Nearly 90% of non-male artists have made history in history with the world's most important art exhibitions

The Venice Biennale di Venezia, which opened in the spring of 1894, is one of the oldest and most important artistic events in the world. For more than a hundred years, the Venice Biennale has never been as good as the 59th edition of this spring, when the pandemic delayed the opening of a full year, and nearly 90% of the participating artists are non-male artists, which not only subverts the consistent inequality of male and female artist participation, highlights the importance of female artists, but also highlights the identity of neutral cognitive artists and non-human-centered issues.

The Venice Biennale is divided into two parts: the Theme Pavilion and the National Pavilion. More than 213 artists from 50 countries participated in this year's theme exhibition. At the same time, more than 80 countries participated in the exhibition of the national pavilion section.

China Pavilion

French Pavilion

UK Pavilion

Uganda Pavilion

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Cecilia Alemani, chief curator of this year's theme pavilion, is also the first Italian woman to curate the biennale, the fifth female curator in the history of the exhibition. The exhibition is named after the famous surrealist female painter and writer Leonora Carrington's work of the same name, "The Milk of Dreams". In this book, artist Carrington constructs a fantasy world with his extraordinary imagination, in which everyone can change, be transformed, become something or simply become someone else. Guided by this "fable", curator Alemani divides the thematic exhibition into three major areas: "The Manifestation of the Body and Its Deformation"; "The Relationship between the Individual and Technology"; and "The Connection of the Body to the Earth". This surreal artistic carnival leads us to the following thinking: What is life? What are people, plants, animals... What is the difference between human and non-human? Man's role on Earth? No one, what does the world look like?

This year's China Pavilion, with Zhang Zikang as the main curator and Sun Dongdong as the assistant curator, set the theme of the China Pavilion as "Yuanjing", mainly exploring the influence of science and technology on the art of the times. The China Pavilion featured artists Xu Lei, Wang Yuyang, Liu Jiayu and the AT team.

On the occasion of the opening of this year's Venice Biennale, VOGUE interviewed Lu Yang, the theme pavilion artist of this exhibition (the exhibition work is "Doku The Self"), and Liu Jiayu, the artist of the China National Pavilion (the work on display is "Virtual Pole Quiet Du").

When the soul jumps out of the shell

The theme hall exhibits an interview with artist Lu Yang

VOGUE：

Your work completely breaks the boundaries of human identity, especially the cyberman alias you create, what experience and background prompted you to have such a perception and trigger such a creation?

Lu Yang:

I started using my own image creation in 2015, which is a creative need and has nothing to do with the background of my experience. I like to jump to a more macro angle of creation, technical iteration progress, the tools used will be updated, DOKU is different from the previous self-image, technically my "digital twin", especially face scanning 100% restore real people.

VOGUE：

Can you tell us a little about your exhibit "Doku The Self"?

Lu Yang:

DOKU only life and death is my digital image, in 2020, Covid19 outbreak began to prepare for production, (around the role of DOKU for the accumulation and construction of digital assets), did not expect that Covid has been more than 2 years, DOKU has lived in the digital world in this way for two years. DOKU's first narrative film work, "Doku The Self", brings a lot of my personal experience to it, and I once again mix the stages of my life's inspiration in this work under the guise of DOKU's digital body.

At the beginning of the work, DOKU struggles to escape bad luck with others in a dream. As he experiences the moment of death in his dream, he awakens from the dream to find that he is still a human being and is on a plane about to begin his journey. Dying from a dream and living from reality is a personal experience that I often have, which makes me feel that the handover between life and death is just a door. Life and death are not dualistic opposites, they are just a game of trial relative to the other shore, they are one and the same shore.

