Sensorial Adventures in “Gen Y”

 “GenY,” one of the three digital exhibitions that constitute Lisbon’s fourth New Art Fest, presented 13 emerging and established Chinese new-media artists who interrogate the pleasures, struggles, and anxieties of millennials in China’s digital age. While the artworks were diverse in terms of subject matter, three distinct themes emerged: the intersection of new media and Chinese ink art, contemporary internet culture, and the phenomenological exploration of sensory perception through technology. The thematic disparity was possibly deliberate, as it illustrated a country that frenetically oscillates between past and future, looking back to sources of cultural heritage, while also toward a globalized techno-utopia/dystopia.

Sun Xun’s video animation Tears of Chiwen (2017) presents a horizontally panning narrative that evokes the lateral unfurling of a traditional Chinese hand scroll. Sun hand-animated each frame, combing techniques from ink painting, charcoal drawing, woodblock printing, and digital animation to tell a mind-bending story inserting Chiwen, a dragon from Chinese mythology, into psychedelic vignettes on Chinese history, starting from literati tradition to British and Japanese imperialism, the Cultural Revolution, and globalization. For both Sun and h0nh1m, ink carries the singular essence of Chinese tradition, and in merging the classical art form and digital video, they discover new capabilities within each medium: ink is not just a material, but a cultural and aesthetic framework with endless possibilities; machines do not replace but enhance the essence of the maker’s hand.

The darker aspects of technological advancement were seen in projects by Yang Jian and Kenny Wong regarding the precarity of existence under China’s mass surveillance systems. Wong’s video performance ][LIMINAL][ (2013) documents a set of hacked semi-autonomous drones programmed to hover close together but never touch. The sense of surveillance is double-layered, as the drones, a form of military-grade spy gear, are captured from fly-on-the-wall angles that evoke security-camera footage. Yang’s installation Forest of Sensors (2008–17) takes a more lighthearted tone, inviting visitors to navigate an obstacle course of miscellaneous domestic objects rigged with sensors. To avoid setting them off, visitors adopted dance-like poses and movements. While encouraging new types of movement, Yang also alerts us of the degree to which external forces shape how we use our own bodies. 

While some of the works in “GenY” gesture to the societal ills of the digital age, the featured artists also utilize new media to reframe these concerns and broaden our understanding of human-tech relationships. Through leveraging affect and interactivity, the show encouraged viewers to engage more closely with their emotions and sensations as they experienced the works, disrupting the fast-pacedness that defines the development of both China and technology.