Chronus Art Center (CAC) is pleased to present Holding A Kitchen Knife to Cut the Internet Cable, an exhibition by the young Chinese artist MIAO Ying.

Holding A Kitchen Knife to Cut the Internet Cable is the third exhibition of a series of parallel online projects under the theme of Folklore of the Cyber World organized by Chronus Art Center, the new media art partner institution of the Chinese Pavilion, la Biennale di Venezia 2015. Folklore of the Cyber World extends the Other Future envisioned by the Chinese Pavilion to cyberspace, revealing the vigor and brio of the younger generation of Chinese artists in their critical engagement with the pervasive media society and creative use of new technologies.

MIAO Ying is a veteran of URLs; she finds loopholes to navigate the labyrinths of walls and fences in cyberspace, poking open a bit over here, hacking a crack over there, YouTube videos and dancing gifs are her accomplices in subverting the politics and commerce of the all mighty electronic sovereign.

Holding A Kitchen Knife to Cut the Internet Cable
MIAO Ying | GIF Animation and Browser-based Webpage
Duration: 2015.7.8-8.7

“Holding a Kitchen Knife to Cut Internet Cable” is inspired by a Chinese Internet poem found online, translated into “Chinglish”, the other half of the poem reads “a road with lightning sparks”. Poems like this, used as online signatures by Chinese Internet citizens ubiquitous across the Chinese Internet were used by the artist. Displaying certain wisdom and a taking joy in romanticised melancholy, the poems ultimately are representative of the romantic relationship the artist has with the Chinese internet. There are 10 web-based works. The first six of them are gifs and the other four are browser-based webpages that are composed of gif animations, still images, and video-sharing website players. The works in the show touch on issues regarding the unique Chinese Internet environment which has been evolving and growing.

MIAO Ying gives the viewer insight into the Chinese Internet in a humorous way; the visual language born from the internet, and its effect on how it has created Chinese netizens that are able to self censor yet still have fun in the Internet realm.

About the Artist
MIAO Ying is a net artist who currently resides on The Internet, Chinese Internet (the Great Fire Wall) and her smartphone. In 2007, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the New Media Arts department from the China Academy of Fine Arts. In 2009, she received her MFA from the School of Art and Design at Alfred University, USA, with a focus on Electronic Integrated Arts.

She has been focusing on Internet art with an emphasis on the Chinese Internet since 2007, when she made The Blind Spot (words censored from google.cn), shown in the Western New York Biannual. Her works have a strong awareness of the ever-changing technology of our time, the relationship of body and machine, and reality versus simulation. A pioneer, utilising experimental formats such as gifs, APPs, Social Media and Second Life, the artist seeks to find an icon for the Internet age.

MIAO Ying explores in a humorous way the visual language born from the Internet, and its effect on how it changes us as we interact with it. She has shown her gifs, APPs, videos, digital prints, artist books and interactive installations in mainland China, Taiwan, Europe, the United States, on the Internet and the virtual world of Second Life.

“Folklore of the Cyber World” Series Artists and Exhibition Durations
*Please click "read more" to enter into the online exhibitions.

SHEN Xin: Rhythms of Work - Means Something to You
2015.5.8-6.7

GUO XI & ZHANG Jianling: The Grand Voyage
2015.6.8-7.7

MIAO Ying: Holding A Kitchen Knife to Cut the Internet Cable
2015.7.8-8.7

WANG Yuyang: Lettering
2015.8.8-9.13

YE Funa: Nail to Go
2015.9.14-10.16

LIN Ke: Lens from E-world
2015.10.17-11.22

The Grand Voyage is the second work of a series of parallel online projects under the theme of Folklore of the Cyber World organized by Chronus Art Center, the new media art partner institution of the Chinese Pavilion, la Biennale di Venezia 2015. Folklore of the Cyber World extends the Other Futureenvisioned by the Chinese Pavilion to cyberspace, revealing the vigor and brio of the younger generation of Chinese artists in their critical engagement with the pervasive media society and creative use of new technologies.

Artists GUO Xi and ZHANG Jianling usher us to a cyber trajectory of the epic journey that the two have undertaken in Grand Voyage, sailing on lands and oceans across the globe, reenacting fanciful parables in thousands of words, pictures, things and objects of the trivial and insignificant that aggregate into thick residues of sentiments and memory downloaded and parceled.

