2020 Research-based Curatorial Project: Shortlist Exhibition
Duration: September 12—December 6, 2020
Opening: 14:30-17:00, September 12, 2020
Address: OCAT Institute, Jinchanxilu, Chaoyang District, Beijing
From September 12 to December 6, “2020 Research-based Curatorial Project: Shortlist Exhibition” will be on show at OCAT Institute, exhibiting curatorial proposals of the six finalists.For the OCAT Institute, this is the third year of holding its “Research-based Curatorial Project,” and it is, indeed, a particularly special year. With the spread of COVID-19, human beings are facing serious challenge, while tremendous transformation is undergoing in our society. Due to the impact of the pandemic, many artists and curators were forced to suspend their schedules, or even to cancel plans. Subsequently, the operation of art institutes was also changed. On the other hand, the occurrence of the virus enables us to pause for a moment in our fast-paced urban lives , using more time to create, think and change. The Open Call for the “2020 Research-based Curatorial Project” lasted from January 23rd to April 15th, 2020. This year, we received 50 proposals in total. Taking “research-based” as priority, the OCAT Institute review group selected six finalists, including "The Animal That Therefore I Am" (curator: Lux Bai Yuting), "Qiwu: Natural Footprint in Geopolitical Vicissitude" (curators: Cai Yixuan, Cao Xuefei), "Banal Objects, DIY Aesthetics: A Remotely Organized but Self-entertaining Exhibition" (curators: Claire Li Shiying, Chris Yuan Zhongtian), "Viral Transmission: A Medium in Between" (curator: Li Yizhuo), City, Sound, "Lightness: Moving Boundaries and Fictional Narratives" (curator: Yu Weiying), "COVID19: From A to Z Toward a Sound & SEEDesign Society" (curator: Zhou Lei).The curators of the six shortlisted projects adopt different research perspectives and methodologies. Some of them capture sensible social problems triggered by the COVID-19 in the current time and ponder over the relationship between human and its living environment in the post-COVID 19 era; others reflect upon the disparity between theory and practice, combining their thoughts on certain artistic forms and methodologies, and communicate all the insights through their research objects. Recalling the proposals of 2019, both the content and format of the selected projects carry features of multi-dimensionality and globalization. Meanwhile, under the current special circumstance, this year’s selected proposals present a series of profound and detailed discussions on practical issues with a high level of social generality.The exhibition of “2020 Research-based Curatorial Project: Shortlist Exhibition” engenders a spontaneous sense of unity because of the relative connection between each proposal’s focal point. During the preparation stage after entering the shortlist, the six finalist curatorial teams have further modified and developed their original proposals. In the following three months of exhibition, they will continue reinforcing the discussions and proceeding with their research to a further extent. The six finalists will be exhibited at OCAT Institute since September 12, 2020. A workshop will be held during the opening of the exhibition. The executive director of OCAT Institute Professor Wu Hung and guest jurors will engage the curators and their respective projects in dialogue, both online and on-site. Considering feedback from guest jurors and audience, a winning proposal will be selected. The final selection will release on our official website and WeChat platform, and the winning proposal will be curated at OCAT Institute in 2021.OCAT Institute would express gratitude to all curators, researchers, artists and institutes as well as your support. About the Shortlisted Proposals
The Animal That Therefore I Am
The global crisis of coronavirus pandemic has led human beings to an unprecedented level of uncertainty and disorder that calls for critical reflections on the Anthropocene. Current evidence suggests that the COVID-19 virus emerged from an animal source, yet animals have long been facing extinction and suffering through global warming, industrial farming, experimentation, human recreation, and habitat loss. In the meanwhile, the mainstream culture often presents animals in the abstract, transforming them into figurative devices. The media and the pet industry assign characters to species that evoke sympathy and sentimentality. The current state of affairs urges humans to respond to nonhuman worlds in a more rigorous and less narcissistic manner, not only ethically but also ontologically. Resisting essentialist divisions between culture and nature, the exhibition aims to interrogate alternative ways of addressing human-animal relations in the contemporary world. Since