“Disconnected Generation” exhibitions has opened on August 20

Disconnected Generation:

Electronic-colors,Internet-ization,Fashion Consumption,Science-Fiction Prose, and the GlobalIdentity of the Post-90s Generation.

Artist：Fei Yining,SKIRUA,Hou Zichao,

Liu Xin,Ma Hailun,Pu Yingwei,Slime Engine,Sun Yitian,Wang Ziquan,

Yuan Keru,Zhang Ji,Zhang Yibei,

Vivien Zhang,Zhang Zipiao

Curator：Cui Cancan

Exhibition period：From August 20 to December 4, 2022

The emergence of the "disconnected generation" marks a watershed moment in the course of Chinese contemporary art.This turn, unprecedented in its radicality to any prior artistic movements, plunges the public understanding into a deep state of perplexity.

The term "post-90s" refers to a group of young artists who were born in the 1990s.Employing the phrase "the disconnected generation" as an umbrella term for this generation, the exhibition attempts to trace and contextualize an irreversible cultural shift that is currently taking place in China, through the means of a group exhibition,interviews,and a publication. By referencing previous movements from the canon of Chinese contemporary art such as the '85 New Wave, Cynical and Political Pop, "New Generation", "Dreadful Youth", and the "Cartoon Generation", the exhibition aims to pin down the uniqueness of the "DisconnectedGeneration" which is also heavily influenced by globalization.

The use of electronic-colors is perhaps the most representative visual trait of this generation. It stems from a virtual present that is collectively shaped by the emergence of electronics, printing, spectrum charts, data, cameras, screens,pixels, programs, industrial products, and ultimately, the internet. This novel reality has displaced the painterly tradition – electornic-colors replace natural colors and light sources; data signals supersedes physical reality. Graphic layers overthrow the

foundations of painting, making superimposition instead a predominant creative method of this generation. They are also an "accelerated" generation. The increasingly extensive usage of "artistic mediums" marks the simultaneous developments of art and society. The internet has completely reshaped the understanding, mindset, and ideology of this generation—art no longer remains pictorial, but instead, it has become a point of dispersion, shift, rupture, and an intersection for physical and virtual realities. The concepts of "Internet-ization" artistic production, information dissemination, and the receptiveness of modern audiences have all departed from the art of the past.

A sensitivity to fashion and consumerism is another distinctive feature of the post-90s generation.The upbringings and lifestyles of this generation give rise to a new reality and aesthetic that unnerve intellectuals. Fashion disrupts their relationship with reality-art becomes not a "reflection" of reality, but a "reaction" that charts its perpetual flux, Consumerism has created a conflated worldview that immensely impacts our identities and artistic perceptions, breaking away from the traditional humanist spirit. This generation confronts the market, fame, and material life openly; they regard artistic life as a professional career, make short films about fashion, design derivative works incorporating highly personalised symbols, and openly discuss their private lives — the ideas of "artistic consumerism" and "consumerist art" are viewed through the lens of pure consumerism.

Science-fiction films have also had a great deal of influence on the aesthetic judgement and the perception of temporal space of the post-90 sgeneration. They have introduced an unparalleled perspective to the discourse of Chinese contemporary art. "Essay Film" acts as an analogy for the complexity of this generation, marked by its blurring of categories, entangled structures, organic syntax, and mythic spirituality. Proses, phrases, streams of consciousness, voice-over narrations, and soliloquies have become unique means of artistic production and modes of viewing for this generation. It comes from the complexity, ambiguity, and heterogeneity of this era, and is a product of this generation's pursuit of "complexity"and a sense of "complex theatricality."

