Peng Yanhan: Contra / Image
Curator: Peng Yanhan
Artists: Chen Baoyang, Liu Beining, Ethan Wang Tianxing, Ding Desiree, Lee I Chuan
"Contra/Image" is an exhibition based on my encounters with five emerging artists in New York City, where we start to rediscover the politics of image through conversational and experimental practice. Works presented here exhibit how the regulation, system and self-referentiality of image is established, and eventually it departs from the production of image to countra-image. The denotations of the works are often fabricated by the relativity and interactions between image and countra-image, the exchange and cross-reference of visualized information, etc. The way they compose the works is like the composition of fugue in music, or working out formula and propositions in math. It involves the invention of new systems of producing and reproducing knowledge/image, and a probe is initiated to find out whether it exists another layer of politics behind these systems.
It is not difficult to understand why artists from the 21th century work more closely with mathematics and computing. Considering how informational network constantly upgrades and extends itself in the human world in the past decades, the world has become unprecedentedly digitalized in terms of technology, cultural development and forms of social organization. In the meantime, artist’s work has been inevitably conceptualized and de-materialized - perhaps these two tendencies signify how the regulation of mathematics is embodied in this universe.
The artists introduced in this exhibition reflect certain characteristics of the self-empowered new generation of Chinese artists. Growing up in different cities and nurtured by multiple cultural scenes, they are keen to uncover how those cultures act upon themselves and their practice. Whether it is to look into photojournalism, or explore new methods and language in artistic expression, they absorb, appropriate and represent, in a remarkable pace. In a way that the interplay between knowledge and intuition can sometimes get neutralized, too. Today’s artists are more immersed in the virtual digital waves of the cyberspace, while they remain rather ambiguous towards the validity of the symbolic and representational image produced in that world. As both the advocates and rebels of the era of mass image production and consumption, the key is to balance themselves between the wills of the Machine and the artistic Self. When the tension between the two is normalized in their daily experience, it further takes away the controls of the system and helps to explore how the politics of image works in today’s network society.
