41:56 minutes
Cao Fei’s video La Town, 2014 depicts a mythical metropolis that has been destroyed by unknown forces. Although the damage is obvious, as the camera navigates across the elaborate, handmade dioramas, the inhabitants of La Town carry on with their activities and the normality of everyday life pervades. As the film progresses, the latent chaos and violence begin to emanate from every corner of the miniature city: a bloody briefcase left on the ground, a kidnapping scene, an axe murderer on the loose, a ferocious man-eating octopus—all rendering the darkness of this new post-apocalyptic world order. La Town is ridden with traces of a consumer capitalist society—such as a well known German supermarket, a McDonald’s, flickering neon Shell signs, and a movie theater playing Gone with the Wind —deliberately coupled with references to different cultures and time periods in order to make it impossible to decipher a time and place. These cultural signifiers are a reflection of Fei’s own experience of the paradoxes brought by a regime that incubated a voracious hyper-capitalism in her native Guangzhou, also known as “the world’s factory.” The dialogue in the film is based on the 1957 movie Hiroshima Mon Amour directed by Alain Resnais, with a screenplay written by Marguerite Duras. In both films we hear an ambiguous and nonlinear conversation in French where a man and a woman contradict each other, extenuating the discrepancy between what is and isn’t real. As with her virtual works La Town uses the city to address Fei’s ongoing concerns: the inaccuracy of memory, forgetfulness, and a tacit existentialism as we search for a greater truth in different facets of everyday life.
Cao Fei is a celebrated multimedia artist known for works that focus on the interplay between real and fictional worlds. Working across photography, performance, video, and digital media, her practice vividly reflects the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century and the role that image production has played in shaping youth culture in a digital era. Influenced by an array of forms of global pop culture—from Cantonese Pop and Japanese anime to American hip-hop—a common thread in her practice is the merging of everyday life with new forms of technology as a means to unveil society’s unfulfilled desires. Her pivotal film Whose Utopia , for example, showcases assembly line workers in a factory in China as they act out their aspirations in a backdrop of industrial machinery. In another key body of work, RMB City, Fei created a virtual city through the platform Second Life —an online space that mimics ‘the real world’—as a vehicle to express ideas that relate to modernization, capitalism, and consumer culture. Through these constructed worlds, Fei presents a profound meditation on the boundaries between the real and the fantastic and the sense of alienation that drives new generations to increasingly experience the world behind the veneer of their Avatars. For Fei, the digital world is an expression of our human condition, and as such, an avenue to reflect on these emerging forms of social consciousness.
Categorized as low-level literature, a “Love Stories” book is a romantic popular fiction of proletariat China, read mainly by teenagers, students, and young workers...
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...
In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text...
Nugroho’s installations and performances have their roots in the shadow puppet rituals in Indonesia, particularly the Javanese Wayang tradition whose essence is in the representation of the shadows...
Anne Deguelle — L’Arctique fantôme — L'ahah Moret — Exposition — Slash Paris Connexion Newsletter Twitter Facebook Anne Deguelle — L’Arctique fantôme — L'ahah Moret — Exposition — Slash Paris Français English Accueil Événements Artistes Lieux Magazine Vidéos Retour Anne Deguelle — L’Arctique fantôme Exposition Photographie À venir Anne Deguelle, Glacier, 2014, 40 × 53 cm © Adagp, Paris, 2023 Anne Deguelle L’Arctique fantôme Dans environ 2 mois : 27 janvier → 17 février 2024 vernissage le 27.01.24, 17h → 21h exposition du 27.01 → 17.02.2024 L’ahah #Moret 24-26, rue Moret, 75011 Paris L’ahah est heureuse de présenter cet hiver en L’ahah #Moret une série singulière de photographies dans l’œuvre de l’artiste Anne Deguelle ...
Anne Deguelle — L’Arctique fantôme — L'ahah Moret — Exhibition — Slash Paris Login Newsletter Twitter Facebook Anne Deguelle — L’Arctique fantôme — L'ahah Moret — Exhibition — Slash Paris English Français Home Events Artists Venues Magazine Videos Back Anne Deguelle — L’Arctique fantôme Exhibition Photography Upcoming Anne Deguelle, Glacier, 2014, 40 × 53 cm © Adagp, Paris, 2023 Anne Deguelle L’Arctique fantôme In about 2 months: January 27 → February 17, 2024 vernissage le 27.01.24, 17h → 21h exposition du 27.01 → 17.02.2024 L’ahah #Moret 24-26, rue Moret, 75011 Paris L’ahah est heureuse de présenter cet hiver en L’ahah #Moret une série singulière de photographies dans l’œuvre de l’artiste Anne Deguelle ...
A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...
The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...
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...
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...
Carolina Caycedo’s practice conveys her very personal passion and relationship to water, as a powerful necessity and spiritual reminder...
La Ruta by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo follows the Panoramic Route, a now weakened infrastructure that meanders through untouched natural landscapes and off-road destinations on the island of Puerto Rico...