While most of the previous Chinese artistic movements were local occurrences, the "Disconnected Generation" is a cross-cultural phenomenon, emerging simultaneously in Beijing, Shanghai, NewYork, and London. It is also since the post-90s generation that the "lag" between the Chinese and the international art scenes has dissipated – knowledge and information are now widely shared, geographic differences diminish. As more artists study abroad, this not only sets them apart fromthe linear trajectory of Chinese contemporary art, but also allows them to focus on expansive global topics that were never articulated before,such as the fluidity and disjointedness of space and time. Social-polarization and decentralization makes it difficult for these artists to gain instantaneous "fame" asones have done in the past. This deviation is also explored through a "disconnectedness" within the structure of the entire exhibition, as it showcases the vastly diverse and individualistic practices of this generation.

Electronic-color use, internet-ization, fashion consumption, science-fiction prose, and global identity all beg for a meditation beyond the phenomenon: the relationship between the essence and the façade of this era; the optimism towards technological advancement and the abuse of it by capitalism; the definition of human by nature and technology; the alienation of the body; the changes in consciousness, mentality, emotion, and secretion propelled by social transformations; the making and anti-making of an era; the replacement of critically by diversity; globalisation and identity anxiety; apoliticism and the tension of reality… all become the most distinct and intrinsic characteristics of this generation. These artists boldly utilize and leverage the cultural significance embodied in these descriptive terms. They demonstrate how the fractured and popular psyche of this era can be channelled into creative energy, truly befitting of a title that is eponymous with this generation.

ARTIST

Fei Yining

FEI Yining (yiningfei.com) is an artist who lives and works in Shanghai.By building multi-media narra-tives-spanning from 3D animation, moving-image, and sculpture, she present speculative tales and fantastical worlds where our alternative states of existence is possible.

Hou Zichao

Hou Zichao, born in 1988 in Shanxi, China, Hou Zichao received his BA Honors degree from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2012 and his Master’s degree from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2013. Hou Zichao's practice involves a variety of media, including painting and installation, which focuses on the ambivalent relationship between man and nature in the current cultural context. His pictorial language emphasizes the distance between artificial landscape and nature, and an ideal environment that hovers between the garden of tranquility and the wilderness of desire.

In the confrontation between the electronic image viewing habits and the artist's painting behavior, a complex and personal expression between ancient divination and data algorithm is hidden - through the superimposition of pictorial layers and the extraction of information, a delicate balance between "chaotic" images and abstract intentions is achieved. For Hou Zichao, the nature is like an inexhaustible database that can be assembled into an "ideal scenery” by pulling out a few characters.

Liu Xin

Liu Xin (b. 1991, Xinjiang/China) is an artist and engineer.Xin graduated from MIT Media Lab with a master degree in Media Arts and Sciences after heer M.F.A from Rhode Island School of Design and B.E from Tsinghua University in Beijing (Measurement,Control Technology, and Instrument).Xin is the Arts Curator in the Space Exploration Initiative in MIT Media Lab. She is also an artist-in-residence in SETI Institute. In her practice, She is the recipient of nurmerous awards and residencies, including Porches Chinese Young Artist of the Year 2021, 30 under30 Asia,X Museum Triennial Award,the Van Lier Fellowship from Museum of Arts and Design, Sundance New Frontier Story Lab.Xin creates experiences/experiments to take measurements inour personal, social and technological spaces in a post-metaphysical world: between gravity and horneland, sorrow and the composition of tears, gene sequencing and astrology. Her recent researchand interest center around the verticality of space, extraterrestrial explorations and cosmic metabolism.

Ma Hailun

Ma Hailun (born 1992, Xinjiang, China). Her experience as a fashion photographer in New York has inspired her incentive to discover her hometown again with lens: She has expressed her strong interest and insights into the fashion culture, women’s fashion, post-90s and post-2000s in Xinjiang in her explorative fashion works since 2018. Ever since her return from New York to China in 2018, she has focused her attention on ordinary people in her hometown and creatively fused her experience and background as a professional fashion photographer in New York. Her creative works have also opened a new window for the audience to approach Xinjiang and helped people to understand the land from a new perspective.

