huidi xiang










my body is in the metric system.



2022
wood, foam, cement, caster wheels, 3D printed PLA, paper, pushpin, acrylic, clay, motor, video played onloop (excerpt from The Pink Panther Show “The Pink Blueprint”)
1 meter x 3 feet x 5 apples





footnote for the work




1.
the footnote. The foot is a unit of length in both the British imperial and United States customary systems of measurement. Since the International Yard and Pound Agreement of 1959, 1 foot has been defined as 0.3048 meters exactly. In both customary and imperial units, 1 foot comprises 12 inches, and 1 yard comprises three feet. The length of the international foot corresponds to a human foot with a shoe size of 13 (UK), 14 (US male), 15.5 (US female), or 48 (EU sizing). The foot here is holding its note, the identical copy of this footnote.
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2.
Pink Panther’s ruler, in the episode “The Pink Blueprint,” teaches me not to make a work to fit the ruler but make a ruler to fit the work.
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3.
“Hello Kitty is 5 apples tall,” claimed Sanrio, the company that created the internationally renowned cartoon character Hello Kitty. Inspired by this statement, I decided to use the apple as a math object and made a ruler of apples for my art practice. The apple size here is defined by the average size of the 10 most common types of apples we can find in supermarkets today.
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4.
not 1kg. The kilogram is the unit of mass in the International System of Units (IS). The kilogram was originally defined in 1795 as the mass of 1 liter of water. This measurement of weight can also be traced back to just a single object: the International Prototype of the Kilogram (IPK), which was stored in an environmentally monitored safe in the lower vault located in the basement of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) Pavillon de Breteuil in Saint-Cloud. Since its creation in 1889, the IPK had been the standard by which the world’s weights are defined, and used to calibrate all other kilogram mass standards on Earth. But in November 2018, grandees of the BIPM, which regulates the metric system, gathered in Versailles and decided to replace this physica artifact by a new definition of the kilogram based on physical constants. And in 2019, after having served for 129 years as the world’s standard, the old IPK was stood down. The 1kg is not 1kg anymore.
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5. a replica of the hook of the measuring tape I have been using in my studio.



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6.
from the nose to the thumb. The yard is an English unit of length in both the British imperial and US customary systems of measurement, equaling 3 feet or 36 inches. Since 1959 it has been by international agreement standardized as exactly 0.9144 meter. The origin of the yard measure is uncertain. But there is a saying that, in the 12th century, King Henry I of England fixed the yard as the distance from his nose to the thumb of his out-stretched arm.

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7. 
in the exhibition, this footnote is printed on letter-sized paper. Letter is a paper size standard defined by the American National Standards Institute. The American Forest & Paper Association says that the standard US paper dimensions have their origin in the days of manual paper-making, the 11-inch length of the standard paper being about a quarter of "the average maximum stretch of an experienced vatman's arms."

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