Aristotle, hierarchical divides are constructed between humans and animals. The Cartesian subjective/objective distinction further foregrounds the conceptualizations that privilege the human on capacities for reason and language. Literature and psychoanalysis have a long history of employing animals as projections of human imagination and metaphors of the human psyche. Against the liberal humanist tradition, recent philosophers have posed possibilities of deconstructing the ontological boundaries. In 1974, Thomas Nagel’s well-known article “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” argues against reductive materialist accounts of the mind that ignore the complexity of the subjective experience of animals. Similarly, in “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” Jacques Derrida describes his experience being beheld naked by his pet cat in the bathroom, criticizing the prominent assumed “otherness” and the disregard of individual animal subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari, uprooting the very notion of fixed and stable subjects, express the intimate and non-dialectical process of “becoming-animal.” Donna Haraway proposes that human and nonhuman co-shape one another as part of an intimate entanglement of agency. Drawing from Derrida’s inquiry and other thinkers’ animal theory, the exhibition selects artists whose works disrupt anthropocentrism by exploring animal subjectivity and challenging the ontological foundations of human-animal relations. Either performed or presented, rather than represented, the animals in the group of works play as active agents that maintain their point of view. Rejecting symbolism, the artists approach nonhuman through understanding rather than imagination. Collectively, they offer a post-anthropocentric perspective of species equivalence and plurality thus also suggests a chance of liberation from being bound by identities for human beings.
QiWu: Natural Footprint in Technological Vicissitude
Curator: Cai Yixuan; Cao Xuefei
Cities embed mountains and rivers, production activities extract energy from nature, and infrastructure transforms the geological state drastically—construction technique gradually enters in the ecosystem. The modernization of technology also enables space to extend upward: sensory and interactive equipment connects human emotion and cognitive ability with network interface; and through satellites, human-being obtain planetary operation ability to tame nature. This exhibition uses the theory of “The Stack” from Benjamin Bratton as a metaphor of contemporary geopolitical structure within “the numerous devices from terrene to ether”, and the theory of “equality of things (Qiwu)” from Chuang-Tzu to elicit the unification between Chinese landscape and cosmology. The counterbalance between nature and humanity constrained by ritual-and-order(LiFa) and folklore, disintegrates gradually during the process of modernization, and has been transformed into a new treatment of conflicts and catastrophes under the guidance of technology. Starting with an atlas of emotion and perception, this exhibition adopts “natural system and technological stack” as a thread, to overlap the perception of “Qiwu” with the geography, insetting the lifecycle into the geochron of cosmos.
Humidity, virus and flotage in the air all come from ecological barriers, combustion of geological resources, and even the spatial condition of the surface. The streaming media is a screen of the anxiety from land disposition. Constant in a state of escape, information just like air, is a surface between land and body, immersing into the quotidian life. The umbilical cord between geocentric and satellite is like “ The Neck of Luna”, traveling through the atmosphere, endowing humans with planetary-scale cognition and control of earth. The traction that the moon functions on hydrology, is converted to energy in tide, delivered to steel pipelines and connected electronic chips or satellite networks; it compresses the sensation of undulating mountains and rivers into libido, involving into virtual investment and endless consumption.The exhibition is divided into three sections—Sky That Comes from Earth, Neck of Luna and Tidal Current. Video and sound intertwine heat, humidity, anxiety, silence, watershed and typology with geospatial structures, displaying various moods and emotions. Research-based works trace the footprint of natural elements in political upheavals, territorial expansion and alteration of economic models, presenting the rival between scientific cognition and local embodied knowledge. The exhibition ends with three speculative designs on management strategies: from the perspective of judicial framework, energy flow and data distribution, they attempt to present another path to enter the ecosystem.
