“Artificial Boundary” Exhibition
Fou Gallery
[Image: Jing Lin "Machinetopia" (2018) Loop video, Edition of 5 + 1 AP. ©Jing Lin, courtesy Fou Gallery]
This event has ended.
Fou Gallery presents Artificial Boundary, a group exhibition of works by Jing Lin, Yuan Fang, and Dodo Xinyu Zhang. The works in the exhibition include multimedia works such as videos, installations, paintings, performances, and artist objects. This is the first time that artists working at Fou Gallery self-curate an exhibition. As new generation of young artists, they are skilled at bringing various media together. Their distinctive visual languages engage in a close dialogue and suggest that all boundaries are actually meaningless. It is human civilization that divides the world, thus inventing the notion of boundaries. The narratives of the three artists’ works interact with each other from three different perspectives, enacting skepticism about the concept of borders. There will be an artist talk and opening reception on December 29th, 5–8 pm. During the exhibition, Dodo will stage a beauty booth where “Recruiting New Faces” event is taking place.
Lin’s cross-media installation, blending video, interactive devices and other technologies, is rooted in the most instinctive and elemental human desires — eating, sex, and shelter. She explores how the inventions that humans conjure up are based on their desires, thus finding future ways to blur the fixed boundary between human and machine, reality and virtuality, and men and women by creating a disembodied cyborg world of information and the withering of subjectivity. She asks viewers to question whether there are distinctions and boundaries between themselves and machines, and to further rethink their experience of boundaries in the world.
Fang’s paintings are exploring a notion in a Chinese classic philosophical text Tao Te Ching, that there is only a subjective distinction between ourselves and the outside world; the individual and the world are not inseparable opposites, but both part of that “between” which cannot be talked about. Through this enigmatic language, a series of lines and shapes that indicate human figures and faces but go far beyond their literal description, she captures the in-betweens and illustrates the seemingly opposite but actually complementary relationship between vacancy and mortal life.
Recruiting New Faces event poster. Poster Design: Dodo, Graphic Design: Xi Lu. ©Dodo Xinyu Zhang, courtesy Fou Gallery
Dodo presents “Recruiting New Faces,” a site-specific art event which is part of her ongoing Asian Beauty Studio project (asianbeautystudio.com). Asian Beauty Studio is a public engagement project that invites participants to contribute to an ideal “Asian Beauty Standard” together. During the exhibition, she will set up a beauty studio in the gallery with an open call for participants, and beautify their faces with the “beauty” feature in Meitu app. They will be presented as new idols of Asian Beauty Studios and get posted on the official Instagram. Dodo believes that no one can define the standard of beauty; entertainment idols are just business strategies. Asian Beauty Studio itself is an irony. Whenever the artist documents a “beauty,” she is exposing the absurdity of the project itself.
Jing Lin (b. 1993, Yongkang, China) is a contemporary multimedia artist who currently lives in New York. Jing studied Inter-media Arts in China Academy of Art in China (2011-2015) and received M.F.A. at School of Visual Arts in New York (2015-2018). Her practice explores universal questions at the intersection of human, machine, and reality, and technology, life, and death. Her works often juxtapose Eastern philosophy with Western culture and pop culture with traditional Chinese identity. Jing’s works have been exhibited at various shows, including Emerging Curators Project, Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2018); New Wight International Biennial ‘We, Activeast’, UCLA New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); Consumed, SVA Flatiron Gallery, New York (2017); Progress Everyday Masters-Nominated Exhibition, Zhuzhong Art Museum, Beijing (2017); and Fresh Vision Arts Festival, OCT Art and Design Gallery, Shenzhen (2015). Her works are also collected by China Academy of Art.
Artist’s website: linjing.me
Yuan Fang (b. 1996, Shenzhen, China) is a visual artist who lives and works in New York. She is expecting to graduate from the Visual and Critical Studies Program at School of Visual Arts (BFA) in 2019. Her works have been exhibited in China and the United States, including TWO EASTS: Chinese Photographers in America, 103Allen St Gallery, New York (2016) and Yuan Fang: The Weaver Girl and The Cowherd, School of Visual Arts, New York (2015). Born and raised in Shenzhen, a modern city in China with almost no historical heritage, Fang spend most of her adult life in New York, a diverse international city; this split background generates her lack of belonging in both the Eastern and Western society, although she still holds an intimate and lively connection with Chinese culture through language and history. Through the process of gathering fragmented elements of Taoism, Buddhism, Chinese ancient idioms, and fairy tales she recalls from her childhood, and recasting them under the influence of Western modernism, she is commuting a mixture of nostalgia and self-distancing raised from cultural displacement and hyphenated identity. While focusing on painting, her work also extends to digital imaging, GIF, drawing, and photography.
Artist’s website: yuanfang.art
Dodo Xinyu Zhang (b. 1989, Jilin, China) currently lives and works in New York. Dodo graduated from the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department at School of Visual Arts in 2019. Most of her work focuses on the young generation of Asian women’s rethinking of self-worth and belief in Asian society. By showing the contradiction between the consuming and satirizing of one’s value, her work questions the so-called mainstream settings for Asian women and the limitations of Asian women in thinking about their own values. Dodo has participated in various exhibitions in China and in United States, including ART511 Mag — Eminent Domain, Robert Miller Gallery, New York (2018); Constellations, SVA Chelsea Gallery, New York (2018); and The Catcher in the Rye Group Exhibition, 798 Ning Space, Beijing (2016).
Artist’s website: dodo.pink
Media
Schedule
from December 29, 2018 to January 05, 2019