©️superelle Photography：Lusha Alic

Pu Yingwei

Pu Yingwei, (b.1989), Lives and works in Beijing, China. Pu received his BFA from Sichuan Fine art Institute in 2013, DNSEP (MFA with Félicitation du jury) from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in 2018.As an active contributor to the new generation of political conceptual art, Pu Yingwei has creatively inherited and developed the visual and ideological lineage of socialist art and early Chinese avant-garde art, he has drawn nutrition from the visual culture of revolutionary art and ideological propaganda, thus forming the unique language system and historical perspective. With the core pursuit of “how to interpret the complexity of contemporary China to himself and the world”, his practice spanning painting, writing, designing, curating and lecturing. He is also the artist who interprets the multiple identity narratives that he practices in the public sphere as a comprehensive mobilization of an artistic trend of thought.

Slime Engine

Slime Engine, founded in 2017, operated and curated by Li Hanwei, Liu Shuzhen, Fang Yang, and Shan Liang. Slime Engine is an online platform organization that utilizes the virtual world which is not limited by time and space, to develop unprecedented forms of art, exhibition and experience. Slime Engine excels at integrating art, interspersing and placing art in everyday experience. Their practice is based on parody and reconstruction of the existed reality, creating the new reality with collage aesthetics of integration, to provide critical feedback to the structure and order of the current world.

Photography：Du Yuzhou

Sun Yitian

Sun Yitian (b. 1991 in Zhejiang, China) graduated from the Painting Department of China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA) in 2015 and earned her Masters Degree in 2018. She is now completing her doctorate of Literature at the School of Humanities at Tsinghua University, Beijing. Her practice, which spans painting, installation, performance, and fashion employs material objects as metaphors of labor and production to reveal the inner mechanisms of our hyper-consumerist, patriarchal society. Sun's often photo-realist works examines the secret, increasingly tenuous connection between seduction and fear as well as the sculptural ‘thingness’ of her subjects.

Wang Ziquan

Wang Ziquan (born 1993) graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts（China) with a B.A. degree in sculpture in 2017 and from the Royal College of Art with an M.A. degree in 2019. Wang’s practice is rooted in his unique observation and understanding of the Internet and the virtual world, exploring the threshold values between virtuality and reality, and using 3D software to imitate the absurdity in the physical world. By using narrative computer images, he copies and pastes between virtual and real spaces.

Yuan Keru

Born in 1990 in Hangzhou, Yuan Keru graduated from School of Inter Media Art, China Academy of Art with an MFA in 2016, and currently lives and works in Shanghai. Yuan’s practice focuses on exploring the painterly quality, spatial rhythm and narratives of video, combining the on-going events, emotions with history, mythology, dreams and so on. She uses narrative films to present the plight of individuals in different sections in the history.

Zhang Ji

“Every time the spell is read aloud, the sentiments will be aroused once, and the notion will complete once again and be permanently carved with the time and space; the holes on the body will breathe once and again, move without cease and feel as warm as the tide, and the hidden surge below the skin sings the melody of life itself.”

Zhang Yibei

1992 Born in Daqing, China,Lives and works in Beijing.Yibei Zhang start with a proposition, that is, a rethinking of the relationship between artist, material and ideation. In this rethinking, the artist and her materials form the entity world and the entity world frames the ideation world; ideation and material together compose the imagery of the artist and this imagery leads, chicken and egg-like, to the collaboration of artist and material. Material, artist and ideation are therefore fated to co-exist. What then is material and who is the artist? Where is ideation? We might deem that the artist picks her material, be it stone, silicon or things that exist in the world (found or sought objects), because she combines her materials as reference objects to her subconscious. This poses for Yibei the question of whether the material belongs to the artist or vice versa, i.e. relative to material, the artist is moved and relative to the artist, the material is moved.