I projected one of my own flight experiences into this work, and this origin is very important to this work. During the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020, on a plane, I saw lightning flashing near and far, and the city became a vertical view at a 90-degree angle, the plane plummeted in a thunderstorm, other passengers on the plane cried out in horror, and I only looked out the window. It was all so amazing that I experienced "ecstasy". The dots of the city on the ground like tofu blocks are where I was just now, and I observe it so objectively and calmly, just as in a near-death experience the soul breaks away from the body and goes to a more macroscopic vision, and in the ascending vision, observes its own body like the other. In that moment, I experienced the calm feeling of my soul jumping out of my shell. Time is static, or there is no time at all, and space transcends my previous conception of space. This moment can not be learned from any books, it is too wonderful, I want to know why, just search the Internet to see if anyone has had a similar experience, and found that the "overview effect" is experienced by astronauts in the more distant cosmic dimension, but similar to this experience. I was very depressed because of the Covid epidemic, but the "ecstasy" in this thunderstorm has given me a new way of looking at the world, and this energy continues to affect every moment I am now. DOKU re-experienced my Overview effect in this digital world for me, and when making this work, I can always go back to the flight I experienced, to the origin of the experience of "ecstasy".

VOGUE：

DOKU The Self's creation has gone through the epidemic stage so far, how has the magical reality affected your work?

Lu Yang:

I like to think about creation from a more macroscopic perspective, throughout history, what we have experienced now has been staged many times, and people's lives are a paragraph in the long river of history, so many disasters in history, war, plague, disaster, encounter is very normal, human nature is so, the whole of human beings has not evolved in thinking, history will be similar to the stage, so I will do the work from the whole of human beings, the whole of the universe, beyond the concept of time and space, not very aimed at the current events, the epidemic also belongs to these human overall events, And not independent of the outside.

VOGUE：

Congratulations to DOKU The Self on the stage of the Venice Biennale. This year's Weishuang is regarded as the most special one with its absolute proportion of non-men, what is your evaluation of this?

Lu Yang:

I have always felt that I am just a mind body that can be expressed using the body, there is no difference between men and women without reference, my works have nothing to do with gender, and the roles in the works are genderless. But the reality is that inequality between men and women is a matter of human history, and it does exist, and the Venice Biennale must stand up to take this step.

VOGUE：

The epidemic in Shanghai has forced you to miss a series of activities such as the opening of Venice this year and the opening of the Melbourne Museum of Contemporary Art.

Lu Yang:

This is my second participation in The Two Worldsity, the first time in 2015 at the National Pavilion. Many of my partners and friends abroad were surprised that I didn't attend myself. But I was locked up at home in Shanghai, I could only send a document to the past, there was no way to set up the exhibition, every day I could only look at the photos of my works sent by those who went to see the exhibition, and interact with it... I feel very sorry... Some physical works are also difficult to transport, to be produced locally, the performance can only be remotely controlled, although digital creation has no geographical restrictions has been relatively lucky, but the presence of artists is still very important.

VOGUE：

Is there an latest creative and exhibition plan to share with VOGUE readers in the future?

Lu Yang:

AroS in Denmark, Kunstpalais in Germany are on display, and a solo project at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo is underway. In the second half of the year, there will be a solo exhibition in the Berlin space of Deutsche Bank, The Paris Space, and the Zabludowicz Collection in London. In addition, the Munch Art Museum Triennial, the Sydney Opera House's personal digital performance project, etc., especially many projects, many group exhibitions, the focus of work is basically on the international bar.

Creating the "buffer zone" of the metaverse

The Chinese Pavilion exhibits an interview with artist Liu Jiayu

VOGUE：

AI, intelligent learning, East and West, art and technology, your work is integrated into the most worthy of our exploration of this era, I deeply feel that your work not only responds to the theme of this year's Weishuang "Milk of Dreams" - the discussion on the boundary of Homo sapiens, but also summons the theme of the Chinese Pavilion "Yuanjing", can you introduce this work and share your views on "boundary" with VOGUE readers.

