The two tiny screens are set at the same distance between human eyes, so viewers have to watch with both eyes to get the complete contents. Each eye is fed with different video contents, which are constantly pieced together in the peepers’ minds to create a video montage. On the one hand, the work describes…
It is a religious symbol made out of the negative form of four interspaced screens, with flowing and bursting supernatural green rays flickering constantly. Screens have now become the fundamental medium that modern people rely heavily on. People’s spiritual life is stored in those separated yet bridged screens.
It is a religious symbol made out of the negative form of four interspaced screens, with flowing and bursting supernatural blue rays flickering constantly. Screens have now become the fundamental medium that modern people rely heavily on. People’s spiritual life is stored in those separated yet bridged screens.
It is a religious symbol made out of the negative form of four interspaced screens, with flowing and bursting supernatural red rays flickering constantly. Screens have now become the fundamental medium that modern people rely heavily on. People’s spiritual life is stored in those separated yet bridged screens.
When you gaze into the abyss, do you know where the abyss is gazing back at you? The artist selected several AI-generated pseudo-human portraits from thispersondoesnotexist.com, and reassembled all of them into an animation. On this website, the AI uses the eyes as the central focus of its algorithm. When the portraits are fast-played in…
The artist used a one-take long shot to film close-up segments of a model’s full body skin, and presented them through a micro-display equipped with a magnifying lens for viewers to observe voyeuristically. On the transparent yellow acrylic shell appears the inscription The Truman Show. In today’s online context, everyone is both a voyeur and…
On a metal rod tightly wrapped with dense cables, a pair of screens continuously display animated eyes. These animations, each symbolizing different emotions, seem to have become emotional surrogates for the joys and sorrows of the users behind the screens, replacing genuine individual feelings with a flattened, kawaii-style universal expression. The use of VR headset…
The Abyss Watchers No.1 reassembles discarded screen pieces of VR headsets and reasserts fragmented video footage of human models. Fathoming the profound engagement and intervention of digital media in our lived experience, this work offers a prophetical rendering of the futuristic Frankensteined species. The pair of eyes that commands the viewer’s self-awareness in consciousness unveils…
The Vanishing Prophecy No.2, lays OLED displays in tanks filled with transparent electrical insulating oil, which provides stability at high temperature and commonly used for high-voltage switches and circuit breakers. The submerged OLED screens illustrate either circulating lines of existential questions chosen by the artist or video footage filmed by the artist that closely examines…
Inside a cylindrical liquid container, an OLED screen with a blue background continuously displays twenty sets of existential questions. The artist positions this screen and its control unit as a specimen from the future, where all the questions become a cross-temporal dialogue with the viewers in the exhibition space.
Three round screens of varying sizes show the classic smile of Mickey Mouse. When the viewer approaches within 1 meter, Mickey’s features collapse simultaneously.
The round screen displays the Smiling Face emoji. When the viewer approaches within 1 meter, the smile collapses instantly.
The round screen displays the Smiling Face emoji. When the viewer approaches within 1 meter, the smile collapses instantly.
The round screen displays the Slightly Smiling Face emoji. When the viewer approaches within 1 meter, the smile collapses instantly.
A custom-built Mouse Hole modeled after Tom & Jerry was carved into the exhibition wall, in the silhouette of the Raised Fist emoji. Electrical wires spill outward from this aperture into the gallery space.
Five different skin-colored versions of the Raised Fist emoji are printed on a lenticular grating panel. As viewers shift their angle of view, the perceived standard skin color of the fist continuously changes.
A crystal ball with an inner-engraved Raised Fist emoji encircles the phrase revolution without revolution, placed atop a monument-like pedestal.
The artist collected Raised Fist emojis from social media platforms and recomposed them into a fast-looping animation. The trembling fists resemble a silent protest, presented through a miniature screen that renders this elusive square of resistance.
On a circular ring, thirty 5.5-inch displays are mounted, each connected to its corresponding ultrasonic sensor and a Raspberry Pi control unit. Whenever a viewer stands in front of a screen, a high-speed video of an arm raised upward appears on the black screen; once the viewer leaves, it immediately returns to black.
The “(being) role-played” identity has become a key feature of today’s social media. The artist re-drew fragments of thirty classic cartoon characters—their raised arms—formally appropriating Annette Lemieux’s seminal street-political work Left Right Left Right (1995). These protest placards and the cluster of cartoon fists raised upward seem to stage an act of resistance and accusation,…
In Neon Spiral, against the constantly shifting halo of urban popular aesthetic paradigms, nearly sixty well-known commercial brand slogans appear and disappear, forming a Moebius-like temporality. The work is presented on an irregularly contorted LED billboard, fatigued and precariously leaning against a wall.
This site-specific installation for the gallery’s second floor features a glowing levitating moon above a square water basin. It interrelates with the main hall works Circle and Dandelions and The Edge of the Earth, weaving a cross-spatial narrative that extends the exhibition’s conceptual framework.
