47H x 31W inches
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. The title alludes to the Pre-Raphaelite notion of a brotherhood based on “truth to nature.” Censorship of the mouth and indigestion of freshly cut stalks, central to Chen’s language of tree branches, feeds back provocatively to the title’s suggestion of “state terrorism.” However, one must resist seeking symbolic meaning in the image as Chen’s focus is on the direct visual impact of the absurd act portrayed.
Chen Xiaoyun studied ink painting at the Chinese Academy of Arts and lived as a writer in Suzhou before becoming part of the Hangzhou video art community. Chen’s works stages scenes of everyday life with elements of the strange and the absurd in order to explore existentialist themes through narratives of visual linearity. Chen is drawn to nighttime scenes of ambiguity, making use of shadows and silhouettes in concert with simple plots and fixed scenery to reconcile disjuncture in gazes and assert connections between the filmic eye and reality.
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...
Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself...
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 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...
Open Mind is a model created by Capote for a traversable public maze that, when seen from above, resembles the human brain...
Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...
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...
Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...
Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion) is part of a series drawn from architectural objects that mark the boundary of public and private spaces Wong encountered while strolling in Hong Kong...