“Shen Shaomin: I stand a little higher than Socrates” is a recent interview piece published on The Beacon (September 2022).
“Shen Shaomin once read a magazine on an airplane that described many cults. He found that cults, like pyramid schemes, are a process of brainwashing, and that human cognition and consciousness can be constructed and manipulated. He wanted to use hypnosis to test this theory. He invited a master hypnotist from the US, and from a single person, a group to a collective of 40 people, he did experiments again and again to confirm this theory.
A magician friend once told me that the highly intelligent people of Mensa International are the easiest to be manipulated through mind reading, and even the higher IQ the person has, the easier he or she would be fooled. Shen Shaomin has always had a skeptical attitude towards hypnosis, believing that artists are hard to be manipulated, and if one can hypnotize an artist, it would be miraculous. In 2017, he invited an American master hypnotist to record a process of hypnotizing more than 40 Chinese artists on video. He observed the reaction of each hypnotized artist. With the prompting and inducement of words and gestures, some people’s perception of reality was shattered and they could not control themselves and performed all kinds of strange movements and behaviors. The experiment answered his question and concluded that human consciousness can be manipulated.
In this process, Shen Shaomin just gives an answer to his own intuitive judgment; the answer may not be accurate, but at least he has his own idea, and the work has the potential to make more people think. Compared to solving the problem, the significance of raising the question may be greater, because once an answer is given, things end there.”
Shen Shaomin’s The Hypnotized Artist will be featured in “No Point in Time”, curated by Dr Geoff Raby AO.
To read the full interview click here.
