2023｜Beijing Contemporary Art Expo

"At Beijing Contemporary, we presents an exhibition centred around the symbiosis of the real and the imaginary."

Wandering on the border between the virtual and the real, this originally clear dividing line is gradually wet, faded and blurred. Through the screen and the flow of data, the physical body becomes an Avatar; emotions and language are attached to a virtual double; real behaviour becomes a traceable track; and high-speed development erases the exclusive characteristics of the city. People begin to inhabit the digital world of mirrors, transferring emotions, recreating humanity, and interconnecting senses.

The exhibition features works by 11 domestic and international artists, exploring the relationship between the real human society and the digital world from the perspectives of personal emotion, collective commonality, artificial intelligence, and digital ecology, which are inextricably intertwined and mapped with each other.

Artists：

Chen Baoyang、Cometabolism、Guo Yaoxian、Huang Tian 、Jack Elwes、Liu Jiayu 、Marc Lee、Wang Tianxin、FRANK WANG Yefeng、Wu Ziyang、Zheng Da

The Eternal Flux—2
Wang Tianxin

The installation consists of 3 moving LED luminous bodies, and the collector will wind, sound, air and other environmental data through the algorithm driven by each cube independent rotation movement. During the day, the mirror movement reflects the surrounding landscape and light, and at nightfall, the autonomous dynamic and visual system interacts with the objective environment to produce a comprehensive “dance”.

Wang Tianxin

His artistic expression involves installation, painting, video and theatre performance. He is good at creating large-scale interactive sound and light installations using image reconstruction, intelligent algorithmic editing systems, automated theatre machines, etc. He explores and contemplates the boundaries between media technology, spatial theatre, and social sculpture. He continues to challenge the close connection between the individual and contemporary society.
I see you cry in the rain
Chen Baoyang

In this work, the artist has replaced the face of the bionic Roy with that of Harrison Ford in the “Tears in the Rain” sequence at the end of the original Blade Runner film, using AI face replacement. In the film, Ford played the role of a human street hunter who chased the bionic. Thus, the bionic Roy in the film has the face of Harrison Ford. The problem of artificial intelligence is ultimately a human problem.

Chen Baoyang(b. 1989)

He is a creator who works between technology and art. He graduated from Columbia University and teaches at the School of Experimental Art of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He sees technology as a collaborator, constructing and preserving the seemingly chaotic surfaces of algorithms in a certain order from “nothing”.
NomadicCopolymer
Cometabolism Studio

This work is formed by the “Nomadic Bookshelf” carrying the “Image of Communion”. The “Nomadic Bookshelf” takes the form of the shelves in the Song Dynasty’s Cargo Man drawings and transforms it from a traditional tool for material exchange to a carrier of information that travels through urban space today. Through the mathematical logic of traditional patterns (paper cuttings, wooden window panes, etc.), “Copolymer Image Project” reconstructs the seller’s diagrams of industrial metabolites collected from Taobao, and generates a complex pattern that dissolves the original industrial intent of the images. The combination of copolymer and bookshelf allows the flow of information and information carriers through the city by pushing and carrying them, just like the exchange of goods carried out by ancient carriers.

Co-Metabolism Studio

It is a design and art research studio founded by designer Zhang Ning (b. 1995) and artist Yang Yafei (b. 1988). Co-Metabolism attempts to reactivate and blur the function of mass-produced industrial metabolites such as industrial components in space, and sincerely return public space and objects to the real needs of the moment.
Entropy
Guo Yaoxian

Entropy is a function that describes the state of a system, and is also used to describe how chaotic a system is. The work is based on the relationship between the mapping of systems and variables, and uses the viewer as a factor to change the static and stable system: when the viewer walks by, it triggers the sensing, which then feeds back the rotation of the motors to drive the change of coloured warps and wefts and ultimately change the picture. Each intervention brings about random results, which are triggered, calculated, accumulated, and superimposed to generate endless images that resolve the possibilities of the finite and the infinite, of disorder and reconstruction, of evolution and iteration, of perception and nothingness.

Guo Yaoxian(b. 1985)

He graduated from the China Academy of Art with a Ph. He specialises in the exploration of artistic language and the presentation of concepts through the use of various technological media. His creative themes include cybernetics, systems theory, etc. He often uses human intervention to trigger unpredictable, chain and butterfly effects as a way to carry out the “iteration and arithmetic” of constructing or deconstructing the logic of order. His works are collected by China Academy of Art Museum and China Sculpture Museum.
Word Beast Paradise
Huang Tian

Word Beast Paradise is a meta-universe of hieroglyphs born out of the demands of our current digitalised social system, parallel to reality. The work is a response to the question of how human beings can break away from their own limitations to create new types of objects in the virtual world: the solution to this problem may be found in artificial intelligence.

Huang Tian(b. 1991)

He is dedicated to artistic practice and theoretical research in the field of digital media art. Including the exploration of the meta-universe language form, looking for more diverse possibilities of the language of reality. He is currently teaching at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, majoring in digital media.
Zizi and Me
Jake Elwes

The Zizi Project (2019-present) is a series of works by Jake Elwes exploring the intersection between Artificial Intelligence (A.L) and drag performance.