Banal Objects, DIY Aesthetics: A Remotely Organized but Self-entertaining Exhibition
Curators: Claire Shiying Li, Chris Zhongtian Yuan
After the epidemic, many characteristics of the post-globalization era are becoming more prominent. Artists are getting better at self-entertaining in small groups like early punks with an attitude of cynic with pleasure. Noticed many new works are created under such situations, we think of many diaspora artists who are committed to uncertainties in terms of “identity”. Their works show their individual thinking on cultures crossing in fluidity. In this exhibition, we invite artists who are in dialogue with multi-cultural society to present their raw emotions and life observations by video in order to find emerging creative forces out of ever-more complex contradictions in the post-globalization era. As more exhibition press these days is written in personal style, we also intend to break through traditional curatorial thinking by revealing the conversation between the curator and the artist and engaging the public to participate in the curatorial narrative. After entering the dramatized narration of the exhibition, each encounter between the public and the video work opens up possibilities of creating a new personal private dialogue.
Viral Transmission: A Medium in Between
In a time of panic, or panic of escalating panic, how do we reconcile the geopolitical borders that are simultaneously dissolved and reinforced by viral transmission? How can we make art when we witness, and in not a few cases, experience the dreadful spread of a virus while confined home and barred from productive activities? Is art, however illusorily, a promising antidote to the fear of the unseen and unknown? This exhibition argues to foreground their technographic thinking in a multifaceted entwinement of personal narratives and an intermedial fable of our time. The tale further reaches for novelty in the eye of machines and sensory apparatuses. Airborne infections appear to have achieved an ultimate transmissive efficiency—the messenger is the message. This year since March, public programs have been canceled or postponed globally, leaving art in an imaginary state suspended between an archived press release and an upcoming event. The uncertainty is no news—art might have been always dwelling in such an imaginary sphere, nimbly inverting spatial relations and casually navigating its habitat on and beneath, or even in and out of, the surface. How is a virus supposed to transplant itself into a liquefied cell whose membrane is mobile and discernment of othering/belonging questionable? “Television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done”; this quotable remark attributed to Ernie Kovacs, the pioneering TV comedian, is a telling testimony on our hybrid age of advancement and haphazard. In fact, we would baffle ourselves to name one thing that is either rare or well done; in other words, everything prospectively becomes a medium and a medium of a medium, followed by an infinite derivation. The above fallacy will by no means bear scrutiny, given its mischievous semantic plays, but serves as a metaphor for our society’s impulsive dissolution of cognitive dissonance. Every time confronted by frictions and schisms, we tend to seek shelter in an anthropocentric construct of consistency. In its dawning decades, video was celebrated as a capable conduit—affordable, portable, and amenable for the restive search of social changes—that activated expressive desires instead of merely satisfying a want. Parallelled to the pathogenic mechanism that viruses prey on and die of, this reflexivity has grown beyond a specific medium and has accumulated to a form that hopefully invites investigation into its generative impulse and condition. City, Sound, Lightness: Moving Boundaries and Fictional Narratives
An azure island on planet Murjek stands somewhere in the universe, and occasionally, a faster-than-light spaceship arrives. Few visitors on an empty grandstand silently watch the original mechanical body, the final piece left by the artist, Zima, which is a slow swimmer focusing on cleaning blue pool tiles. Visitors gaze stubbornly and longingly as if waiting for something, or recalling the pure experience of pleasure in the depths of a distant memory. One of the audience members is Alastair Reynolds, a British novelist who chronicles this fictional future artist’s story. I learn about the artist Zima from Netflix’s 2019 science fiction animated series “Love, Death + Robots.” I think the stories of artists in the future would also be about artificial intelligence, multi-dimensional art creation, and the exploration of the truth of space.In 2020, humanity is still living in cities on the earth, facing the daily realities and looking up at the unknown. City, Sound, Lightness: Moving Boundaries and Fictional Narratives ponders on the fusion, refutation, and experience of future art and technology—from the representation of life in a “postmodern” context to the pursuit of deep self-consciousness towards the virtual digital space in the form of virtual experience. Since the 1960s, the evolution of science fiction literature and popular culture characterized by cyberpunk has presented moving boundaries of fictional narratives. Human civilization and future world based on a high-tech development where homo sapiens and artificial intelligence replicas fall into an illusory philosophical swamp and a poetic aesthetic imagination—“All these moments will pass with time. Everything is like tears and disappears in the rain.”The theme of this research-based curatorial project and the work of artists are designed to revisit the paradox of future cities and free will under cyberpunk and dystopian aesthetics, focusing on the field that interacts with the body through listening to sound and rhythm, thus expanding the discussion of the future boundaries of artistic imagination. In the future, artists would be able to experience everything in the universe beyond the earth in a transformed mechanical body as Zima, will artistic creation extend to more distant infinite spaces or return to its beginning on the earth?