Journal from the Grand Voyage 

2015 | Guo Xi & Zhang Jianling | Text and Image

Duration: 2015.6.8-7.7

Enter Project

When Theo Angelopoulos was discussing a new script with Tonino Guerra, a present arrived from Giacomo Manzu?’s daughter: a sculpture of Ulysses’s head. Angelopoulos read from the letter that her father’s “last wish was to find a way of sculpting Ulysses’ gaze because he believed this gaze contained the whole human experience.” Isn’t it the same gaze from the wanderer in the fog who merged into the panorama of horizons and the shimmering of existential experience? From March to May 2015, tracing the sensory experience and mysterious disappearance of Bas Jan Ader and Arthur Cravan, the world cruise of The Grand Voyage has been a search for vanished gazes and solitary figures that once reached out to tangible infinity then disappeared in the ocean.

In the past 86 days cross-ocean journey, the artists bore witness to twelve prophecies and sent back to “continents of the Known” the evidence as visuality of testimonies. The twelve prophecies witnessed not only reflect potential routes to the theme but also serve as an index leading to infinite texts and endless interpretations. In Journal from the Grand Voyage shown at the Chronus Art Center, the artists start to tell stories of one thousand characters who are likened to a vine twining around prophecies accompanying them to witness the miraculous. In a series of future exhibitions, the project will unpack one thousand parcels and corresponding owners dwelling within. In the constellation of image-evidence-text, their memories will be brought to light.

The Grand Voyage is supported by Imagokinetics, a non-profit art institute in Hangzhou.

About the Artists 

Guo Xi
Guo Xi was born in Yan Cheng, Jiangsu Province in 1988. After graduation from Department of New Media Art of China Academy of Art in 2010, he joined a two-year program at the Rijksakademie in Netherlands as artist-in-residence. In 2015, he graduated from New York University with MA degree in Studio Art at.

What Xi is mainly concerned with is the ideologies with which people perceive and interpret their world-specifically, the toughest-to-crack nutshell grown out of the convergence of these ideologies. By means of a dramatized sense of humor, Xi attempts to soften, or even break open this nutshell a bit, such that a trace of absurdity and uneasiness can be introduced into his audience’ s daily life. He likens an artist’ s work to an act of “piercing”, making little pores on the hard husk of ideologies, through which people will be given a chance to glance at the Truth hidden within. In his view, the visual form is but a medium for the transmission of message, and that justifies his extensive use of a variety of artistic forms, such as installation, painting, performance, sculpture, text, et cetera, to try to convey his messages as faithfully as possible.

Zhang Jianling
Born in 1986, Zhang Jianling graduated from Wuhan University in 2008 and then studied in institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thoughts of School of Inter-media Art, China Academy of Art. After graduation with MA degree in 2013, she now lives in Shanghai. Previous art programs she participated in include: Tales from the Taiping Era, co- curator, Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2014); One Meter Theater, executive curator, Imagokinetics, Hangzhou (2013); Limited Knowledge, executive curator, City University of Hong Kong, HK (2013); Greenbox: Remapping – the Space of Media Reality, co-curator, Media City Research Center, Hangzhou (2013); The Surprise of Existence - A Moment of Youth Image, executive curator, Lianzhou Foto (2012); Limited Knowledge, executive curator, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou (2012).

“Folklore of the Cyber World” Series Artists and Exhibition Durations:

SHEN Xin: Rhythms of Work - Means Something to You

2015.5.8-6.7

GUO XI & ZHANG Jianling:  The Grand Voyage

2015.6.8-7.7

MIAO Ying:  Holding A Kitchen Knife to Cut the Internet Cable

2015.7.8-8.7

WANG Yuyang: Lettering

2015.8.8-9.13

YE Funa: Nail to Go

2015.9.14-10.16

LIN Ke:  Lens from E-world

2015.10.17-11.22

 

Chronus Art Center (CAC) is pleased to present SHEN Xin’s project Rhythms of Work – Means Something to You.

Enter Real Time Live Streaming (16:00-18:00 daily)

Enter Video Documentation (16:00-18:00 daily)

 

Rhythms of Work - Means Something to You is the inaugural work of a series of parallel online projects under the theme of Folklore of the Cyber World organized by Chronus Art Center, the new media art partner institution of the Chinese Pavilion, la Biennale di Venezia 2015. Folklore of the Cyber World extends the Other Future envisioned by the Chinese Pavilion to cyberspace, revealing the vigor and brio of the younger generation of Chinese artists in their critical engagement with the pervasive media society and creative use of new technologies.

