group | Body Media II

Body Media II has incorporated the industrial architecture of the Power Station of Art – a fragment of modernity – into the exhibition as a “cold body.” This cold body will be infused with warm languages and heated narratives that allow the audiences’ bodies to move and circulate within it like the flow of blood, testing whether the space, the works, and the audiences can act in accordance with each other. Throughout the process we will, encounter exhausted bodies, contrasting bodies, moving bodies, and illusionary bodies; see how the body can become a substitute for time; discuss the relationship between the body and identity in the virtual world; experience how the body is documented, extracted, readjusted, and reprogrammed; trace how photographic and video graphic techniques have transformed our perceptions of the world; and as well discover how bodies, in their representations, can intrude and affect our relation to the real.

This exhibition is a sequel to an exhibition of the same name held in 2007. Ten years ago, Body Media was held in two fully enclosed black boxes, where the sense of space was deliberately taken away, turning the audiences’ bodies into keys that could open up the works through time. At the time, we were anticipating new interfaces and cross-disciplinary collaborations that would circumvent the power centers that formed the patterns for contemporary art production. Ten years later, the ubiquity of self-media and mobile terminals has caused the body and media to surpass a mutually mirroring and collaborative relation. The body is like an interface that every human carries that is of the same scale – an other that is at once both familiar and strange; new media technologies have given it a stage to play and perform, and slowed down its aging, just like how the same technologies are altering the past limitations of art.

——Gong Yan