2021｜Westbund

“On the Westbund，we present an exhibition about clouds.”

All things are connected. The ancient word “云”, the traditional “雲” and the modern “云” have complex representations. “Cloud” is made up of water droplets and ice crystals suspended in the air, and was regarded by the ancients as a pneumatic force between mountains and rivers, and “cloud” as an intermediary that transforms energy for natural phenomena such as thunder and rain. Coincidentally, the word “cloud” has been borrowed as “曰” because of its ancient sound, and it has become an intermediary for the transmission of information between people.

Nowadays, the meaning of “cloud” has been aggregated into a state of “existence”, especially due to the epidemic, and work and life on the cloud are becoming more and more normal, pushing us to the door of the meta-universe. If organisation is the material embodiment of technology, the medium of the cloud will be the basis for connecting the virtual and the real.

Therefore, the works we bring this time respond to the transition from “nature in motion” to “media in motion” from a cloud perspective, and will also try to extend the spatial dimension of the exhibition in Cryptovoxels.

Artist：

Shuyi Cao、Snow Yunxue Fu、Yaoxian Guo、Pan Long、Marc Lee、Ting Song、Tao Wei、Ziyang Wu、Haichao Zhang+Kun Li+Tao Hu、Handuo Zhang

  • Egg-born, Change-born, Moisture-born

    Shuyi Cao

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    The series (2020-2021) illustrates human existence from the perspective of non-human entities. From the transparent or coloured borosilicate glass sculptures on display, one may recognise tree tumours, roots, lumps, knots, tentacles, exoskeletons, embryos, umbilical cords or slime moulds. These hand-blown glass sculptures connect the known and unknown worlds, the natural and the man-made, and their shapes evoke subconscious memories of primitive microscopic organisms.

    Shuyi Cao

    Graduated from Parsons School of Design with an MFA in Pure Art in 2018, interested in the complex networks of geological, biological and technological matter, her creative practice explores the alchemy of object making and knowledge production.

  • Pool

    Snow Yunxue Fu

    In this 3D rendered pool, water is digitally simulated and undergoes transitions and changes throughout. Through the use of liquid-rendered digital animation, the artist examines the world around her and seeks to realise the parallels between physical, virtual and metaphysical space in her work.

    Yunxue Fu

    She is an international new media artist, curator, and current Associate Professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is currently an Associate Professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she is responsible for designing and teaching courses in New Media Art, Post-Photographic 3D Imaging, and Video Installation Art.

  • Code's Text

    Yaoxian Guo

    The Book of Days reconstructs the most basic linguistic symbols and organisational logic of Morse code into a woven structure – through audience participation, the system’s variables increase, accumulating and iterating to form a new “vocabulary”, “statement” or “psalm”. through the audience’s participation, the system’s variables increase, accumulating and iterating to form new “vocabularies”, “utterances”, or “verses”. At the same time, these ‘semantics’ are dissolved in the next moment. The work explores the homology between text and textile, as well as the multi-dimensional relationship between the generation and dissolution of “concepts”, disorder and reconstruction.

    Guo Yaoxian

    1985 Born in Erguna, Hulunbeier, Inner Mongolia, Guo Yaoxian received his MFA from the Fibre and Space Art Studio of the Sculpture Department of the China Academy of Art (CAA) in 2009-2012, and his PhD from the Department of Fibre Art of the School of Sculpture and Public Art of the China Academy of Art (CAA) in 2016-2020.

  • Reverse Writing

    Long Pan

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    “I plant mushrooms in books, and the mycelium feeds on the books. The mycelium gradually penetrates and covers the text on the book, and the dense mycelium slowly wraps the pages in white, as if erasing the text one by one. Finally, it will grow flame-like mushrooms on the book, speaking its own ‘language’ in a wild manner.”

    Long Pan

    Long Pan graduated from China Academy of Art in 2019 with a master’s degree in cross-media, and lives and works in Yichun. Long Pan pays close attention to microscopic organisms in the natural world. She often uses plants, fungi and other living organisms as materials for her works, which are not limited to the use of substances or images, but are more about researching the characteristics of the organisms’ survival. Based on the perspective of these organisms, she finds an entry point to intervene in social issues, which becomes the cornerstone of her understanding of reality and artistic creation.

  • Me, Myself, I

    Marc Lee

    Me, Me, Me discusses the situation and conflicts of the individual in the digital age, egocentrism and selfie culture as pervasive contemporary phenomena and trends. The work transports the viewer into a world of egoistic games filled with heterogeneous illusions.

    Marc Lee

    Born in 1969, Marc Lee is a Swiss artist. He uses contemporary art as a vehicle to constantly redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us. His artistic experiments with information and communication technologies reflect creative, cultural, social, ecological and political critiques. In this context, he is creating web-oriented interactive artworks.