In SHEN Xin’s Rhythms of Work - Means Some thing to You, the interior of the Chinese Pavilion is teleported to CAC’s Shanghai space as a defective holographic avatar performs a dramaturgy juxtaposing the real and unreal, unfurling a ghostly story of work, labor, body, wealth, class, and death.

Rhythms of Work - Means Something to You

2015|SHEN Xin| Installation, Live Streaming, Recorded Documentation

Sound – SHEN Xin with Oliver

Animation – HE Jiaying

Editing – SHEN Xin

Rhythms of Work – Means Something to You takes a multitude of forms on this occasion, connecting physical and virtual properties. It involves a 16-minute sound performance by a vocaloid figure, Oliver, who sings quotes gathered and scripted from 12 poems written by poets who had once taken a socialist position. The economic and visual ambitions of a holographic concert are stripped down here to a projection of a process of outlining Oliver’s body, a flattened holographic figure in the making, pre-animated and still. Live cameras, perceptual layers of images from the laboring of feedbacks, hardly recognizable words that are spoken in the concrete space and through headphones, as well as applications on an iPad, together they configure a scheme in which they seek to be their own surrogates of beings.

The words written by the once advocators of socialism are materialized in the falsity of sound and vision, in their fluctuated states, topologically exist in real sites of production of the arts, arts, arts — in Venice and Shanghai. Acoustically mumbled, the structure of this subtraction of senses (of words, images, and sound), takes a form of defective listening, looking and reading. Streaming the surplus of Otaku — the collective endeavor towards the immanent absence of the stage of the common — these flawed forms present the alternative values of Otaku’s aesthetic properties in their presumptuous flatness, fluidity and the synthesizers parallel to the lived forms of the life of socialism.

About the Artist

SHEN Xin (1990, Chengdu) lives and works in UK and CN. Having completed her MFA in Slade School of Fine Arts in 2014, SHEN was selected for the touring exhibitions of Bloomberg New Contemporaries at World Museum in Liverpool, ICA in London, and Newlyn Art Gallery in Cornwall. SHEN has recently received the CAC (Chronus Art Centre in Shanghai) Fellowship for Chinese Artist at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design and Centre for Chinese Visual Arts in Birmingham (2015). SHEN’s practice concerns the social position of the artist, and is foregrounded by moving image work. It also encompasses elements of virtual realities and figures, public proposal, communication interfaces such as emoji (ideograms), self-publication, online database, tourist attraction and organized events.

“Folklore of the Cyber World” Series Artists:

SHEN Xin

GUO XI & ZHANG Jianling

MIAO Ying

WANG Yuyang

YE Funa

LIN Ke

 

格式工厂4

Guest: Shen Xin, MHP

Date: 2015-05-08  20:00 ~ 2015-05-08  24:00

Address: Building 18, No 50 Moganshan Road, Shanghai

Folklore of the Cyber World
Launch of the Parallel Online Exhibitions & Celebration Night

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Chronus Art Center (CAC) invites you to "Folklore of the Cyber World” Launch of the Parallel Online Exhibitions and Celebration Night.
On 8th May 2015, CAC will inaugurate the parallel online exhibitions in Shanghai with Shen Xin’s Rhythms of Work - Means Something to You, in which the interior of the Chinese Pavilion is teleported to CAC’s Shanghai space as a defective holographic avatar performs a dramaturgy juxtaposing the real and unreal, unfurling a ghostly story of work, labor, body, wealth, class, and death. At the same time, in conjunction with CAC’s special event at Chinese Pavilion, CAC will host a celebration night in Shanghai with live performance by MHP.
Rhythms of Work - Means Something to You

Artist: Shen Xin

Duration: 8th May- 7th June, 2015

About Folklore of the Cyber World
As the new media art partner institution of the Chinese Pavilion, Chronus Art Center will organize a series of parallel online projects under the theme of Folklore of the Cyber World to extend the Other Future envisioned by the Chinese Pavilion to cyberspace, revealing the vigor and brio of the younger generation of Chinese artists in their critical engagement with the pervasive media society and creative use of new technologies.