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...
The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...
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...
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...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement...
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...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
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...