Video artist DING Shiwei’s solo exhibition, Disparate Illusion, will open on September 7th in MAOSPACE Hengshan Fang. Works on display will include a single-channel video, Double Act, afive-channel animated installation, Goodbye Utopia, ink manuscripts from these two videos, anddrawings specifically created for this exhibition. In addition, MAO SPACE is, for the first time,dedicating its entire second floor to construct a Utopian imagination for the audience to explore. Youare invited to embark on a sensual journey to his land of mist, haze and aloofness.
DING SHIWEI, Goodbye Utopia,20142.35:1 9 Channels Animation Installation, 7’31” 7 分 31 秒
DING utilizes monochromic visualization to preserve conventional Chinese aura in his worksalongside a narrative frame scattered with personalized vocabulary in his art; he furthermore employslow-pitched background music to invoke subjective estrangement. He captures ideological signs andepical features within secularity to manifest his artist’s statement on conflicts found in politics,aesthetics and society. These characteristics constitute DING’s tonality, which is staged at theintersection of time and space, where the metanarrative of our time is decomposed into a stanza ofblack and gold.
DING SHIWEI, Double Act, 201316:9 Single channel animation Video16:9 , 4’37” 4 分 37 秒
Yet, knowledge recedes from experience, and experience is essentially limited. Hence, we might notbe able to enter the realm where DING is headed for via the path of pure image, since it is merely aform of self expression intended by the artist. Therefore, decoding and encoding can only be reachedby on-site conversations, which, once catalyzed, may spark resonance.
DING Shiwei was born in 1989 in Hei Longjiang Province, China. He obtained his BA degree fromChina Art Academy in 2012 and is currently a master student at the School of Inter-media Art underprofessor ZHANG Peili. Disparate Illusion will last from September 7th, 2015 to October 15th, 2015.
