Flux in Dust
2023.06.20 – 08.20
Chronus Art Center
2nd Floor, Building 11, No.50 Mo Gan Shan Rd, Shanghai
Artist
LONG Pan
OPENING HOURS
11 am – 6 pm (last entry 5:30 pm)
Wednesdays – Sundays
Free Admission
Chronus Art Center (CAC) is pleased to present Flux in Dust, the first iteration of CAC’s 2023 new program CAC Projects in collaboration with the artist LONG Pan. The project opened on June 20, 2023 and will remain on view through August 20, 2023. Leaf and Fireworks are derived from a research trip conducted by the artist in Guiyu, Guangdong in 2021. As one of the largest e-waste dumps of the world, the small town has played a crucial role behind the scenes of today’s fast-forwarding planetary computational capacity in the past two decades. By exploring the sedimentary traces of metals in the region, LONG Pan initiated an artistic experiment.exhibition view © Chronus Art Center
exhibition view © Chronus Art Center Fireworks presents a splendid moment of copper, a base metal dispersed in the global material economy. After undergoing extraction and liquefaction, it circulates back to the earth through a traditional Chinese ritual Datiehua (打铁花). Among the exploding sparks, the show also unveils the process of LONG Pan’s alchemy in the opposite direction. She was intrigued by plants rich in heavy metal accumulations that grow in an opaque blank area in satellite imagery. The heavy metals in discarded electronics from all over the world permeate and condense within them. In Leaf, plant roots are uprooted from the soil, and the extracted metals are transmuted into the glaze on the surface of leaf-shaped ceramic pieces. Under a microscope, the metals are eventually visualized as glittering dust.
Leaf, a ceramic leaf, LONG Pan, 2022 ©the artist, Chronus Art Center
Leaf, archives ©the artist, Chronus Art Center
Leaf, microscopic photography, LONG Pan, 2022 ©the artist, Chronus Art Center
Fireworks, still image, LONG Pan, 2023 ©the artist, Chronus Art Center
Metals in Leaf and Fireworks circulating among the technological, the earth, and the plants alongside the pulsation of organic matters reveal the fluctuating permeation between life and nonlife as well as the contemporary magic of alchemy: chemistry and geographically dispersed logistic infrastructures. The complex social, political, and conceptual disturbances spanning various systems and scales on the planet also manifest through camera lenses and microscopes.
About the Artist
LONG Pan is a social practice artist working in art, research, technology and community. She collaborates around issues of bioremediation and biopolitics using digital and biological material such as fungi, plants, pollutants, electronics, minerals, etc. She is interested in the human footprint in the environment, and the biological response to environmental change, especially in China's struggle between ecological embarrassment and technological exuberance. She is also focus on making invisible changes in the environment visible through biotechnologies such as "phytometallurgy" and "fungal degradation". Through interdisciplinary research, fieldwork, and visual art expression, she hopes to provide us with a fresh perspective to read the deeper and often overlooked relationship between human existence and the environment in contemporary industrial society. Exploring and presenting the 'secret correspondence' of the whole network of life in which human beings live. Her art mediums include but are not limited to bio-sculpture, ceramics, installation, video, photography, etc.
