PILANE

A Swedish-Chinese marketplace, high up on the mountain in Pilane Sculpture Park at Tjörn, on the Swedish West coast, as part of the "Lower World Project".

Pilane Sculpture Park is a spectaculairly beautiful place on the island Tjörn runned by Mr Peter Lennby. Every year, new sculptures of prominent international artists are exposed. In 2012, a 400-year-old Chinese temple was built up in the mountains. Mr Lennby asked Torsten Jurell to transform the place where the temple stood "through a nightly attack" ...

... And it became a place for Information from the Lower World up the hill. A place for illegal trade in licenses between China and Sweden.

What is Ban Zheng?

"ON WALLS, LAMP-POSTS and frontages - everywhere you look in China - you'll see phone numbers to ring. Often they've been painted over. The more I have thought about these painted-over numbers, the more they have attracted me. Various combinations of numbers have crept into my paintings. This year I got round to asking my friends what the phone numbers were. 'Ban zheng,' they said. They're part of the illegal licence business. Marriage certificates, drivers' licences, Ph.D. degrees. You can buy whatever kind of papers you need. Everything's for sale. Just make a call to the Lower World".

Text: From the book - Good News From the Lower World.

The Lower-World Project FIND HERE

信息 = Information

.What does 信息 mean?
In 2006 Torsten Jurell attended a wooden symposium in Orsa. There were 8 Swedish and 8 Chinese sculptors.
"To Orsa, I had a drawing on a loudspeaker tower. With a chainsaw I create a tower that would be like a big drawing in wood. I painted the sculpture in yellow and show it later on a photo for my artist-friend Gregory Coats in New York." What's that? Look!? "I asked.
"Information" he said.

"Of course!" I thought, and named the sculpture ... "Information".
A shaky information tower. A few years later, it becomes the central figure in The Theater — one of the important symbols in the "Lower World Project" that I started to show in Sweden and China.

Photos of Ban Zheng in Shanghai and Beijing ...