Vivien Zhang

Vivien Zhang (b. 1990, Beijing) is a London-based artist who spent her formative years in China, Kenya and Thailand. She received a BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2012, and a MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London in 2014. Zhang was also the recipient of the Abbey Residency Award for the British School at Rome in 2016. Zhang is currently an Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts. Vivien Zhang’s work interrogates the inconsistencies and paradoxes experienced as a "third culture citizen" and "digital native".

Zhang Zipiao

Zhang Zipiao, born in Beijing in 1993. Influenced by the culture of YouTube, Instagram and other social networks, Zhang Zipiao in her creative process indirectly ponders the condition of the globalised everyday life, and the politics of representation, delineating contents that are oftentimes dismissed by social ethical frameworks. The painting surfaces reveal direct or nuanced erotic scenes and propositions, suggesting the artist’s affirmation of her ever-shifting position when it comes to subject matters. In her recent paintings, she takes personal life experiences as a starting point, returning to the subject matters of portraits and still lifes, to reflect on universal physical and spiritual connection through painting, a medium based on body.

SKIRUA

SKIRUA is a contradiction between reality, society, internet, and fantasy. "SKIRUA" is the name of Guo Yuheng's imaginary self, who travels through the timeline to become a mimic of different social phenomena, anime characters with different identities, and finally gets lost in herself. Guo Yu Heng has always aspired to become a fictional character, fall in love with a fictional anime character, get married to the dolls he incarnates, and finally divide her emotions, preferences, and soul into countless dolls. Each doll is its own "doppelganger", turning itself into a doll to wander and play in the fantasy world. Beauty, scars, and happiness are intertwined. The characters in Guo Yuheng's works are all "I," but her portraits themselves are submerged and transformed into a collection of countless sensations. In her fantasies, the "I" is able to continuously cycle through the processing, transformation, procreation, cutting, dueling, and murder of the "I.” Her imaginary world is a shelter of witches, sealing a myriad of intertwined feelings.

CURATOR

Cui Cancan,

an exhibition designer and author.

Since 2012, Cui Cancan has curated over a hundred major exhibitions and events. His major group exhibitions include “Heiqiao Night Away, “Rural Wash-Blow-Dry,” “FUCKOFF II,” “Unlived by What is Seen”, “Between the 5th and 6th Ring Road in Beijing”, “The Decameron”, “Rip It Up!”, “2015-2019 Spring Festival Special Series,” “The Curation Workshop,” “Nine-Tiered Pagoda”, “The Methodology of the New Generation,” and “Hometown Spring,” among others. He has also organized major solo exhibitions on artists including Ai Weiwei, Bao Xiaowei, Chen Danqing, Chen Yufan, Chen Yujun, Feng Lin, Han Dong, He Yunchang, Huang Yishan, Luo Zhongli, Li Binyuan, Liu Wei, Liu Gangshun, Liu Jianhua, Li Qing, Li Ji, Li Zhanyang, Mu Er, Ma Ke, Mao Yan, Polit-Sheer-Form, Qin Ga, Qin Qi, Sui Jianguo, Shi Jiezi Art Museum, Shi Jinsong, Shen Shaomin, Tan Ping, Wang Qingsong, Xie Nanxing, Xia Xiaowan, Xia Xing, Xiao Xing, Xu Zhongmin, Xu Xiaoguo, Yin Chaoyang, Yuan Yunsheng, Zong Ning, Zhang Yue, Zhang Yonghe, and Zhao Zhao, among others.

SONG ART MUSEUM

Song Art Museum，Located in Wenyu River, Shunyi District, Beijing, it was designed by the famous designer Mr. Zhou Guangming and officially opened to the public in 2017. In 2021, Mr. Ding Zehua became the curator, taking full charge of the operation and management of Song Art Museum. "Connection" is the mission of Song Art Museum. Only by connecting with people, objects and sites can we pursue a broad and deep common vision. On the road of building the cultural characteristics of the new era, Song Art Museum is constantly ushering in new restarts and transformations by virtue of the full-function planning that integrates the public, art and field.

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