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.”
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
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...
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...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...
The Nightwatch , which is an ironic reference to the celebrated painting by Rembrandt, follows the course of a fox wandering among the celebrated collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London...
Pak 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...
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...
Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...
In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium...
Itch 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....