Installation view of "Burning Road", Fotografiska, Shanghai, 2024
CHANEL Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
Curatorial team Gan Yingying and Zhou Yichen won the 3rd Jimei x Arles "Curator Award for Photography", and their project "Burning Road" was recently exhibited at the Fotografiska Video Art Center in Shanghai. Founded in 2021 by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and Chanel, the Jimei x Arles Image Curator Award is committed to discovering and cultivating outstanding young Chinese image curators and researchers. By focusing on eight artists active at home and abroad, "Burning Road" opens up a path of exploration that juxtaposes the macro and micro around the spiritual issues of technology and media. At a time when neoliberalism is imminent with accelerated production and disruptive technology, how can our familiar weak bodies be embodied and examined, and conversely, become a refuge that can soothe the subject's anxieties, thus giving birth to new possibilities?
On the one hand, it is self-evident to present the endless flow of life, as mentioned in the curatorial preface, this texture from the outside to the inside, through nature and then into the hinterland of human habitation, close to the human body and skin, and finally back to nature, so the first echo is the perfect interpretation of the logic of the exhibition, and on the other hand, the curator Gan Yingying mentioned that the arrangement of this exhibition movement is influenced by the movie "Dog Town" Further, can the core narrative of the exhibition be seen as a journey towards a community where rationality and irrationality are born together, a moment of technological singularity and blind spot?
Alex Turner, Blind River, 2018-2021
Image courtesy of artist Alex Turner
Wang Ninghui, Pyramid and Parabola II, 2021
Image courtesy of the artist and Capsule Gallery
Citizen scientist Alex Turner's project "Blind River" began with black-and-white images of Turner's long-term research at the U.S.-Mexico border, during which he used remotely sensed infrared cameras and AI facial recognition software to capture images of life at the border, a tool that was also used by local governments in the context of surveillance. The curators did not confine the black-and-white images to a flat surface, but let them appear on the surface of the multi-faceted three-dimensional structure, allowing the potential of the narrative to generate more tentacles. In the adjacent curtain space, artist Wang Ninghui's "Pyramid and Parabola II" is projected, which documents the artist's exploration and retrace the way humans have tried to communicate with the universe through the creation of a massive installation of geometric lines.
Left: Julian Quintanas Nobel, Dream Moon, 2020
Julian Quintanas Nobel
Right: "Dream Moon" at the exhibition "Burning Road", 2024
CHANEL Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
On one side of the curtain, photojournalist and travel photographer Yurian Quintanas shifts his lens from the untangible, to the everyday, with his black-and-white series Dream Moon, which focuses on whether there are still technological objects and their qualities in everyday objects within the sight of a stable human dwelling. This group of two-dimensional works is staggered to the ground, suspended in the exhibition hall in a way that is superimposed on the front and back, and continues to give shape to this tangibility with domestic objects such as sofas and bonsai. This presentation may be a tribute to fragmentation, and the content presented is a kind of Heideggerian demasking, a return to the truth of the silent thing as a being itself.
Xu Weijing, Electric Skin, 2016, at the exhibition "Burning Road".
CHANEL Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
Turning outward, erected on the central axis of the exhibition hall is the "Leather Series" by biological artist Xu Weijing. From Stiegler's point of view, technology is not only an extension of the human body, but also a constituent body, in other words, people and technological objects can be synchronous, forming a "new relationship between the organism and its environment". Xu Weijing's work is a testament to this tendency to explore embodiment, and the logic of her wearable devices is to use microcurrents to conduct on human skin, so that people can have heterogeneous bodies and obtain new resonances with the outside world, thereby stimulating the potential of perception. However, if we look back at the Renaissance, although scientists at that time had begun to carry out empirical explorations into the interior of the human body, such as the "small blood circulation" proposed by Servetus, just as people at that time did not abandon animism when they gradually transitioned from the empty sophistry of scholasticism to the physical body present, now we seem to be hanging and swinging back in this cycle, and the more we are attracted to the alienated way of existence, the withdrawal brought about by this technology will make us return to embodiment again and again.
