Upcoming Exhibition | Order Copied: Change the Reference Frame

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Changing the Reference Frame

I thought that each of my words (that each of my movements) would persist in his implacable memory; I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying useless gestures.

—Funes the Memorious, Jorge Luis Borges (1942)

In Jorge Borges’s 1942 novel Funes the Memorious, the protagonist Ireneo Funes has infallible memory. Funes can list and number 70,000 memories every day, but he cannot distinguish the front and profile of a dog. His world is a “garbage heap” of details, which results in the withdrawal from pointless behaviors of people around him.

Looking back at this novel today, Funes is comparable to a 20th century computer that lacks computational intelligence. Just like what former US vice president Al Gore contends in his 1998 “Digital Earth” project, both Funes and a 20th century computer store a colossal amount of information that goes to waste. We need a practical and visible atlas of the virtual world, since “the vast majority of those images have never fired a single neuron in a single human brain.” Today, new technologies have begun to act as proxies for some human senses. Artificial intelligence knows humans better than humans themselves. When the former database becomes the present proxy, for both the new and the old Funes, the difference between not daring to act rashly and acting in accordance with instructions is insignificant.

Guo Cheng

The Net Wanderer, 2021

HD Video

9'32"

This exhibition is a revisit to technical images, an exploration of images and neurons. If we question the current state of technological proxies, perhaps it reveals how the images that “fire our neurons” today are not more than those in 1998. As such, if we return to the technological optimism of the millennium, we will discover that projects like the “Digital Earth” cannot fulfil the promise by simply liberating the database. The models that are designed to foresee crises and formulate the grand vision of humanity are products of the integration of satellite telemetry and virtual modeling technology. The image of an omniscient perspective is just the surface of the future. When we look at the earth on a screen, the boundary between the virtual and the real is surreptitiously reorganizing information as well as our cognition.

Tarak

Open Ended Objects, 2021

Giclee, Mixed-media Sculpture, Animation

Dimensions variable

A process of migrating towards the virtual world, this exhibition serves as an exploration of the technological evolution of humankind. It is an experiment of allopatric speciation.

About the Artists (Scroll down for the full text)

Guo Cheng

Born in Beijing in 1988, Guo Cheng currently lives and works in Shanghai. He was graduated from MA Design Products at Royal College of Art (London, UK) and obtained his BE in Industrial Design at Tongji University (Shanghai, China). His practice mainly focuses on exploring the interrelation between mainstream/emerging technologies and individuals under the context of culture and social life.  In recent years, his practice has dealt with themes such as the Anthropocene and Second Nature, digitalized interobjectivity, and infrastructures and ideologies behind. Guo Cheng's works often use humorous yet calm plastic language, linking grand issues with seemingly arbitrary objects, and providing critical perspectives for discussion and imagination.

Liu Xin

Born in Xinjiang in 199, Xin Liu is an artist and engineer. In her practice, Xin creates experiences/experiments to take measurements in our personal, social and technological spaces in a post-metaphysical world: between gravity and homeland, sorrow and the composition of tear, gene sequencing and astrology. She examines the discourse-power nexus as an active practitioner, an experimenter and a performer. Her recent research and interest center around the verticality of space, extraterrestrial explorations and cosmic metabolism.

Liu Guangli 

Liu Guangli (b.1990) graduated from Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains in 2020. Passionate about image-making, he has developed an art practice around painting, video art, 3D animation, and virtual reality. His works attempt to question how the digital medium fits into contemporary storytelling and the reconstruction of our collective memory.

Tarak 

Tarak works at the intersection of forms, objects and systems within art and architecture. His works traverse an ecological system of objects, a process of reading / extracting / re-creating everyday world. Decoding the formal composition of the most mundane of objects and categorising them into typologies, he translates the familiar forms into cross-media contemporary objects with direct emotional and intellectual effect. Simultaneously analytical and aesthetic, his works seek to deconstruct conventional ways of looking, reconstruct perception and transgress binaries of high art - low art, design - non design and banal - beauty. Tarak studied and works in Berlin, Beijing, and Baroda. Trained as an architect and a Master of Arts from Staeldelschule, Frankfurt, Tarak has 10+ years of professional experience with international practices, as well as his own design projects, publications and objects. His works investigate ontological questions of forms, objects, aesthetics and systems, often drawing from his formal experience in architecture.

Wu Chi-Yu

Wu Chi-Yu (b. 1986) is an artist based in Taipei. His works has long been focusing on re-establishing the connections among humans, things, animals, and the ruined world left by technic capitalism. His practice revolves around the moving image, looking for contemporary narratives in lost memory through the reproducing of oral history and myths. He is also involved in different collaboration projects of installation, video installation, and performance.

Zhi Wei 

Zhi Wei (b. 1997) currently lives and works in Shanghai. They completed their BFA degree with a first-class honor from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, in 2019. Working with lived experience and detached references through digital imageries and unconventional materials, Zhi Wei explores the entangled interdependence among the image-making, the act of painting, and the surface, and toes the line between object and image, concealment and exposure, materiality and phantasy, through which the tension between superficiality and sincerity is interrogated on both formal and emotional levels.

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开放时间：周二至周六 10:30 - 18:30

Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-18:30