Zhuyang Liu
2020:My Family Kept Me in Fridge for 14 Days & A Talk Therapy
2020: My Family Kept Me in Fridge for 14 Days
11 min, 54 sec, 2021, 4-channel video, 4-channel stereo sound, Variable size
This happened in the context of existing global policies during the 2020 pandemic. I found that by rationalizing myself with my user identity, the way of inhabiting and existing can be effectively changed. After a stormy argument, my family put me in a refrigerator for home quarantine with cameras documenting the whole process.
A Talk Therapy
3 mins, double-screen 4K colored video, stereo, digital moving image, variable size, M50, Shanghai, Yard Gallery, 2021
All physical diseases are understood when they are physically seen, but the brain is treated specially. The people in the image on the right repeated the same words "show me" when the artist was mentally ill. So the artist finally pulled out his brain to show them, and their solution was to cheer him up a bit: go eat hot pot.
Use talk therapy, meditation therapy, as a guideline. As a "person suffering from physical and mental diseases every day" in the post-human era, the artist uses the voice of AI algorithm to talk with the "others" in the picture -- that is, the crowd. As a living person in a green screen suit who was completely digitized after being cut with his identity concealed.
Art Statement
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Zhuyang always took her works of all mediums as “behavior," and she does appear frequently in the work. Zhuyang refuses to call it a "work," but says it anyway in order to maintain normal paperwork with people.
In the practice during these years, Zhuyang has been trying to stay sober in the "social drunkenness" and see things as they really are. Contradicting the truth, the contradicted facts drive her direct different“behavior”. Zhuayng likes to preserve a portion of the truth of matters while tampering with manipulated content that feels not self-consistent with the possible correction of reality; a way for people to redeem themselves; to rationalize and survive. If you don't understand what she is saying, here are some very basic questions to refine, as yourself: Am I still alive? What time am I? What are the facts? Thus, objects, time, and space become modules that can be edited and reassembled at will, and the exploration of their relationships is another focus of ongoing discussion in physics in her work.
Zhuyang works in people's eyes are "absurd/ironic/unreasonable/play abuse" but under the surface of these words, the works may be a cry for help, the reproduction of the facts.
All of this is bullshit, and you're being molested, because she's already started speaking in a language you don't believe in at first. Can you expect Zhuyang to tell you the truth? But what is true? The reality is, believe it or not, you've gone through it already.