As the new media art partner institution of the Chinese Pavilion, Chronus Art Center will organize a series of parallel online projects under the theme of Folklore of the Cyber World to extend the Other Future envisioned by the Chinese Pavilion to cyberspace, revealing the vigor and brio of the younger generation of Chinese artists in their critical engagement with the pervasive media society and creative use of new technologies.
Folklore of the Cyber World inaugurates its program with SHEN Xin’s Rhythms of Work – Means Something to You, in which the interior of the Chinese Pavilion is teleported to CAC’s Shanghai space as a defective holographic avatar performs a dramaturgy juxtaposing the real and unreal, unfurling a ghostly story of work, labor, body, wealth, class, and death. Artists GUO Xi and ZHANG Jianling usher us to a cyber trajectory of the epic journey that the two are concurrently undertaking in Grand Voyage, sailing on lands and oceans across the globe, reenacting fanciful parables in thousands of words, pictures, things and objects of the trivial and insignificant that aggregate into thick residues of sentiments and memory downloaded and parceled. While WANG Yuyang transforms the strokes of Chinese characters into “0”s and “1”s and molds these digits into myriad three-dimensional objects that can be culled by the millions to create words in sculptural forms at a mouse click, YE Funa calls out for a “congressional assemblage of manicures,” escorting a passion for beauty beyond the pageantry: “Draw nail pattern online and print them on your nails,” letting known autonomy can be as easy as whimsically exercised. MIAO Ying is a veteran of URLS; she finds loopholes to navigate the labyrinths of walls and fences in cyberspace, poking open a bit over here, hacking a crack over there, youtube videos and dancing gifs are her accomplices in subverting the politics and commerce of the all mighty electronic sovereign. Finally we have LING Ke, a digital native who mesmerizes us with the mystics of a laptop ballad, rhyming with the clinching of hardrives and USB sticks and the chiming of keyboards, for him the folklore of the cyber world rehearses a joyful choir sung by a throng of things, human and nonhuman.