  • Used to be my home too

    Marc Lee

    The work reflects on biodiversity while also reflecting on the ongoing extinction of species and how we humans are the mainstay of biodiversity in the most fundamental evolution of the planet. In this work, viewers can follow a Google Earth flight to where observations provided by iNaturalist.org are being sent, and browse data on endangered plants, animals, and fungi added in real time on the RedList.org website.

    Marc Lee

    Born in 1969, is a Swiss artist. He uses contemporary art as a vehicle to constantly redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us. His artistic experiments with information and communication technologies reflect creative, cultural, social, ecological and political critiques. In this context, he is creating web-oriented interactive artworks.

  • The Peony Pavilion: Information Technology Penetrates "I"

    Song Ting

    This work is one of the props in the AI-Human collaborative immersive theatre experiment adapted by artist Song Ting from the kunqu classic The Peony Pavilion. The “dream world” of each character is the main character of the experimental theatre “Peony Pavilion rêve”, while human actors, algorithmic NPCs and human audience are the supporting roles of the theatre. The artist collaborated with the AI model on the blockchain and the AI model off the blockchain to generate the colour planes in the screen, and also encrypted the lyrics of the opening chapter of the Peony Pavilion, “Butterfly Loves Flowers”, and the interpretation of “classical love” by contemporary people in the year 2021 into data fragments encrypted in sha1 language to be stored in the screen.

    Song Ting

    AI and blockchain artist, IOC Asia Ambassador, and the only Asian artist invited to VOGUE’s first NFT public seminar.

  • Salute

    Wei Tao

    Inspired by a beggar on the northwest corner of 21st Street at 7th Avenue in New York, The Beggar aims to explore the symbolic phenomenon of daily life, that is, symbolism, which has a tendency to encroach on the physical, especially at a time when the Internet and virtual technology have silently and perfectly integrated into our lives. Wei Tao is panicked by this tendency, and the questions triggered by this panicking are what this work aims to express.

    Wei Tao

    Wei Tao lives and works in Beijing. His works focus on space, emotion and the symbolic meaning of things. Through abstract painting, spatial interventions and the transformation of everyday concepts, he explores different themes in a diversified way, and explores the expression of psychological and emotional states in the use of different media.

  • A Woman with the Technology

    Wu Ziyang

    A Woman with the Technology is a complex process that uses machine learning to examine the phenomenon of “filter bubbles”. The title of the piece and the video script were generated by an AI dialogue bot that was trained using all of my personal social media data collected over a 90-day period. Therefore this dialogue bot can be seen as an AI version of me. Through my dialogue with this AI, we “co-created” a dystopian video script, and finally I produced a 12-episode animated video based on this AI-generated script.

    Wu Ziyang

    Ziyang Wu 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. MFA Rhode Island School of Design, BFA Florence Academy of Art.

  • HELLO WAVE_UPDATE FOR NEW WORLD

    Zhang Haichao&Li Kun&Hu Tao

    The work is an immersive digital interactive theatre composed of interactive algorithmic images, depth-aware elements, and a mechanically driven matrix. Algorithmic images overlay the flow on the surface of the space, which is transposed into an internal field of digital images. The hardware (depth data acquisition) acts as its senses to capture reality data, uploading it to the vertebral hub, which shunts and directs it to the image interface, providing energy for the virtual overlay to superimpose reality. The viewer can observe with the naked eye the transformation of information from being captured, to being uploaded, to being outputted, from intangible data, to visualised grains of sand imaging. The whole system is like the unknown mobile star described in the novel “Solaris”, which has the basic socio-biological mechanisms of self-learning, response, and communication, but exists in a form of life beyond human common sense.

    Zhang Haichao

    Born in Chongqing in 1987, Zhang graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2010 and from Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 2016. He now teaches at the Experimental Art School of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, and is the head of the Science and Technology Art Direction.

    Li Kun

    Currently teaches at Sichuan Conservatory of Music, Department of Electronic Music. He uses hardware/software/wetware to explore new possibilities of artistic expression.

    Hu Tao

    Graduated from the Experimental Art College of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2016. He is now working in the Experimental Art College of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, and is a researcher in the Institute of Science and Art of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.

  • Siro: A Mirror of Mind

    Zhang Handong

    This is an interactive installation based on “brain-computer interface” technology. Participants walk into the exhibition space alone and interact in real time with images and sounds generated by their brainwave signals. The experience and the ripples underfoot echo each other in a way that no one else but the participant can understand.

    Zhang Handong

    Born in 1994, he is a multimedia artist, film director, and MA in Digital Narrative at the International Film Academy Cologne. His works are dedicated to presenting the real through fictional narratives, and using video as a medium to reflect on the nature and operation mode of various things. He lives in North America and Europe.

  • ccCloud

    Collective projects

    The work is an attempt by Raiden INST to combine artists’ practices in Cryptovoxels, with the participation of 19 artists.