrecognizable as such.

I’ve always struggled when it comes to pieces of art that bear such explicit reference to someone’s personal life to the extent where the reference is unescapable. On one hand, there is some harrowing power in how a piece could seek so strongly to inflict a mark on reality; on the other, such material is apt to make its meaning blatantly obvious in the name of sincerity, which I find crude and essentially un-artful. All art about heartbreak is crude and most likely unsophisticated. The fact that “1591.7 Centimeters” exists—now, in the open—is a profound violation of my own principles. For this, I wrestle with myself often. My feelings will remain complicated hereafter.

“1591.7 Centimeters” is one of the only things I’ve written for no other purpose than to relate something that I feel in real life, exactly how I feel it. Because of this, I’m not sure I even consider it art. My feelings, vulgar as they are, feel too real to be beautiful.