The Tower of Babel: Independence of the country
2010 - Photography (Photography)
Du Zhenjun
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization. Though the theme began with the struggle of monotheism over linguistic and geographic diversity in early human history, Babel in Du’s work has become a contemporary vision of catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.
Born in 1961, Du was trained as a painter and sculptor at the Institutes of Arts and Trades in Shanghai and the Fine Arts College at the University of Shanghai and garnered M.A. from the Regional School of Fine Arts of Rennes, France in 1999. Despite his classical training, Du became one of the first generation of artists to incorporate digital technologies into art pieces, producing interactive installations and describing digital media to be “a way of working on the dimension of power inherent to a society of information and new technologies.” Du’s works explore themes of “Modern Man” and human tragedy. Specifically, he highlights the ecstasy of human behavior in light of suffering and challenges in conveying what he calls the “universal human condition.”
Colors:
Related works featuring themes of: » China, » Color Photography, » Contemporary Conceptualism, » Contemporary Participation, » Cultural Commentary, » Chinese
© » KADIST
Qing Zhang
2006603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
© » KADIST
Jiang Pengyi
2008Unregistered 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...
© » KADIST
Yang Guangnan
2011Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands....
© » KADIST
Yang Xinguang
2009Although 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...
© » KADIST
Pak Sheung Chuen
2008Pak created New York Public Library Projects (NYPLP) (2008) during a residency in New York, using public libraries as exhibition spaces and the books they house as raw materials...
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2014Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
© » KADIST
Lu Chunsheng
2004A 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...
© » KADIST
Lin Yilin
Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...
© » KADIST
Pak Sheung Chuen
2017The 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...
© » KADIST
Chen Chieh-Jen
2010Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
© » KADIST
Allan McCollum
1982In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium...
