Thrashed
“Thrashed” is a video work that presents the isolated queer body and its transformation into an afterimage in a virtual utopia with deconstructed electronica sounds, which was created under the influence of the significant changes in 2020.
Those changes are thrashing the naked body with insecurity mentally and physically, doubting the identity without being observed during isolation, and questioning the queer existence while voguing along with high heels. The desire for intimacy, vulnerability, and care intersect at the center of the body’s performance. With the post-club digital aesthetics, the moving body becomes a digital afterimage surrounded by plants, Bodhisattva’s statues, and delicate structures, addressing the wanting for exhibiting a broken queer self in a virtual fantasy. The music strengthens the psychological panic through the elusive penetrability of low-frequency post-club style.
The project has changed, thinking about the queer body representation digitally and the identity language visually, and has challenged the Internet cultural manifestation through club aesthetics.
Habitat
“Habitat” is a video work presenting a surrealist acid exploration in a queer-identified space. It is inspired by the desire to create post-club environments to contain the artist’s queer identity and the protest against the social nonacceptance of queer identity in Chinese society.
Glowing Chinese characters——“spiritually fierce” and “drums”——spinning around the hills and body, prompt the club-like energy. The afterimage-like body is dancing along with the holy statues, and a futuristic structure is popping club lighting, which celebrates the indiscrimination in the habitat. The graveyard formed by the monitors implies the collapse of reality within the Internet cyberculture. The wanting for a queer-accepted space mentally is reflected by the significant gravitational representation visually, which creates vertiginous, distorted landscapes throughout the video. The experimental and nonnatural sound constructs the desire to look into a better future self.
This video critiques the situation of nowadays young Chinese generations who embrace the Internet culture and virtual spaces to escape from reality, and it also addresses the influence of Chinese politics on people’s ideologies in an overtone way.
F2020
The F2020 (short for Fuck 2020) Installation is an experiment of the disconnection between reality and virtual technology during 2020, full of disasters. The whole work forms by a YouTube video, which the audience can access with their own devices, and a projected video installed in a small room, which the audience needs to see physically.
The 360-degree video on YouTube creates a highly interactive post-club space to explore the psychedelic and high-key colored landscape. The popping artificial-intelligent-like windows and the glitchy hands reaching into this space imply the exciting but noxious immersive technology. The audience’s perspective is led to the center of the psychedelic and vertiginous structure, combined with a mushroom tree, orchid, and surreal entities. A group of Shiva’s statue is surrounding this structure, which emphasizes the devastating power of Shiva. While getting closer to the center, the landscape is changed into a recap motion of what has happened in 2020. Musically, post-club music brings the climax and immersive quality of the space.
On the other side, the projected video installed in the small room is present without sound, but still, as a panoramic view, and only the sound of the running projector can be heard. Though the video slowly drags the audience into the post-club space, it loses the excitement of the 360-degree video. The silence and darkness emphasize the sadness and loneliness within the environment, which embodies the nowadays situation of reality in 2020. Moreover, no matter how exciting the virtual world is, it cannot fulfill the emptiness of the real world.
The content in the 360-degree video and the projection is technically the same, but the way of presenting them changes the audience’s perception. What is real, and what is fake? The disconnection and contradiction between reality and virtual space are gradually attacking people’s mentality during the post-pandemic. It also reveals now the struggle of the balance between the terrible reality and the rapidly emerging virtual world from people.
Alejandro Junyao Zhang 