Zhongguo 2185

Tianzhuo Chen’s work spearheaded the presentation, and carries the strongest reference to Liu’s narrative in the sculpture Scapegoat 01 (2015), which presents a dissected corpse laid out on a dais, or a lifeless Frankenstein monster waiting to be reanimated. In Liu’s fiction, technology makes possible acts of resurrection and matter manipulation, endowing characters with a quasi-priestly status, with secret cults forming as a result. Chen’s work captures this esotericism with the placement of ritualistic items around the body and by covering its face with a mask, which also features in the artist’s video Ishvara (2016) shown beside Scapegoat 01. In the documented performance, a cast of fantastical personalities perform a ritual that climaxes with two fang-toothed figures writhing in a possessed state—one can imagine they are exorcizing Liu’s historical demons.

The artists in “Zhongguo 2185” share the contemporary dystopian pessimism that features in Liu’s writing. This is a welcome shift in how Chinese artists have been presented in the United Kingdom in the last decade, when a narrative of monumental, utopian consumerism has dominated. Chen Zhe’s wall piece of text and photographs Bees & The Bearable (2007–12) is an extraordinary and intimate portrait of lives experiencing extreme breakdown. The poignant expressions of youthful angst and loneliness found in the handwritten notes are familiar, and the imagery of self-harm will connect Chen’s work with the canon of self-revelatory art practices of many others. Chen’s observation of the hopelessness of an emerging generation is at odds with the aggressive utopianism projected onto China by some parties abroad. Here, the artist and her collaborators make an explicit and honest confession of their mental states in ways that still seem taboo-busting, despite the prevalence of voyeurism and surveillance culture at home and abroad.