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.”
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...
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...
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....
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...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...