The Venice Biennale reflects on the future of Chinese art and technology

The Venice Biennale is a highly influential international exhibition in the contemporary art world, first held in 1895, with a history of more than 100 years, also known as the "Father of the Biennale of Art", together with Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and Art Basel in Switzerland, known as the "Three Major Art Exhibitions in the World". The Venice Biennale contains the International Biennale of Art and the Biennale of Architecture, which alternate between odd and even-numbered years. In addition, the Venice Film Festival is part of the Venice Biennale, and music, theatre and dance are also part of the Venice Biennale.

Cecilia Alemani. Image: Andrea Avezzù/La Biennale di Venezia.

On April 23, the Venice Biennale was officially opened to the public in the Garden And Armory exhibition area. In the themed exhibition "Milk of Dreams", curated by Italian curator Cecilia Alemani, 180 of the 213 participating artists participated for the first time. Among the artists who participated in the theme exhibition for the first time, including Zheng Bo, who now lives in Hong Kong, Lu Yang, who now lives in Shanghai, and Li Shuang, who now lives in Berlin and Geneva, three artists from China, their video forms present their own explorations of the love of all things, digital body and biopolitics.

Poster of the 59th Venice Biennale

The exhibition's name, "Milk of Dreams," comes from a short story by Leonora Carrington about children transforming into surreal paintings that depict fantastic indoor scenes as well as ecstatic landscapes, where the differences between animal and human life are erased. In his preface to his curatorial exhibition, Alemani writes, "Many artists are imagining a posthuman environment that would challenge the modern Western understanding of humanity as the standard for the cosmic and all-things scale, which assumes that the white male "rational man" is a universal ideal." ”

"History" is a highlight of the Venice Biennale

Exhibition site of the 59th Venice Biennale

There are about 80 new works in this year's Venice Biennale, of which "History" is the highlight of this Venice Biennale. Alemani has five "time capsules" in the exhibition, most of which are museum loans, echoing the themes of the exhibition, such as deformation, the cyber concept, or the body as a container, but not from the perspective of art history. "So for the body deformation, you can say it is through a surrealist perspective, a futuristic perspective, or it can be the perspective of some Dada artist, or even the perspective of a Bauhaus artist." "I'm trying to tell a story that's not necessarily the kind you'd read in art books, but focuses on female artists — who, in my opinion, often have very similar strategies and approaches to men," Alemani explains.

The large proportion of women artists' works in this biennale is also one of the important features. Cecilia Alemani has given a deep reflection on the overall artistic phenomenon of the past few years, and her exhibition plan is particularly closely connected to the current form. The relationship between the individual and technology, which her exhibitions focus on, has also been the focus of the Chinese art scene in the past two years. With the improvement of women's global economic and social status and the changes in the international situation, more and more female artists are actively participating in the exhibition, and their artistic and cultural activities have also been highly recognized by the community and the world, especially in the war, the epidemic, and the changes in the social environment. Compared with the social forces borne by women, it is very important and worth exploring in depth.

With the theme of "Yuanjing", we will work with Chinese artists to unlock the symbiosis of human beings, nature and technology

Venice Biennale China Pavilion "Yuanjing" exhibition site, 2022

The theme of the exhibition in the Chinese Pavilion is "Yuanjing", which looms the concept of "metacosm", which indirectly unveils the prelude to the metacosm. The Chinese Pavilion of the Venice Biennale is curated by Zhang Zikang, director of the CAFA Art Museum, with the theme of "Yuanjing", trying to present the development system of Chinese art from the personal and technical levels. "As a national pavilion, what should bring to the world is the most cutting-edge artistic development of a country in the past two years."

Artist Liu Jiayu at the Chinese Pavilion of the Venice Biennale

Liu Jiayu, an artist exhibiting at the China Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, was born in 1990 in Liaoning, China, graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts in 2014, and established Liu Jiayu Studio in the same year, dedicated to the creative practice and research of new media art.

Jiayu Liu, Virtual Pole Static Duc, Artificial Intelligence, 3D Printing, 3D Projection, Real-Time Rendering, Size Variable, 2021

Renderings of Liu Jiayu's "Virtual Pole Quiet Du"

The inspiration for the early days of Liu Jiayu's work came from the earliest Atlas of Yugong in China, which produced the earliest imagination and reflection on the geography of China. Over the past year, we have started from the Helan Mountains and used styleGAN, pix2pix and MIDAS to train different components of the work and obtain different information. The system synchronizes the three-dimensional results generated by artificial intelligence after deep learning training on Chinese terrain and the two-dimensional results generated by artificial intelligence after deep learning training on Chinese ink paintings in previous dynasties. Between the surreal dimension and the virtual field, the space in which the work itself is located is like a buffer zone for the viewer to be in.

