Tremble

2009 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

6:00 minutes

Jiang Zhi

location: Beijing
location: Shenzhen, China
year born: 1971
gender: male
nationality: Chinese
home town: Yuanjiang, China

In the video installation Tremble, Jiang projected the life-size images of seven naked men and women onto seven individual screens. Each person displays a different facial expression and body position such as reading a book, arms open for a hug, holding a knife, raising a fist to take an oath. Each gesture reflects some essential social aspect of everyday life: hugging is about caring, taking oath has to do with politics, reading relates to acquiring knowledge, and raising a knife indicates violence. As a result of a hidden vibration machine, the images’ projection screens oscillate vigorously and the contradiction between the shaking screens and the static human figures creates an absurd effect. Through this imposed trembling, Jiang suggests the invisible power that controls modern human behavior. These seemly “out-of-control” actions are often ironically conceived as the most adaptable and mutually-agreed upon tenets of social activity.


Jiang Zhi represents a generation of artists whose practice developed against the backdrop of experimental art in China in the 1990s, during which a series of social and cultural transformation occurred in the country. His work actively deals with issues such as body, gender, identity, consumerism, conflict, fear, power, and temporality, and often involves recent social events. Jiang attended the China Academy of Art and has long been engaged with writing and video art. From 1995 to 2005, Jiang was also an active journalist, which had him on the frontlines of his country’s the social transformation, and all of his experiences have deeply influenced the language and context of his practice. Constantly positioning himself at the intersection between brutal reality and poetic imagination, Jiang’s works presents a complex trajectory of the artist’s everyday life and society at large.


Colors:



Related works sharing similar palette

Phillips Drops a Last-Minute $35m Bacon Bomb on the November Sales
© » ARTMARKETMONITOR

Phillips Drops a Last-Minute $35m Bacon Bomb on the November Sales Francis Bacon, Pope with Owls, 1958 )$35-45m) Phillips announces tonight that it will offer Francis Bacon’s ‘Pope with Owls’ ($35 – 45 million) from 1958 during its New York Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art...

Telmo Miel Brings Collaborative Paintings to Thinkspace
© » HIGH FRUCTOSE

Telmo Miel, the artist duo consisting of Telmo Pieper and Miel Krutzmann, brings their surreal, distinct collaborative work to Thinkspace Projects with a new show...

Harrowing and sublime: Topography of Breath 2.0 by Pat Toh
© » ARTS EQUATOR

Harrowing and sublime: Topography of Breath 2.0 by Pat Toh | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Pat Toh November 10, 2020 By Chan Sze-Wei (739 words, 4-minute read) In grainy close up, we see segmented views of one woman, fighting to breathe with every fibre of her sinewy body...

Screening and discussion between Arseniy Zhilyaev and Keti Chukhrov
© » KADIST

Friday, January 31st, 2014, at 7 p.m Discussion between Arseniy Zhilyaev and Keti Chukhrov and projection Philosopher and poet, Keti Chukhrov will present her film Love Machines that questions today’s shift to a post-humanist philosophy, with its dismissal of the notions of love, mercy, pity, and collective sensitivity as components of an outdated human culture...

Caring for the Carers: How Malaysian artists working with communities hold space
© » ARTS EQUATOR

Caring for the Carers: How Malaysian artists working with communities hold space | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints Courtesy of Syarifah Nadhirah August 12, 2021 By Rahmah Pauzi (1,300 words, 5-minute read) I had forgotten how loaded the words “how are you,” or “apa khabar,” can be...

The Big Review: Caspar David Friedrich at the Hamburger Kunsthalle
© » THEARTNEWSPER

The Big Review: Caspar David Friedrich at the Hamburger Kunsthalle ★★★★★ Art market Museums & heritage Exhibitions Books Podcasts Columns Technology Adventures with Van Gogh Search Search Exhibitions review The Big Review: Caspar David Friedrich at the Hamburger Kunsthalle ★★★★★ This curatorial triumph highlights the measured artificiality of the German Romantic artist who made work that still mesmerises J...

