Five Chinese artists question future of technology in New York Guggenheim exhibition
Xiaoyu Weng’s ‘One Hand Clapping’ exhibition looks at art, technology and society’s need for instant gratification with works by five Chinese artists
According to the giant tech companies, the future has already been ordained. It will consist of artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet of things, fintech, and a sprinkling of virtual reality and augmented reality. But Guggenheim curator Xiaoyu Weng challenges this widely held viewpoint with her new exhibition “One Hand Clapping”.
“I want to consider the possibility of different technological futures. The artwork is about challenging some of the set values and beliefs that we hold about what kind of future we will have.”
The group show that runs until October 21 at the Guggenheim in New York, features specially commissioned works by five Chinese artists, including Hongkongers Wong Ping and Samson Young Kar-fai.
“Young had the idea of creating instruments that didn’t exist in the real world, and then composing with them,” says Weng, who organised the exhibition with consulting curator Hou Hanru.
The artist draws attention to the marginalised and the unique, to challenge the idea of a fully homogenised future society. Her paintings often feature contradictions such as ghosts and humans inhabiting the same space.
“She is querying the global aesthetic, the synchronised view that has been adopted. Her work focuses on uniqueness,” Weng says.
Duan also took the images of some carrots that were circulating on the internet as a meme, and made sculptures of them, bringing them out of the digital realm to exist as individual physical objects. “The carrots actually look a bit like human beings,” Weng says.
Robots and the automation of the workforce are also addressed. For her commissioned film installation Asia One, Chinese artist Cao Fei visited the world’s first fully automated sorting centre in Kunshan, Jiangsu province, to examine the effects of automation and robotics on human relationships.
“It’s a kind of love story,” Weng says. “There are only two beings in this strange facility and they are both robots. Have we finally been emancipated by machines, or are we ensnared in a new confinement – trapped into buying the world while staying at home?”
The LED installation, which is surrounded by a mound of chattering false teeth toys, highlights the plight of the aged in Hong Kong, noting how they must bid for burial plots online. A large, organic looking model at the rear of the screen introduces the possibility of an unknown controlling force in the background.
“Wong is very good at observing everyday details and turning thatinto a narrative. His imagination goes wild,” Weng says.
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Weng says she feels that technology is limiting our imagination rather than expanding it, and that observation gave her the idea for the show. The idea of a ubiquitous global aesthetic is leading to a kind of universal sameness, she feels.
“Everyone is exposed to the same images,” Weng says. “The ability for us to use our imagination is winding down as a result. Information technology is always swirling around us, and we have developed very short attention spans.
“We need to absorb information so quickly that there is no room to be romantic, or poetic, or imaginative. Slow processes, like using our imagination, are not appreciated any more.”
So can art help to rectify the situation – or is it a spent force in the age of technology?
“There is a now very populist approach to art – it has been turned into entertainment,” Weng says. “Somehow we have forgotten how to be patient – we need everything to have an immediate result. Nowadays, we need to see things being quantified, we need to have everything evaluated. So we need to free art from the need to have an immediate pragmatic and functional purpose. We should try to reintroduce romanticism, poetry, and imagination as a way to resist.”
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The exhibition, Weng points out, is forward looking rather than nostalgic – it’s not a show that rails against science or scientific progress. Science itself is not at fault, she notes, it’s the big tech companies, who have appropriated scientific advances for their own ends.
“Technology and science are two different things. Technology is a corporate idea for taking control. The problem is not science, but where we take our scientific advances,” Weng says.
“There is no bad science – the negative side comes from how corporations manipulate it. It’s not about what you invent, it’s not about what you discover, it’s about how you apply those inventions and discoveries.”