![]() ![]() NESS & Shane Aspergren) (2018) consists of a set of ‘impossible instruments’ – in this case, classical Western instruments blown up to a size unplayable by humans. ![]() What about objects that can only be simulated? Samson Young’s sound installation for Possible Music #1 (feat. In a society racing into a future already identifiable as reality, VHS tapes and prosthetic teeth – like the plastic wind-up denture toys scattered behind the screen – are rendered relics of the present. ![]() In this world, sex is stripped of reproductive function and becomes a never-consummated loop of sensory stimulation and response death, denoting a state of nonproductivity, is relegated to the virtual sphere. The artist’s Cantonese voiceover delivers deadpan, graphic depictions of lust, male impotence and the morbidity of hypercommodified urban life. With the aesthetics of an early videogame and a colourful geometry that recalls the Memphis movement, the visual storytelling oscillates between the cute and the lewd, naughty and absurd, perversion and repression. Hong Kong artist Wong Ping’s animated video installation Dear, can I give you a hand? (2018) tells the exploits of a sex-starved widower belonging to a surplus population of megalopolitan seniors. The resulting works reflect artistic strategies that navigate a host of concepts and realities of ‘China’ – often entertained as a place of alternative modernity and accelerationist fantasy, as evinced in the show’s title design, which combines classic serif type with a pixel font reminiscent of 8-bit Nintendo handles. Each considers new horizons for our technocratic-capitalist present, of which ‘China’ appears to be a pioneer. The play of Sino-futurism and Sino-pessimism in Cao Fei’s ode to logistics anchors the five newly commissioned works in One Hand Clapping. The installation features workers’ uniforms, corporate ephemera and interviews with real employees at the Chinese ecommerce giant Jingdong, suggesting lives enmeshed in exploitation, alienation and marketing ideologies. Past and present conditions of labour – be it Great Leap Forward-style optimism about constructing socialist modernity, or networked capitalist consumption and circulation – are the backdrop to a romance between two workers, the promise of human connection suspended between fantasy and reality. Incorporating choreographic sequences from the 1960s revolutionary opera On the Docks and dazzling 3D models of logistical operations, there’s plenty in Asia One to indulge fetishists of China’s socialist past or hyperdeveloped future. But instead of leisurely idyll, Asia One presents a near-future in which the regime of work has been replaced by a totalised dystopia of control, surveillance, isolation and ennui. Sure, there’s not much work for humans in the fully automated warehouses depicted in Cao Fei’s video and multimedia installation Asia One (2018) – included in this survey of artists exploring the impacts of technology and globalisation on our understanding of the future – compared to the labour-intensive factory in the same artist’s Whose Utopia (2006). ![]()
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