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