This work is an abstract diagram of conceptual thinking and narrative mapping. Composed of 66 images, Relational Aesthetics visualizes the intertextual relationships among the project’s works. It offers viewers another channel to access the artist’s thought process while also serving as a tool for the artist to refine logic and extend future possibilities.
As the counterpart gaze to Circle and Dandelions, The Edge of the Earth, and The Oldest TV, the model’s gender in this work is deliberately blurred, turning the eyes into universal ones that belong to anyone, at any time and place. They gaze directly at the primal sources of memory and consciousness—the moon and the…
The work depicts the collision of the cube and the sphere, a metaphor for the encounter of ancient paradoxes and the convergence of ideas. The resulting fragments symbolize eruptions and divergences within human civilization, echoing the collisions across the entire project.
Inspired by Nam June Paik’s The Moon is the Oldest TV, the artist collected images and texts related to the circle, classifying them logically and transforming them into an animated installation. The work explores the connection between gazing at the moon and the origins of human consciousness. From the circle emerges infinite associations—memory, dimension, religion,…
One square painting of an oceanic vortex suspends a levitating cube; another circular painting of a sky vortex suspends a sphere. The work symbolizes how natural revelations reshape humanity’s perception of the square and circle as “perfect” forms, while asking: if the horizon were a curve, or the moon a rhombus, would we still regard…
The work begins with the question: “When we gaze at the sea horizon, what are we truly gazing at?” This becomes both the starting point of the project and a prompt for viewers. The overlapping layers of looping landscapes, the endless passage of time, and the ambiguous character “终” (End) strip away worldly desire and…
On August 27, 2016, the artist discovered he had 1,000 friends on WeChat. He entered each friend’s “Moments” page and captured screenshots of their profiles and covers. All screenshots were then compiled into a frame-by-frame animation. This work uses social media to reflect upon society. These 1,000 friends serve as a sampling of the broader…
In this work, the artist spent 24 hours on April 26, 2016, continuously refreshing WeChat “Moments” to obtain updates. Each time a red-dot notification appeared, he randomly captured a screenshot containing the user’s profile image and compiled all the screenshots into an animation. The theme revolves around FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)—the anxiety of missing…
This series of works employs 738 groups of cross-sectional photographs of tree branches. Each group was subjectively color-adjusted and recomposed, forming a photographic installation of 738 cellular structures. Depending on the chosen printing medium and exhibition space, the project presents itself in three different modes. The term “Xian Wei” (显微) in Chinese carries a dual…
The aspects of time that interest me are, first, its formless morphology, and second, its dimensional structure. I compressed 14,464 scanned sectional images into a single frame, attempting to explore the representation of temporal form and to articulate the concept of temporal compression. The former is a process of materializing the intangible and abstract morphology…
We are honored to announce that Mr. Ding Shiwei’s solo exhibition Daybreak will open in Beijing Art Now Gallery on 23 July, 2016. This first solo exhibition of the artist in Beijing will last until 31 August, 2016. By combining symbols and experience, Ding Shiwei focuses on social conflicts and paradoxes that are difficult to…
Meteor Sonata is a video installation composed of six interconnected and synchronized screens. It was created by cutting and photographing nearly one thousand segments of a dead tree’s trunks and branches, taken between every two adjacent nodes. These photographic sequences were then edited into nearly one thousand animated images. All of the cross-sectional images originate…
Video artist Ding Shiwei’s solo exhibition, Disparate Illusion, will open on September 7th in Mao Space Hengshan Fang. Works on display will include a single-channel video, Double Act, a five-channel animated installation, Goodbye Utopia, ink transcripts from these two videos, and drawings specifically created for this exhibition. In addition, Mao Space is, for the first…
Installation version of Goodbye, Utopia. The nine-channel video installation Goodbye, Utopia is presented in a spatialized format. Nine LCD screens are suspended in midair, their images facing downward toward the floor. The backs of the frames are uniformly covered with black aluminum panels. The installation is accompanied by aluminum plates and mirrors, each mirror matching…
Daybreak was a site-specific painting installation designed in response to the gallery’s architectural space. Taking advantage of the low ceiling height on the second floor and the stark material contrasts among the walls, floor, and ceiling, the work constructed an anti-display landscape of paintings within the exhibition hall. All the paintings were suspended in midair,…
God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, including ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Humans strive to create the ideal society, killing many on the way. Short, but momentous animation that symbolically, yet clearly shows the rise and tragedy of various utopias.
In a fantastical space saturated with ideology, the dazzling facade of modern industry is displayed, brimming with utopian ideals that hypnotize society. Yet ethnic communities are excluded from politics, bound by unspeakable rules and invisible constraints. From the indifferent public, the literary spectacle of square politics, to the frenzied rise and fall of the guillotine,…
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