603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai. Installed like monitors fed by surveillance cameras, the videos present a voyeuristic entry into a private space, where two teams of men are scurrying around a bed, a desk, and some shelves in to score a goal, represented by a kitchen at one end and bathroom at the other. The game is furnished with complete uniforms, a referee, and a midfield line. Initially, the game appears as a whimsical solution to urban ennui. Yet, as the players shuffle the ball around, recklessly knocking down items in the apartment, the viewer begins to wonder if the indoor game marks the increase of air pollution, and the erasure of green space by real estate development has forced all leisure activity to be conducted in the prison of one’s apartment under surveillance.
Zhang Qing is a conceptual artist whose works deploy a variety of motifs and styles, at times dabbling in gender-bending photography and engaging in endurance-performances. Particularly, Zhang uses humor as an access point to expose the darker sides of capitalism in works such as Don’t Go So Fast (2009), social commentary on the state of economic disparity among social classes. His recent video installation and mixed media works has developed a sophisticated videographic language, exemplified by CCTV (2011) to address issues of state media, surveillance and privacy. Zhang considers China’s socio-political challenges to be unique to its own cultural-historical background and do not always translate or transfer well into foreign contexts. Thus, contemporary Chinese art can provide special visual entries into these complex socio-economic situations.
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...
Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...
The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...
State Terrorism in the ultimate form of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood features a portrait of the artist wearing a zipped utilitarian jacket reminiscent of a worker’s uniform, with one arm behind his back as if forced to ingest a bundle of stick—a literal portrayal to the definition of fascism...
A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...
Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water...
Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...
Although seemingly unadorned at first glance, Yang Xinguang’s sculptural work Phenomena (2009) employs minimalist aesthetics as a means of gesturing towards the various commonalities and conflicts between civilization and the natural world...
The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image...