With the monumental installation UNKNOWN, which spans across three floors of the ZHI ART MUSEUM, artist YIN Xiuzhen has created an awestriking work that transforms the exigencies of world affairs and flux of emotions into constellations of heavenly bodies, in which fleeting human presences catalyze and transpire a universe of ephemerality and uncertainty.
Six display screens constantly feed news headlines from global hot spots, out of which an AI system generates endless nebula formations which are shown on the adjacent mammoth Starmap, a four-meter in diameter custom-made circular LED screen, which soars into the clearing that crosses three floors of the museum. Visitors’ facial expressions captured while reading news, again trigger a cluster of celestial objects to appear. The object, an aggregate of some of YIN’s previous work interpreted by an AI algorithm, displays distinctive motion behaviors fed by visitors’ emotional data. Meditative ‘om’ chants as well as excerpts of news of recent world events: COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, global food shortages, etc., fusing with sounds from deep space and sounds of emotions, compound into a murmuring soundscape, often beyond recognition.
Ascending to the upper level, visitors encounter an expansive space embraced by undulating hills and rivers seen through surround glass walls. Over the course of the exhibition, numerous 3D printed celestial objects will “float” atop of transparent plinths one by one. Generated from the collective data aggregated every day, the objects are the assemblages of human emotions solidified into cosmic existence, tangibles transformed from the virtual.
Thus, YIN’s artistic sensibilities, typically characterized by the intimate human touch in her work, her solicitude for tradition and community, extend into a new horizon of stellar grandeur, cohabited by machine intelligence and human emotions, beckoning for a new humanism of cosmic dimension that is at once immense and minute, celestially untouchable and emotively present. Earth and heaven comingle in equally unstable media, forever changing and forever.
UNKNOWN is the third iteration of the A&T@ Project initiated at Chronus Art Center, and another notable outcome of continued collaborations between ZHI and CAC. A&T@ supports leading Chinese artists working in traditional media to venture into otherwise inaccessible channels of advanced programming and production facilities by pairing them with technologists to develop works that are unique and different from their established artistic vocabulary and formal strategies, thus opening up new horizons, furthering the experimental potential for these artists and, in turn, contributing to the development of art making in the twenty-first century. Previous collaborating artists: LIU Xiaodong (Weight of Insomnia) and YAN Lei (Rêverie Reset).