Benjamin Moser on What We Can Learn from Failed Dutch Painters
© » LITHUB

Benjamin Moser on What We Can Learn from Failed Dutch Painters ‹ Literary Hub Craft and Criticism Fiction and Poetry News and Culture Lit Hub Radio Reading Lists Book Marks CrimeReads About Log In Literary Hub Craft and Criticism Literary Criticism Craft and Advice In Conversation On Translation Fiction and Poetry Short Story From the Novel Poem News and Culture The Virtual Book Channel Film and TV Music Art and Photography Food Travel Style Design Science Technology History Biography Memoir Bookstores and Libraries Freeman’s Sports The Hub Lit Hub Radio Behind the Mic Beyond the Page The Cosmic Library Emergence Magazine Fiction/Non/Fiction First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing Just the Right Book Keen On Literary Disco The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan The Maris Review New Books Network Open Form Otherppl with Brad Listi So Many Damn Books Thresholds Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast WMFA Reading Lists The Best of the Decade Book Marks Best Reviewed Books BookMarks Daily Giveaway CrimeReads True Crime The Daily Thrill CrimeReads Daily Giveaway Log In Via Liveright Benjamin Moser on What We Can Learn from Failed Dutch Painters "Why do we make art, why do we need it, and how can you avoid becoming a failure?" By Benjamin Moser November 20, 2023 When I was 25, I moved to the Netherlands from London...

Danh Vo: interview
© » KADIST

The exhibition “Les fleurs d’intérieur” took place at Kadist Paris in 2009...

CIAS Blends Sensibilities of Tattooing, Ancient Artists in His Paintings
© » HIGH FRUCTOSE

Carlos Mendes, who works under the name CIAS, is a painter and tattoo artist with a penchant toward ancient art history...

The Ballad of Special Ops Cody
© » KADIST

Michael Rakowitz

2017

The Ballad of Special Ops Cody by Michael Rakowitz is a serio-comic stop motion animated film in which an everyday African-American G...

Michael Stipe on His Collection Exhibition at the Outsider Art Fair: ‘Chickens and How Funny They Look’
© » ARTNEWS

Michael Stipe on His Collection Exhibition at the Outsider Art Fair – ARTnews.com Skip to main content By Andy Battaglia Plus Icon Andy Battaglia Deputy Editor, ARTnews View All March 2, 2022 11:49am View Gallery 10 Images When Michael Stipe first started engaging with outsider art, he was a young buck learning the curious folkways of Athens, Georgia, while on the cusp of fronting the storied rock band R...

Inclined uncertainties
© » KADIST

Prabhakar Pachpute

2020

Calling attention to campaigns for land rights, survival, and sovereignty, Prabhakar Pachpute’s recent works consider how farmers in India use their bodies in performative ways during acts of protest...

Office Voodoo
© » KADIST

Haegue Yang

2010

In addition to Yang’s signature drying rack and light bulbs, Office Voodoo includes various office supplies like CDs, paper clips, headphones, a computer mouse, a stamp, a hole puncher, a mobile phone charger...

Deep Ellum’s Kettle Art Has Been Helping Artists for Nearly 15 Years
© » D MAGAZINE

Deep Ellum’s Kettle Art Has Been Helping Artists for Nearly 15 Years - D Magazine Skip to content Menu Search One brand, four magazines...

And Europe Will Be Stunned
© » KADIST

Yael Bartana

2007

Yael Bartana received great international attention for the trilogy series And Europe Will be Stunned (2007 – 2011)...

Chu’u Mayaa
© » KADIST

Clarissa Tossin

2017

Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture...

Art Collector Robert Rifkind, Namesake of LACMA Study Center, Dies at 91 - via Los Angeles Times
© » LARRY'S LIST

Robert Rifkind, philanthropist and "game-changing" collector of German Expressionist works, has died....

Zanele Muholi, interview
© » KADIST

Self-defined « visual activist » Zanele Muholi introduces us to her practice and recent projects, on the occasion of the exhibition Art/Afrique – Le nouvel atelier at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris...

Hilary Harkness Interviewed by Ksenia M. Soboleva
© » BOMB

BOMB Magazine | Hilary Harkness Interviewed Necessary (Required) Cookies that the site cannot function properly without...

Pay and Display
© » KADIST

Oliver Beer

2011

Pay and Display is a film of a performance, for which there was no audience, staged in the multistory Pershore Street car park in Birmingham, a brutalist building, arguably one of the most inhospitable environments for a musical performance...