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ARTISTS EXHIBITIONS SPACES ARTICLES PUBLICATIONS WORKS VISUALS
ON AAAJIAO
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xu wenkai (aaajiao) is a prolific artist living and working in shanghai and has
worked feverishly for years, continually exploring new approaches in new media
that shimmer as elegant attempts at re-formulation of questions of networked
culture; power, command and control. trained as an engineer and autodidactic in
his study of the arts, aaajiao invents as the situation at hand requires. his skills
allow him a range of exceptional breadth since he does not need to settle for what
exists, nor to divert his vision through the agency of another person. his main
source of material and means? code, and mostly playful abstraction - a gift that
his medium generously offers. that aaajiao, with a formal degree in engineering
from wu han university, has chosen art as his medium of exploration of the coded
limitations of our physical world suggests that he relies as much on philosophical/
emotional sources and intuition as on his left-brain. his genius is the result of self-
thought skills and interdisciplinary positions across the digital field .
thus, our first collaboration was for the development of an online platform for
arthub asia, an ambitious contemporary art initiative i am co-directing. when we
set out on the planning phase for its website, this is when i was first astounded by
his experimental spirit, resourcefulness, refined abilities, and good nature.
our second collaboration took place on the largest first zero energy 'media wall' in
china: a building-sized movie screen that collects energy while the sun shines,
using it to display digital forms of art by night. when the sun set, and the nightlife
of beijing came out to play, the entire building came alight with mindlight.data" by
aaajiao, using the solar energy harvested during the day to illuminate his moving
image on the colossal video 'screen', measuring in at 2,200m2 covering the entire
glass curtain façade of an entertainment complex, near the architectural spectacle
of the 2008 beijing olympics stadium. aaajio was one of the three artists to engage
with china's first photovoltaic system integrated into a glass curtain wall.
our most recent collaboration with him, this time for shanghai earts festival of
2008 for which as arthub asia, davide quadrio and myself curated final cut-
processing new media in public space, we went for an intentional subversion of
commercial led screens in xujiahui area and their flashy, in-your-face high
resolution yet tacky advertisements. we thought that artistic content must take the
wavelengths as much as advertising content. we wanted to explore the limits of
how the currently highly commercial use of outdoor screens can be broadened
with artistic content, so we invited aaajiao to contribute. aaajiao took over the
metro city (mei luo cheng)'s large led globe in xujiahui. with "mindlight.data- write
the work's name here pls", he neither paid homage to the riches of capitalism nor
to the technology behind its physical form instead he chose free-styling and
mainly explored forms, light, abstract compositions of pixels, implying movement,
poesis and the overflow of reality through the application of algorithmic processes.
in this work, like "mindlight.data," .
aaajiao elevated his artistic strategy of abstraction and randomness (as generated
by code) into an intellectual principle. he mystified code while demystifying art,
and paralyzing those faithful in the uniqueness of art.
for final cut-processing new media in public space, aaajiao also joined in an
experimental set-up of dancers and musicians. always in the high spirit of
experimentation, aaajiao embarked on this intense collaboration in which he
translated dancers' movements into real-time abstract visuals, facilitating a
dynamic dialogue on the stage and fluid interactivity between the dancers, and the
architecture that surrounded them. (created by his on-going collaborators/
architectural duo wang zhenfei and wang luming).
this is how "patience for the man" was born, following a number of rigorous
workshops to explore the possibility of an open creative interdisciplinary
production, where the single "actorscould, through the work in progress, get to
know each other and generate new artistic content, meaning and directions.
aaajiao, along with other shanghai –based actors such as b6, nunu, and ling xi
were asked by beijing-based choreographer alizia borsari to go beyond their
medium and to experience new techniques of expressions more affiliated with
"decontextualized emotions." the result was in the form of a live performance
within a musicscape featuring heterogeneous and multi-scaled levels of network
spatialities and temporalities. aaajiao's contribution was another media-
archaeological excavation of the "formal" through the use of algorithm, but this
time in realtime orchestrated by himself. pixels exploded, as dancers cracked
open their volatile emotions through their movements on the stage.
it was clear from this work that aaajiao's world tends not to be fixed; it prefers to
be in constant movement. it is a world in which particles prefer to exist in many
places at once, with their future momentum calculable only in probabilities. space
and time and perception are all meant to be elusive for him. he is artistic
Defne Ayas
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2. intentions recognize that art and engineering - and possibly metaphysics - share
common ground in their attempt to offer answers to the question of what is reality.
is it possible for aaajiao to capture the on-going mutations in subjectivity through
abstraction only? is that a choice of politics or technical convenience? can his
work also be read beyond a conceptual reflection on the institutionalized
computation and networks? his oeuvre brings together art, code, and poetry in
order to participate beyond the interface and to address the
socio-technical underpinnings of global cultural politics. and if we are bound by
understanding of society through cybernetics, then his work can even be seen as
"political"—as it constantly approximates the network and its underlying
mechanisms as a cultural form. so, the pleasure that this work affords could be
multifold: his on-going research into the emergence of computation and
cybernetics, his poetic insight and the delight in a glimpsed understanding of，a
new possible political in china.
recently, aaajiao utilized the cloud's natural rhythms. in "cloud.data", he was most
possibly reflecting on forms of participation under a globalized networked culture
that entails ubiquitous interface-based computing and cloud platforms. in this
world flooded with images, digi-bites, screen-based interfaces and social networks
that blanket all of us across the physical, technological, biological, social,
economic, and cultural spectrums, was it also possible that he might have been
inspired by romantic landscape art or the buddhist blankness of hiroshi sugimoto's
seascapes? (was there room for his work to be read within such a linear cultural
production history at all?) or was he responding to the unregulated economic
development that has run rampant in the chinese architecture industry, often at
the expense of the environment, thus making a call for chinese architecture for a
serious ecological change? hard to tell.
aaajiao claims that the transaction shall remain with the viewer at all times, and
only creation is his sheer responsibility. refraining from articulating his art himself,
and constantly questioning of apparent reality, while harboring his doubts about
the received opinion on his art and what is real, aaajiao seems that he will
continue on his playful inquiry route, offering not answers but possible ways to
understand the questions. otherwise why would he ever engage in a project like
"weigh the data" which involved the measurement of data of robotwisdom.com, a
resourceful website created by jorn barger who coined the term weblog to
describe the process of "logging the web"?
a refined simplicity in its execution, and in its constant diy attempt to avoid the risk
of becoming mere seduction, aaajiao's computer wizardry hopefully will live
beyond short-term sensationalism for new media in china and continue to allow
for insight into the attempts for a new thinking of a vocabulary of philosophical,
scientific, or artistic discourse to explain the forces of not only networked politics
but also matter, space, and time. (translated by suki, revised by peggy, li zhenhua)
defne ayas, curator- performa/ adjunct professor - nyu in shanghai
RELATED
Artists
PUBLICATION(S) (1)
(catalogue)
2010
Xu Wenkai
aaajiao
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