This project tries to explore the concept of measurement as a way of survival. The Measurement series is inspired by my own childhood experience. As a child with diabetes, I had to measure and and record my blood sugar levels and inject insulin every single day. My daily routine which involved “measuring – recording – judgement – action – record” was then gradually internalized and became the way how I know the world. For a long period of time, I have been asking myself these questions: “what can I do to turn everyday behaviors with a purpose into art?” and “how can I add incentives, meanings and values to these daily medical routines?” I therefore began to develop the “Lifetime Project”, which will keep going until the end of life. This project consists of several pieces: the “Pearl Beads” involves stringing together medical waste in a temporal order. “The Level of Existence” displays the collection of the full blood glucose monitoring records which have been accumulated in the last 26 years. “The Portrait Diary” features twelve monthly portraits and one annual portrait which are retrieved from the collection of 365 daily self-portraits that I have taken during a year. “The Bodily Inscription” involves that I perform the Buddhist ritual of bowing for 111,111 times on the floor in order to fix my own posture. Finally, “Measurement” explores the various customary units of measurement that we employ on a daily basis as a reference for common understanding and communication in our urban life. Unlike the Lifetime Project,this work can be seen as the variation of my “measurement” series. Instead of being heavy or existentialistic like my previous works, this series is characterized by a combination of absurdity, rebellion and exaggeration, as the pieces are filled with all kinds of arbitrary units of measurements in use. This piece shows how, by using the body as the chief medium, one can measure the city, the self and one's relationships with others using non-traditional units of measurements. What I try to demonstrate is how one can rebel against the regulation imposed upon us, or to question the notion of subjectivity/objectivity simply by the system, simply by adopting seemingly absurd, non-standard or non-objective means of measurement. These pieces were executed mostly in 2003-2004 during the course of my artist residency in the New York P. S. 1 program and Taipei Artist's Village. Whereas the former, entitled “The Manhattan Project”, consists of 15 pieces, the latter, entitled “The Taipei Project” consists of three pieces. As far as I am concerned, New York and Taipei are both foreign cities. By measuring everything – even though it is little more than a gesture, as the act barely changes the world or its signifying system – I have realized the surreal and absurd nature of the pattern of my life, and found a way to re-define my world. Therefore, even though this series is still focussed on measurement, it has departed significantly from the “Lifetime Project”, in the sense that it shows the will to defy authority and fate, and the strategy that can be employed to achieve this goal. However, wandering around in a foreign city, I still feel the need to know my blood sugar level, or my whereabout, or how I can get to my destination, or, how to get home. Perhaps deep in my consciousness, the act of measuring itself would satisfy my deepest need for survival and security. “The Dressing Project” was the 13th piece of the Measurement series which I did in New York. In “The clothintg Project”, I made a cloth-ruler using fabric from my own clothing, and measure the circumference of the art institution which accommodated me. The measurement process involved four stages. At the first stage, I collected the clothes that belonged to myself, other resident artists and the staff of P. S. 1, assigned numbers to each of them, put these clothes on one by one and have my photographs taken. In the end I put on a total of 77 clothes. Every time I added another piece of clothing on myself I would have another photographs taken, so there were a total of 77 different photographs. At the second stage, I took off the clothes, cutting them into stripes, again assigning numbers to the stripes and sewing them together into a cloth rope before wrapping the rope around a cylinder. In the third stage, I took a measurement of the perimeter of P. S. 1 using the cloth ruler that I had made. As I rolled the cloth ruler around the P. S. 1 building clockwise, I found out that it would take 21 clothes to wrap around the building. I then walked counter-clockwise around the P. S. 1 building to roll the cloth ruler back. The fourth stage involved that I produced textual and visual records of the entire process and the results of the measurement in the forms of texts, objects, photographs,video images and installation.(Shi, Jin-Hua)