The Shanghai-based multidisciplinary art collective, Island 6 (Liu Dao) will present their exhibit “LED City” at The Opposite House. The art pieces are by nine international artists who worked together to create some of the most innovative art ever seen or experienced in Beijing. The collective at Island Six engaged in the use of electronics as a creative vehicle in their art making process. Everything gets plugged; everything runs on power, lights and colours come out of the artwork to waken The Opposite House.
Red Gate Director Brian Wallace says “LED City will animate and illuminate the atrium space of TOH, enticing and mesmerizing the unsuspecting visitor. The repetitive, soundless performances inspired by age old issues contextualized by the pace of the 21st century in cities such as Shanghai and Beijing are deftly executed by the mastery of the technology employed by Island 6.”
For some, technology is a tool to help make life easier and automate daily functions. For others, it is a way to effortlessly and powerfully communicate with other people around the globe. Some users see technology for its entertainment purposes. For the artists of the art collective at Liu Dao, technology is all of these things and much more— it turns them into magicians. With their help, technology becomes organic, digital reality comes alive, where it begins to speak, dream, conspire, and seduce.
LED City is a perfect setup for Alfred Hitchcock's ‘Rear Window’ (1954) and Brian De Palma’s ‘Body Double’ (1984)— allowing a glimpse into ones’ lives through the exposed moments in the series of artworks. The artwork does not impose a particular mindset but it does want to make the viewer feel like a voyeur. In a context of PRC cities, even the little LED glimpses seem to become voyeuristic fantasies that could be classified as a new paraphilia/artphilia—a sexual urge that make a person want to engage in sexual fantasies or activities with an artwork; activities such as petting a painting, rubbing against a sculpture, or undressing in a video artwork.
LED towers physically restrict the images within them, they are a window for seeing other and to be seen by others, choreographers Wu Yandan and Li Lingxi reveal only fragments. For example, in “Elevator”, two female legs playfully rub against each other – visually rhyming with electric cables and steel chains. They make the viewer wonder in where passion and affection is being well built in the walls in the multimillion populated cities of China.
“ATM Machine” depicts an LED ‘white-collar’ marching with a rifle in his hands -it expresses a constant fight for being one of the top in the hierarchy of consumerism, surviving the pressure of society and living up to the expectations of yourself and your family.
Liu Dao’s towers offer a glimpse in a spectrum of feelings and problems well protected by the walls. They open a city of emotions, repeated patterns and lifestyles, reminding the endless circle of manly and womanly needs. These video loops are containing a specific. Each piece of work is a question mark – it is a small inquisition within yourself- within your own window.
About The Opposite House
The Opposite House is located in The Village at Sanlitun—a vibrant new open-plan shopping, dining and entertainment destination developed by Swire Properties. The hotel’s 99 guest studios, including 9 spacious suites and a penthouse duplex with a 240sqm roof terrace, are amongst the largest in Beijing. More than half of all the studios are over 70 sqm and all are strikingly simple with natural wooden floors and subtle touches of Chinese décor.
About Liu Dao
Liu Dao is an international multidisciplinary art collective based in Shanghai (P.R.C) established in 2007 by Island 6 Arts Center (island6.org) under the auspices of French curator Thomas Charvériat and Latvian art director Zane Mellupe. The group is comprised of performance and multimedia artists as well as engineers and tech geeks concentrating on body and movement research in electronic art, often incorporating the aspect of human interactivity.
The work presented at The Opposite House concentrates on the juxtaposition and interaction of the body and perceived persona with aspects of popular technology, using it to enhance or exaggerate physical characteristic and movement to produce hypernatural representational portraits of the human form.