Musquiqui Chihying “Resistance is Futile”

Gallery 456 in Chinese-American Arts Council

poster for Musquiqui Chihying “Resistance is Futile”

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SCREEN presents Resistance is Futile at 456 Gallery, an exhibition of installation works by Berlin- and Taipei-based artist Musquiqui Chihying (b. 1985). This is his first solo show in New York. Chihying’s recent works investigate the post-colonial and post-immigrant ideology embedded in the images and media culture of a globalized society, questioning the power structures around seeing and being seen.

The exhibition features four media installations that the artist has created since 2016, which center around the complex tension between human beings and the camera. Printed on film, The Figure is a series of digital images of people covering their faces, representing a straightforward gesture to resist the intrusion of the camera. In keeping with Chihying’s interest in discovering the invisible in current historical narratives, Camera(36) and Camera(16) imagine the world behind the camera lens when subtle resistance took place. Turning the camera toward the people usually behind the machine, Camera(36) recreates the scene when Leni Riefenstahl shot Korean athlete Sohn Kee-chung trying to cover a symbolic Japanese icon on his shirt in the well-known documentary Olympics, while Camera(16) imagines a worker from a Korean entertainment company shooting the video, in which Chou Tzu-yu, the Taiwanese member of a popular Korean girl band, apologized for waving the Taiwan national flag on a variety show. Chihying’s fourth piece envisions the message from the camera itself, based on the fact that the act of looking is sustained with the existence of light. By using flash light and luminous paint, The Flash sends a message to humans — resistance is futile — from the perspective of machines.

The exhibition is titled after a line delivered by a villain called The Borg from the popular sci-fi franchise Star Trek. The Borg assimilates the culture of those it conquers, turning its enemies into living machines without independent consciousness. As our perception is gradually replaced by digital apparatuses and our reality is constructed through the images and moving images circulated on social media, are we becoming an entity similar to the Borg in the future?

Media

Schedule

from October 06, 2017 to November 03, 2017
Weekend Schedule:October 7 & 8, 1-6 pm.

Opening Reception on 2017-10-06 from 18:00 to 20:00

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