Liu Jiayu:

The exhibited work "Virtual Pole Quiet Du" is a three-dimensional sculpture projection work with a total length of about 21 meters and an exhibition line covering about 30 meters. The inspiration for the early days of his creation came from the earliest atlas of China, the Yugong Geographical Map, which produced the earliest imagination and reflection on the geography of China. I hope that the works created this time can show the cognition of civilization from different perspectives and the desire of different people for imagination through the translation of the terrain by artificial intelligence, and everyone has their own perspective and the deduction path of civilization behind the perspective, and I look forward to drawing a blueprint for the future of mankind through the output of these different perspectives. Over the past year, we have started from the Helan Mountains and used StyleGAN, pix2pix and MIDAS to train different components of the work and obtain different information. The system synchronizes the three-dimensional results generated by artificial intelligence after deep learning training on Chinese terrain and the two-dimensional results generated by artificial intelligence after deep learning training on Chinese ink paintings in previous dynasties. Between the surreal dimension and the virtual field, a buffer zone linking the two is created for the viewer.

There's a lot of talk about the distinction between humans and machines, or the boundary between the virtual world and the real world. But in fact, in my creation, this so-called "boundary" does not exist. The space in my work is the buffer zone before people arrive in the virtual world from the real world, not a "boundary", but a place where people can see the invisible essence of reality and expand their imagination to complete the transition from reality to virtual, where the real information of the real world is continuously imported into the virtual world, and then the echo of the virtual world continues to feedback to the field of the real work. When I use the deep learning of artificial intelligence as the basis for creation, I will not completely treat AI as a pure machine, he is not just a medium of creation, more like one of my partners, I will co-create with him, he can not always learn or train out the state I want, we also have a run-in, but all this is the joy of creation.

VOGUE：

Graduating from the Royal Academy of Arts in 2014, what was the toughest time you've ever experienced along the way? Have you ever envisioned standing on this stage in less than a decade?

Liu Jiayu:

In fact, there is no particularly difficult moment, because when I embarked on the road of creation, I never had a certain idea of the present, or what kind of stage I expected to stand on, just like I did not want to be an art creator before, many things I made when I made choices, it was because I had pure liking in my heart. Of course, in my opinion now, I have been lucky along the way, and there are many people who have helped me. I had the opportunity to participate in the exhibition of the Chinese Pavilion of the Venice Biennale at such an age, and I am very grateful for the support of Teacher Zhang Zikang and Assistant Curator Sun Dongdong.

VOGUE：

Since this work is the interweaving of machine learning and artists' thoughts, and the encounter between virtual space and real space, I believe that the Venice Chinese Pavilion is the most perfect "physical" appearance it has, is this work a broader "virtuality" space in the future?

Liu Jiayu:

As a three-dimensional sculptural projection work, it has a strong ability to extend, and its adaptability and plasticity with the "virtuality" space are also very high, which can integrate many scenes and guide the audience to open a deeper imaginary world. As a creator, I certainly hope that it can show more possibilities in the "virtuality" space, and in the post-epidemic era, how to let the audience access the work itself faster and more conveniently is also a problem that every creator is thinking about, and the "virtuality" space can make people more quickly access to the work itself. We are also now working intensively to prepare a version of the cryptovoxels public chain of this work, which will also slowly unfold to the public along with the cycle of the exhibition.

VOGUE：

Do you have any new creative plans to share with VOGUE readers in the future?

Liu Jiayu:

In recent years, "metaverse" has become a hot topic, but for us now, the metacosm is still full of unknowns. In 2021, also because of the metaverse and digital collections, there has been an almost fanatical focus on technology. As new media creators, what we can do may be how to use technology to realize the language of our own ideas, I have always thought of installations as a port that links the virtual world to the real world, and what I am doing now is to build a "buffer zone" before people arrive in the metaverse. In the future, we will also carry out more creative extensions in the virtual world, through this "port" to transport a steady stream of creativity, explore more possibilities and ways to present.

Editor: Juvan Zhu

Author: Luo Yi

Fine Arts: Roland