Chando Ao “My I”

Postmasters Gallery

This event has ended.

Postmasters presents its first exhibition with Chando Ao, a Chinese multimedia artist who splits his time between New York and Shanghai.

The exhibition with its deceptively simple title “My I’ (inspired by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett’s book The Mind’s I) consists of a series of artworks that function as tools for the viewer’s sensory experiences.

Chando Ao’s works, where technology and human experience intersect, provide a variety of tools to confuse, inspire, induce, stimulate, and disturb the audience; to let them generate new feelings about their “I”; to connect irrelevant things beyond intellectual experience; to make the obvious strange and, perhaps, to make the strange obvious. Then, “I” becomes vivid.

The objects in the show – two digital drawings, two chairs, two dogs, two vessels, and three screen mirrors – are all interactive, self-reflective instruments to arrive at heightened awareness of one’s body, actions and emotions.

Pole Chairs have a seat and footrest attached to a tall metal pipe. As they become a performative sculpture, the familiar function of rest and comfort changes one’s body language and transforms into the new sensory experience closer to disconnection and floating.

Vessels are objects in the shape of the I: thin poles of adjustable height filled with water, grounded by a 3D printed sculpture of a foot/shoe, and topped with a live flower. Each is a sculpture of self-reflection, where the organic world coexists with the man-made and technological.

Mirrors 3, 4 and 5 all translate the idea of looking at one’s reflection onto screens. The artist envisions a future when the digital mirror, with its ability to multiply the self, will replace the physical reflection mirrors used today. Over time, the new mirror would fundamentally change self-perception from a flat physical frontal view to a digitally-represented projection of one’s image already present in selfies culture.

And then there are two robotic dogs inspired by Postmasters’ resident French Bulldogs: the future option on human’s best friend to project love, trust, domination and interdependence. Co-exisitng with the gallery dogs, these animatronic animals were built for two different functions: companionship (Sony Aibo) and service (Unitree A1). The potential interaction of live and robotic dogs in the show cannot be determined ahead of the exhibition.

Chando Ao was born in Chongqing, China, in 1990 and now lives and works in the US and China. He received his BFA from Tufts University in 2016 and was the recipient of The Chan Sculpture Award in 2015. His past exhibitions include in X Museum’s Triennial (2020), Beijing, YveYANG gallery show at OoEli Hangzhou (2021), SPRING/BREAK Art Show (2019, 2020), New York and West Bund Art & Design Show (2021), Shanghai.

The artist would like to share this quote:

“The intensity of a brief experience, the feeling of being utterly suspended in time, beyond past and future … I was completely at one with myself and utterly absorbed and immersed, filled with wonder, feeling the vibrations, effortlessly excited and calm as well, enthralled by Happiness. Serene, undisturbed beauty. Nothing is mediated. Everything is itself…I have an inkling of the essence of things, of their most universal properties. I now suspect that these lie beyond any categories of thought.”

— Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture, 2006 - 2nd Edition