Apr i l 16th- June 6th 2010 (Extended by popular demand)
Gallery Opening Times: Tues-Sat 11-7pm; Sun 12-5pm
I/O (Input/Output) is proud to present a solo exhibition by Chinese artist Lu Yang. Lu works in conceptual invocations of social and ethical issues through an obscure aesthetics. Like most artists working in biological media internationally, she is no stranger to controversy; but her particular interventions into the political order of bodies via electrical, visual, and aural apparatuses is courageous in a critical sense, denying a humanist aesthetics in favor of a rigorous exploration of the callousness towards life beyond the self within some systems of Chinese philosophy and, most strikingly, political theory. Her best works borrow equally from the sheen of science fiction and the history of this anti-humanist image-making in the contemporary Hangzhou tradition pioneered by Zhang Peili, questioning the possibilities for future
development set out in the collective imagination of both our literary fictions and our built realities. This may be the beginning of a new ethics of the bio-political imbued with the productivity of the experimental, searching for an alternative to the ideology of efficiency through an exploration of technical forms and life as content.
Lu Yang refers to the visually orgasmic video, Dictator, as a music video, consisting of heavily manipulated footage derived from her previous work, Happy Tree, set to a composition by sound artist Wang Changcun. Having vowed to never again exhibit Happy Tree, which included live animals in small tanks of water being shocked in time to a centrally controlled pulse of electricity, the artist has instead channeled those impulses and images into a more highly aestheticised exploration of similar themes. The work functions as both a sardonic celebration of the increasingly hybridized relationships between biological and technological material and as a halfhearted critique of the widespread careless attitude towards the value of life within mainland China, never allowing either side to overtake the other but continuously pushing for a resumption of the ossified discourse that silenced her initial explorations into this medium.
Plan for Cooperation with Science Team, complements this energy, but moves from the register of visceral reaction to that of alienated consideration; perhaps a better accompaniment to the anti-humanist aesthetics it appropriates. The fruit of months of research through scientific tomes, these four works depict diagrams and theoretically-consistent calculations for such projects as the use of severed human limbs and tendons in carnival and arcade games; an orchestra of mice physiologically addicted to their music; a ballet of frog legs; and the use of the human body as a transducer in her most recent work. The anxiety of such hypothetical situations is a highly productive situation that produces reactions of both affect and cognitive processing, indicating that the realization of these plans would actually be far less interesting than their threatening but uncertain containment in these images belonging to the rhetorical strategies of public service announcement posters.
Text by Robin Peckham
Society for Experimental Cultural Production.
Artist Biography:
1984 Born Shanghai
2007 Bachelor of Arts New Media Art department, China Academy of Art
2010 Master of Arts New Media Art department, China Academy of Art
Recent shows include the solo exhibition The Power of Reinforcement, curated by Zhang Peili, Zendai Moma, Shanghai 2009; and groups exhibitions such as Jungle, Platform China, Beijing, 2010; Go, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, 2010; Bourgeoisified Proletariat , Shanghai, 2009; Quantity Bears Identity, Kultflux, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2009; Itchy, BizArt, Shanghai, 2009; Spade, T-Space, Beijing, 2008; eArts Festival, Shanghai, 2008; and New Directions from China, Plug.In, Basel, Switzerland, 2007.
Click here for Press Release in Chinese
This event is sponsored by
A Torturous Vision, Installation, 2010
A Torturous Vision, Installation, 2010
Ultimate Energy Conversion Instruman, print on canvas, 1.5x 2.5m, 2010
Ultimate Energy Conversion Instruman (Detail), print on canvas, 1.5x 2.5m, 2010
Lu Yang: A Torturous Vision, Installation (Detail), 2010
