Artists Guo Fazhan, Luo Ran, and Xu Jiachen participate in Smart Order at 69 ART CAMPUS.
Smart Order
Guo Fazhan, Luo Ran, Xu Jiachen
2023.11.25-2024.03.03
69 ART CAMPUS
“Smart Order” is a curatorial project showcasing modes of art production that might disturb a contemporary workplace. Ranging from Generative AI, online ordering & delivery platforms, and digital divination, to knitting, the working methods and materials employed by the participating artists vary. During a fixed period of time, a repetitive act of clocking in, modeling, looking, or even waiting represents a hierarchical structure. If being creative means modifying rules that govern our society, there is a chance that an artist’s practice could instill a sense of security and dignity.
Smart Order always contains Boredom and Stupidity. We should not be fooled by the liberating promise of automation technologies. Paradoxically, advanced instruments of control are maintained by human beings. Violence is glorified rather than noticed when work is done through systematic rituals. It is a Smart Strategy of withdrawal that changes working conditions and organizes a better class of ungovernable art workers.
Smart Order Installation View
Smart Order Installation View
Smart Order Installation View
Guo Fazhan
From the beginning of the conception of the theme of “Cheesy Pick-up Lines” to the present day, in this process, I have established an intimate relationship with painting, with all the traces of life in my memories, some imagination, some complaints, pieces of ordinary messages, in my brain to form a complex space to find those commonplace but not so everyday beauty, so that the perspective of my painting presents a natural, local, ambiguous and romantic way of creation.
For me, life has always existed in an aesthetics where nostalgia and modernity coexist in a somewhat folksy yet titillating way. When observing the surroundings, such as pompous pendants, colorful neon lights on the streets, the smell of cigarettes and alcohol in the alleys, the dreamy curtains and extravagant dreams in the windows, men and women in the hair salon……These are places full of “love” in secular life, and a vibrant local aesthetic culture. In a way, it’s a love story – an undisguised, cheesy love story.
The memories of life need to be colorful to be reflected. I use saturated colors with intuitive aesthetic images to restore the mood of life, maybe memory, love, emotion……I hope my works are more like coincidences, daily stumbles, first encounters, where each individual tells his or her own story, the story of life, through which we feel what is moving in life.
Safety Zone
2023
Ink and colour on silk, light belt
51 × 51 cm
Luo Ran
Based on my doubts about interface tools and visual experience, I became obsessed with an image structure that can be continuously added to it. At the same time, I tried to understand and digest the sudden feeling of being trapped in various smoothing techniques in painting. My working process generally involves two steps: first, modeling using software, and then painting based on the modeled images. When constructing objects, the focus lies mostly on discussing tools, often relying on methods such as experience, presets, and organizing fragmented information to build a logical structure. It feels like a raw, temporary, and strained closed system. The back-and-forth switching between illusion and pause is a necessary condition for the active participation of the individual as the subject in the illusion. During the painting phase, it’s more of a bewildering reactive scenario, focusing on facing and depicting the subject based on intuitive personal feelings. Here, the logical structure is established by shedding experiences (actions and traces under different perceptions while painting). To some extent, this phase’s work seems more like the digestion or disintegration of the previous phase’s content (built on individual feelings and experiences), determining which accumulated information or knowledge can be associated with personal consciousness. The traces in the paintings reflect the actions of the subject, and by using these reflections, one can observe various visual presentations triggered by their actions. Visuals always encompass internal logic, cognition, and emotions, which correspond to the action-based narcissistic psychology generated when using software as a tool. Thus, the content of these two stages forms a continuously flowing closed loop.
Adverb (Zoom out, but zoom in multiple times）
2023
Acrylic on Canvas
210 × 140 cm
Xu Jiachen
In Travel Notes – 3 and Travel Notes – 4, the artist sees our relationship with the automobile as a metaphor for the status quo, the automobile as a technology that is our extracorporeal organ, our atonement for the faults of Epimetheus. It is associated with desire, but at the same time we also bear the repercussions of the rejection effects of these extracorporeal organs, and the work is concerned with the difficult game between our genes and the speed that the automobile is capable of delivering.
Travel Notes – 4
2022
Oil on canvas
50 × 60 cm