Zizi and Me is a double performance between a drag queen version of Me and a clone of Me created by Deep Fake (A.1.). The artist trained a neural network for the performance, which is able to control the virtual body by learning new movements.

Jake Elwes(b. 1993)

He is a London-based media artist and graduate of the Slade School of Art, University of London. The artist focuses on research in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence, finding poetry and narrative in the successes and failures of these systems, and qualitatively exploring the codes and ethics behind them.
The Sea Wall
Liu Jiayu

The Ocean Pond Trail is a new attempt at virtual curation of the metaverse by artist Liu Jiayu in collaboration with the Raiden Institute, and is the fifth instalment of the Raiden Institute’s “Yun Yun Yun” monthly exhibition. The first attempt of the wave is an orbital device composed by Liu Jiayu by extracting the real-time fluctuation data from the edge of the wave and the camera recognition and customised algorithm pipeline. In “Yun Yun Yun”, the wave data of the physical world will be presented in the form of virtual pixel blocks in the world of meta-universe. The sea, the waves, the bubbles, when experiencing natural phenomena in a new dimension, the exhibition provides a different context for the observer to integrate into the virtual environment. The works explore the various intricate relationships and layers between man and nature, as well as the complexity of people’s visions and perceptions of nature.

Liu Jiayu(Born in 1990)

She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2014, and set up Liu Jiayu Studio in the same year, which is dedicated to the creative practice and research of new media art.
Non-Places
Marc Lee

The work explores how globalisation has created MarcAugé’s ‘Non-Places’, which could exist anywhere in the world and no longer have a regional character, as cities become more and more similar, filled with motorways, airports, hotel rooms and shopping malls. This inspires a reflective attitude that is based on a new “immersive confrontation” with the digital society of today. Visitors are able to travel through a matrix of installations with LEDs, experiencing three-dimensional information, attracted and inspired by images, sounds, texts and videos, focusing on the fact that you can explore these locations and perceive snippets of large amounts of data. In virtual space, this information is visualised on cubes of different heights as a skyline. An unspecific place that could be anywhere in the world.

Marc Lee(born 1969)

He is a Swiss artist. He specialises in real-time processing, computer-programmed interactive art and works on audiovisual installations, augmented reality, virtual reality, mobile phone applications, interactive performances and video art.
The Groundless Protag
Wang Yefeng

In the ongoing body of work, Unfounded Protagonists, a series of digitally animated characters reside as non-corporeal beings in a plasma screen, signalling the virtual presence of TA. However, the TAs rely on dramatic motion capture data to portray emotionally triggered behaviours as a constant attempt to influence and connect with the viewer. Coded recordings of real human movements are wrapped in the polygonal virtual ‘bodies’ of the characters. Their contradictory forms lead to imaginings of subjectivity, which are preserved in a complex series of ambiguous dimensions.

Wang Yefeng(b. 1984)

He works in a variety of media, including experimental 3D animation, video, installation, and writing. He is currently an Associate Professor of Digital Media Arts at Rhode Island College.
Bashi River 2030 - 6 Plus
Wu Ziyang

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Set in the Philippines in 2030, the work is a fictionalised account of a local internet service provider and blockchain company, and its perspective on the future of digital life in the developing world. The “Bashi River” in the title is an important thread in the narrative: the river, which flows through Metro Manila and was deemed “ecologically dead” in the early 2000s due to high levels of pollution, has been transformed into a CG-rendered virtual reality in which a local government and a blockchain company work together to create a digital environment. However, in the CG-rendered virtual scene, the river is restored to “life” under the joint management of the local government and the blockchain company, behind which there are a series of problems such as panoramic monitoring and digital colonisation. Through an in-depth study of the current “digital earth”, global network infrastructure construction and the development process of blockchain, the work not only reveals the contradictions between digital constructs and material reality, backwardness and advancement, but also foreshadows the changes and turnover that society itself will face, hinting at the crises lurking not far from our eyes.

Wu Ziyang(b. 1990)

He lives and works in New York and Hangzhou, and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the School of Innovation and Design at the China Academy of Art, and is a member of the NEW INC programme at the New Museum Art and Technology Incubator. She has an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from Florence Academy of Art.
Generate Leads
Zheng Da

Generated Clues is part of a series of works based on the Electronic Generative Art project, which uses computing to simulate the interaction between individual behaviour and the environment. The interactive work is entirely programmed and has been running for more than 15 months, generating more than 11,000 hours of data and images. The viewer can see that the program simulates and generates two mice moving, clicking, and chasing on the screen, which represent the subconscious behavioural patterns of a person and the influence of the external environment on that person, respectively. The trajectory left by one mouse is continuously influenced by the other and cancelled by the latter.

Zheng Da(b. 1979)

He focuses his work on cross-media interactive art between art and science, and his creative trajectory is focused on the exploration and practice of the intersection of the real and virtual worlds, including game art, interactive art, mechanical installations, media theatre, etc. He has created the “Low-Tech Art” project. His work focuses on the exploration and practice of the intersection of real and virtual worlds, including game art, interactive art, mechanical installations, media theatre, etc. He has founded the Low Tech Art Lab, which focuses on the fusion of contemporary media culture and interdisciplinarity.