Exhibitions & Events
Miniature 缩影
Once-vibrant urban villages are now gradually being replaced by vacant storefronts up for rent; in these still, in-between gaps, only the figures of food-delivery riders mark the rhythm of flow. The retreat of physical space and the advance of digital logic confirm that the fabric of life is being reshaped by algorithms and artificial intelligence. Miniature installs a cigarette retail cabinet at the entrance of a convenience store; together with the surrounding everyday fixtures—online-shopping baskets, freezers, shelves—it rehearses a drama about survival. Inside the cabinet sit objects that resist classification; yet they reside not within language or image, but carry concrete lived experience. These objects invite visitors to step away from the screen for a moment, to return to the direct perception and experience of objects, and—through a re-established sensory interface—to touch the contracts of survival that present-day life takes for granted.
Invisible Wall Project - III
re-do: blow piece
Ake plans to perform these two pieces once more in her hometown—the place where it all began, and also the place where she feels most sensitive.
Invisible Wall Project - II
The Invisible Wall Project is an action whose aim is not to represent the objective world, to grasp the laws by which things unfold, or to express known facts, but to give form to (forming) something unknown. Within the project, the essence of objects is withdrawn: even when they appear to touch one another physically, ontologically they still withdraw from one another. This means that when one object “translates” another, the translation is nothing more than an idling, a spinning in place. In it, each entity continually converts other objects into its own terms, trying to use the word “object” in a comfortably provocative way. The Invisible Wall Project does not invent a new or improved version of substance and accident; rather, at the neck of ontology, it treats everything as a strange entity that withdraws from contact yet somehow manifests. Such action underscores the fact that “the action itself” carries its own internal cause, while the divergence or tension between an object and its qualities constitutes a new entity. The Invisible Wall Project thus creates an entirely new metaphor—an entity that emerges from the collision of images of utterly unrelated objects. Within this entity, the object's unduplicatable veil and its perceptible, explorable contour/portrait interweave to form a single reality. (Text by Deng Jincheng)
The kinetic energy of the sprint's start is wrapped within the posture of the sprint itself.
Huang Xuebin, Object Boomerangs, 2023, scotch tape, everyday objects, variable size
Xuebin tries to suspend the image of every object. He puts the objects in brackets—and at the other end of the link he even places an empty bracket. Like a cassette, the tape plays from one solid to another, but it is a soundless playback; not even the whir of the running tape can be heard. Once the audiovisual is stripped away, how do we observe an action? And if an action cannot be observed, does it still exist? Perhaps this is Xuebin's cunning: he lets action idle in a dark, vacuum universe—the left hand draws the right, the tail draws the dog. (Text by Deng Jincheng)
Invisible Wall Project - I
An invisible wall is the intangible barrier in a video game that restrains the player-character's movement, blocking the space between places that appear to be reachable. It is set up to keep the game running smoothly and thereby to safeguard the player's experience. As a spatial boundary within the game scene, it is imagined as a “wall” and marked as such in everyday language. In an exhibition space, many kinds of “barriers” likewise exist between the works and the audience—for example, the habit of understanding a work as a “readymade.” How to uncover the multiple relations within a space, and to assemble the many sensory qualities of its objects, is the question this exhibition sets out to address.
Bibi (Deng Jincheng) has studied accounting and art theory, and currently works across translation, curating, and art practice. He is especially well versed in the theories of New Materialism: speculative realism, OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology), and the like. Perhaps owing to his rational scrutiny of anthropocentrism, he is an author who keeps overturning his own proposals in the course of working. For him, making art is just doing a job: if it gets botched, he can simply start over—that is a new beginning. This also lets him sidestep the stumbling block of the “self” and seize the power of thinking. As he puts it, “art is no longer a representation of the external world, but a latent field in which events can take place.” In this project he proposes a working method he calls “seamless binding”: by manufacturing temptation and setting “traps,” he lends objects humor and theatricality, saying that what his work aims for is the state of “pressing a finger against your clothes to fake a pistol.” (Text by Huang Xuebin)
Deng Jincheng, Go, 2023, black and white puzzle, 144×50×90cm
