thingworld

June 10, 2014 - July 20, 2014

The National Art Museum of China

media triennial, curated by Zhang Ga The world is a thingworld. For without things there would be nothing to describe, to interpret, to comment on, there would be no evocative signifiers that trigger imagination, conjure up representation, neither would there be societies nor cultures. The world is a thingworld. In Chinese language, the word for “thing” is a compound of the characters East and West, a geographic stretch across the infinite space of two imaginary ends in the ancient mind. Thing is everything.


Works Shown

The Constant World 2014

2014, sculpture with video, sound, and electronics

This new version of 2007's Constant World, with nine live video cameras, presents a utopian world that acts as its own advertisement. This new sculpture, with sound and a slowly evolving video track with text and color is a ceiling mounted assemblage of metal spheres, models, and lights. It portrays a film noir melodrama set in an urban environment that is intercut with text elements. The result, seen on flat screen displays, beckons the viewers to inhabit the place seen onscreen. Drawing from influences as varied as Constant Nieuwenhuis’s models for the utopian New Babylon and the dystopian technological noir of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, the project forms a critique of labels. Specifically it questions the ways in which our culture uses language to falsely assign value.