Artist Xu Lei at the Chinese Pavilion of the Venice Biennale

Xu Lei was born in Jiangsu in 1963 and currently works at the China Academy of Arts. He was admitted to the Nanjing Academy of Arts in 1980 and studied traditional Chinese painting. After graduation, he participated in the 1985 Art New Wave Movement and participated in the Chinese Modern Art Exhibition. Since then, his main direction has been to transform traditional painting with modern ideas, so that traditional aesthetics can be regenerated in new images, forming styles and influencing them. At the same time, he also uses installation, video, etc. as creative mediums to extend his painting concept, advocates the transformation of traditional Chinese cultural "principles" into contemporary visual cognition, and uses the genealogy of art history knowledge to build a connection with the future.

Xu Lei, Correspondances, 266x350x48.5cm, Acrylic, Metal Materials, Electric Rail, 2022

Xu Lei's exhibited work "Correspondances" is two electric devices with a length of more than two meters, coupled with transparent materials reproducing images of trees of different eras, different cultures and different texts, as a dictionary word of "this presence", creating a sports landscape that can overlap and overlap. In the past few decades, Xu Lei has taken "the return of time", "the reincarnation of time", "the interlacing of time" and "the transposition of time" as the contents of works in different periods, making his views have both a dynamic sense of "changing scenery step by step" and a sense of pattern of looking at world civilization.

The "Metaverse" will explore the combination of humans and machines, which is full of infinite experimentation and exploration. Today, science and technology have a major driving force on all aspects of our lives, cultures, communications, cognition, behavior, and more. The metacosmonic concept is constantly updating new business ideas and formats. The direction of new technologies in the future is diversification and globalization. Will be positively reflected in the daily life of human beings, and will undoubtedly continue to be a huge change. The "Metaverse" exhibition will respond to the theme exhibition from a personal and technical level. Through the theme of the exhibition, the development system of Chinese art is presented, reflecting the current social phenomena in China and people's thinking about the future.

In the era of the epidemic, art soothes people's hearts

Titans (2022), Ali Sheri

Lebanese artist Ali Cherri's Titans (2022) consists of three figurative sculptures made of clay, based on other ancient gods such as Ramassou, combining animal and human figures. The work strongly evokes the Biennale's exploration of the theme of secular surrealism. Next to Titan is another of Shelly's works, The Three-Screen Image, Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022), which lyrically tells the story of our lives as water, earth and planets. At one point, a voiceover sounded: "If God has shaped us in His own image, then God must have been created from clay as well." "The image of the Titan shows that our bodies are more connected to nature than we thought. The text on the wall links the work to donna Haraway's concept of slime in When Species Meet (2007).

Bird Superior: Portrait of Max Ernst by Leonora Carrington

Brick House (2019), Simone Leigh

The exhibit at the Armory begins with Simone Leigh's large bronze bust of a black woman, Brick House (2019), next to five mysterious figurative paintings by the late Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón. They demonstrate the importance attached to painting and sculpture in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale, as well as the attention paid to mythological, mystical and monumental themes.

The convergence of art and technology has given globalization and diversity

The process of the fusion and development of art and science is the process of economic and social innovation and development, and the basis of the overlap is philosophy and aesthetics, while the top of the mountain is innovation and creation. Jointly promote the cultivation of humanistic and artistic talents in the new era. The artists participating in the Venice Biennale used their works to profoundly demonstrate the artists' diversified explorations in the field of artificial intelligence such as the boundaries of human cognition, the artistic paradigm of technological innovation, and the collaborative innovation of technology and art, highlighting the appeal of the times of "art and science".

According to Knight Frank's latest 2022 Wealth Report, the Luxury Investment Index (KFLII) shows watches and wines performing their best annually since 2018, up 16 percent for the full year, while the art market grew by 13 percent. As a result of technological developments, emerging fields such as digital painting have also gained great development, encouraging more young investors to enter the market. With the emphasis on environmental protection and sustainable development, more investors have turned their attention to the field of ESG investment to seek opportunities and avoid risks. In recent years, the investment horizons of high net worth individuals have become increasingly diversified and broad, from marine habitats to space, from physical investments to virtual investments.

Mr. Lee Jeong-do, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, said: "Art and science are two sides of the same coin, they originate from the noblest part of human activity, and both pursue profoundness, universality and eternity. "The real charm brought by the integration of art and science is committed to paying attention to the driving force brought by art and science to the development of human civilization; the current immersive new media art works trigger the audience to think about the relationship between human beings and science and technology in the future, conveying to the public the concept of cross-integration of art and science, and moving towards the door to the future of science and technology." Under the high development of China's high technology, especially many achievements in artificial intelligence, brain and intelligence laboratories are on the same level as developed countries. This has also had an impact on many artists today, many of whom have begun to use high-tech means to create. Looking at Chinese culture from the perspective of the world is not the same as corresponding to the world pattern from its own culture. Some contemporary artists who have gained international recognition may have mixed understandings of Chinese culture. From the general understanding of art, China is a country with thousands of years of its own cultural traditions, successive generations of continuous, there is a certain continuity within, after years of internalization, and sublimation, but the development of Chinese contemporary art, is its own context, the more oriental cultural elements, the more can reflect the classics of Chinese art.

Source: NetEase, The Paper, China Culture Daily

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