COVID19: From A to Z
Toward a Sound & SEEDesign Society
“瘗”(entomb), “翳”(eclipsed), “呓”(hallucinated murmur), “忆”(remembrance), “噫”(alas), “疫”(plague)—These six characters are all pronounced as “yi” in Chinese resonating with psychedelic connotations due to their polyphonic mimicry of mantra and associations with current catastrophic COVID-19 plague. Therefore, the curator of this project attempts to create a cohort of new sound-visual regime, by mimicking the soundscape of Sanskrit mantra “Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ” (the mélange of sound and visual installations and documentaries used here as ritualistic and sacrificial objects for those deceased and suffering public impacted by Corona-virus). This project intends to reflect the dominion of visual centralism as a regime, by corroborating and confronting it with auditory narratives, as a result, contemplating the possibility of new sound kinship system, might be written as “Tingship system” (“ting” means hearing, as “聪” in Chinese). The collapse of the world, if this is the ghastly fact we are dealing with, should be heard, in its inception, not be seen. In terms of human epistemology, the numbness of senses, give rise to the decadence of ontological world. Nowadays, those who believe in traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine; those who believe in the "West" and those who believe in the "East"; those who believe in "nature" and those who believe in "conquering nature" are hopelessly disentangled with no gray zone between. These disagreements lead to countless scourges, which in turn cause endless polemic strife and disasters ensued. As long as we are dominated by “seeing is believing regime”, what you hear is not important and often disdained as hearsay.Languages begin with the audio-visual synergy. People know through senses, construe through perceiving, processing through cognizance. Writing system and rigid regulation on fixity of sound are attempts of dominion for complaining murmurs and polemic shouts. Writing system based on visuality makes communication exact, but at the same time keeps many other possibilities and opinions muted. The use of hearing as a guiding principle inevitably leads to a confusion of opinions and chaotic debates. However, the subjectivity of the cognitive theory of hearing can trickle down from revelation of nature, cognizance of world, to an ambidextrous wrist, with calligraphy brush in hand, transporting the meanings from invisible but audible/prototypical/sounds onto the paper as communicative scenarios, crouched in form of visual characters, but must be read in different tones. The archaeology of knowledge and examination of knowledge regime begins with visual chisel but must end with audible brush. OCAT Institute is a non-profit research organization dedicated to the history of art and its related discourses. It was established by OCAT in Beijing and is a member of the OCAT Museums. The Institute has three main focuses: publication, archive, and exhibition. Its research scope encompasses art from antiquity, modern and contemporary Chinese art, and specifically investigates artists, artworks, schools of art production, exhibitions, art discourses, as well as art institutions, publications, and other aspects of art’s overall ecology. It supports library and archive collecting and the facilitation of dialogue and exchange between China and abroad. It is also an exhibition space of the OCAT Museums in Beijing.
OCAT Institute aims to establish a paradigm of values, a system of academic investigation, and modes of applying historical research methodologies to modern and contemporary Chinese art. Its scholarly values lie in knowledge, reflection, and research. Drawing from scholarly research traditions and the open spirit of such research, OCAT Institute bridges contemporary Chinese art history with the history of mind, history of ideas, history of thought, and history of visual culture. It also focuses on the translation and publication of classical art historical writing, and the reconciliation between modern and contemporary art history and classical art history.