HOW Art Museum announces that it will host the first annual “30 Years of www & New Media Art in China”. The event marks the first year of a three-year project. The large-scale transdisciplinary forum and three-person collaborative exhibition “Move on China 2019” will include Feng Mengbo, Wang Jianwei, and Zhang Peili. The event will be held at the HOW Art Museum (Shanghai) on December 12th 2019.

Thirty years after the birth of the World Wide Web and the “China／Avant-Garde” exhibition, video and digital art have increasingly become a force that cannot be ignored in today’s public cultural spaces. The HOW Art Museum hopes to revisit the important nodes of Chinese new media art over the past three decades through these three exhibitions, large-scale forums, and monographic publications. The museum will join forces with artists, institutions, and scholars from various fields, to transmit and transmute civilization on academic and ideological levels between different disciplines and fields by means of on-site works, writing texts and debating topics.

Issues to be discussed will include but are not limited to: the transition and distinction between the central and the marginal, as well as the relationship between technology, the future, and community. The discussion hopes to give philosophical exegesis of media and events, which function as the basis to grasp and define the essence of contemporary life while providing the context and direction of thought and culture.

Feng Mengbo, Wang Jianwei, and Zhang Peili have made outstanding contributions to video art and digital media, endowing new forms of media with a kind of reasoning that is intrinsically linked to the artists themselves. All while bearing in mind the social transformation and constant changes of the times. Since the process of Chinese contemporary art gaining recognition began, their work has retained its prominent exploratory and Avant grade nature. Feng Mengbo has injected fresh blood into contemporary art by intersecting technology and aesthetics in the form of electronic games, interactive installations, video, and music performances. At the same time, Feng Mengbo intertwines the work with alternative takes toward geography, the times and identity. Through a series of videos, theater performances, installations, and sculptures, Wang Jianwei shifts semantics and the center, subverting and reconstructing subjectivity which is passed on to the audience in the form of hyperlinks. Zhang Peili presents us with the control and transmission of information and discourse, the dislocation of public and private space, and the distortion of what it means to see and be seen. It’s within such a backdrop that he reveals in a hyperrealistic fashion the fate of the individual over a long span of time defined in terms of power. With the relatively mature level in development that technology and media have reached today, the pioneering and experimental significance of their work when it was accomplished has yet to be fully revealed. As artists who have a deep awareness of media and concepts, their innovative engagements will continue to have a more and more profound impact in the future.

The second and third years’ of the project “30 Years of Chinese New Media Art”, including the corresponding exhibitions and discussions will also be held at the HOW Art Museum during the fall of 2020 and 2021. The project seeks to explore possible trajectories and dispositions manifested under this theme from multiple perspectives. The project will eventually publish monographs based on three exhibitions and the three forums which will be printed in both English and Chinese in 2022.

About the exhibition

Dates: Dec 12, 2019 – Mar 15, 2020

Venue: HOW Art Museum

Courtesy of the artists and HOW Art Museum, for further information please visit www.howartmuseum.org.