Joseph Kovacs, In Search of Sergei, 2021
Installation view of the "Burning Road" exhibition, CHANEL Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
Josef Kovac's installation "Searching for Sergei" is a sculpture in a series of In the other half of the gallery, the artist's fictional boy named Sergei shares in his bedroom with an astronaut who wanders in outer space for more than 300 days before being rescued after losing his identity due to the coup d'état of the collapse of the former Soviet Union. According to the curator, the artist himself had a real nightmare, in which non-fiction and fiction are combined and intertwined in this way, and Sergei, a common male name in the former Soviet Union, is undoubtedly a signifier, so that the exploration of this work under the cosmic proposition, that is, to show Jung's "synchronicity", which is contrary to causal association, is similar and different from a certain approach path to outer space in Wang Ninghui's work.
Margeolly Duzante, The Moon and the Stars Can Be Yours, 2019
Installation view of the "Burning Road" exhibition, CHANEL Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
If Joseph's project is an extension of the mystic narrative in the redundancy between fiction and non-fiction, the artist Magali Duzan's project "The Moon and Stars Can Be Yours" on display is a means of directing the topic to spiritism and other methods, as if it were a means for anxious subjects to emotionally plan and even change their perception in the face of great uncertainty. Using the artist's large collection of psychic leaflets on the subway in New York, supplemented by archival research based on occultism such as fortune-telling experiences and collected palmistry patterns, the artist has made a small chapter-like book for the viewer to flip through on this small circular table, while the palpable red velvet tablecloth and dark lamp highly restore a certain familiar divination scene. On closer inspection, questions such as "Should I stay in this city?" and "Where is my true love?" point to the collective anxieties of modern life, and allow the products of consumerism and mental health to pour out in a neoliberal context, like leaflets, and allow anxieties to continue to creep in.
Gu Tao, "Shaman Map (2) on the Road", at the exhibition "Burning Road".
CHANEL Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
The projection of documentary filmmaker Gu Tao's "Shaman Map (2) on the Road" on display in the opposite Xirenzhu (the traditional residence of the Oroqen people) may soothe such a restless heart, and the projection in it presents the artist's long pursuit of the shaman after the death of the oldest female shaman of the Oroqen people.
So far, rather than translating Stiegler's text in a figurative form, the exhibition is a compromise between the seemingly opposing levels of technological utopianism and technological dystopianism, extending from the idea that human beings themselves are technical beings. While Stiegler pursues democracy through a new techno-social and in a way that tends to be optimistic about the collapse that comes with technological development, the exhibition relies more on an inclusive perspective that the object of invention is also the subject of invention, and that the history of technology and the history of humanity go hand in hand. "When the age of technology becomes an era of experience rather than principle, people will confuse a certain principle with the experience associated with it, perhaps, the 'machine mind' we are talking about is actually our ontological thought, not the 'life' and 'mind' of the machine that we can empathize with", but is it necessary to look back at physical reductionism, or continue to rely on neural plasticity, or mysticism to clarify the complex tangles in it?
Song Xi, "Ritual: 10,000 Prayers", "Bright", "Starry Sky"
Installation view of the "Burning Road" exhibition, CHANEL Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
Just as the title of the exhibition, "The Burning Road", is taken from the period in divination astrology in which the sun and the moon are not shining, the exhibition never seems to attempt to give a definitive answer to these doubts. Just as enchantment and disenchantment have been flowing in both directions in the discussion around technology, this exhibition juxtaposes "low tech" and "high tech" to address the question of how to leave a caring space for urgent reflection, criticism, and questioning, as evidenced by a few works by artist Song Xi that the viewer finally looks at in a corner of the gallery. The erased stars that the artist uses retouching techniques in "Looking Up at the Starry Sky" echo the starry sky image formed by the electric sparks generated when he swatts a fly with an electric mosquito swatter in "Ode to Joy". Finally, when we lean over to peek through the hole on the side of the wooden passage installation to peek into Song Xi's "Ritual: 10,000 Prayers", the more than 10,000 uninterrupted visions of turning on and off the lights turn the daily into a ritual of being gazed at again, and then fall into the trap of the everyday in a moment.
[1] Stiegler, "Technology and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus [M]", translated by Qiu Cheng. Nanjing: Yilin Publishing House, 2012: 19, 126, 166, 193.
[2] Wu Huaiyu, "Rulers on the Earth". Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2021: 109 pages.
(Article from Art News Chinese Edition)
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