Hangzhou Has an Exhibition That Challenges the Senses, but Its Curator Won't Call It "Tech Art"

In curator Yao Dajun's view, "You can't define whether something is avant-garde art by the technology it uses."

• Exhibition: "Nine Tomorrows" Tech Art Exhibition
• Venue: Hangzhou Powerlong Art Center
• Dates: May 4 to August 4 (daily, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.)

The Hangzhou Powerlong Art Center opened on May 4. Nearly two years in the making, it sits in the fifth-floor rooftop garden of Powerlong City in Hangzhou's Binjiang district, and it is Powerlong Group's second privately run art museum, after the Shanghai Powerlong Museum of Art, which opened last November.

Backing the inaugural exhibition, "Invasion of the Future," on opening day was a live tech-art performance put together by transmedia artist and curator Yao Dajun.

At 7 that evening, as darkness fell over the banks of the Qiantang River, giant screens lit up the rooftop garden. For two hours, interactive lasers that drove into the ears and slammed into the eyes, immersive audiovisual work and VR science-fiction performances kept pushing at the limits of what the audience could take in and imagine. As heavy sound waves and piercing metallic noise pounded eardrums without letup, some people in the crowd reached for earplugs.

The performance was a joint effort by several artists and groups: Daito Manabe, who led the creative team behind the Rio Olympics' "Tokyo Eight Minutes" segment, and his studio Rhizomatiks Research; Japanese electronic musician Yu Miyashita (Yaporigami); the art collective RMBit (People's Bit); the popular Japanese VJ group BRDG; and Open Media Lab, a pioneering experimental team in tech art.

After the audiovisual spectacle of opening night, the weight shifted to the three-month exhibition itself, a selection of work at the international frontier — varied in form, each piece representative in its own way.

Nine Tomorrows exhibition guide video

The nine sections and the live performance pieces covered a wide range: remote robot interaction, Chinese science-fiction VR, microbial noise, interactive lasers, future cities, social-network data, kinetic mechanical installations, real-time body-capture performance, and live-coded moving visuals with electronic music.

Yao Dajun said he hoped the show would push visitors to "reflect on how this runaway, headlong growth of data and technology touches every one of us directly."

The name "Nine Tomorrows" comes from Nine Tomorrows, the classic collection by the godfather of science fiction, Isaac Asimov, whose nine stories imagine the future with the boldness of a prophet. That fit the curatorial team's original aim: to break down the divide between the future and the present, and turn the exhibition into an immersive walk through a "time tunnel."

But the subtitle — "Tech Art Exhibition" — runs against his own thinking about art, Yao Dajun said.

In his view, what "Nine Tomorrows" puts on show does not match the label. "It's a stopgap. We had no other option, so we used that phrase. 'Tech art exhibition' is just what we say to ordinary people, to mark it off from what might otherwise be taken for an installation show or a painting show. But I have always been against defining art by a platform, especially something like 'tech art' — whether it even exists today is open to argument."

More than the interdisciplinary technologies the artists used here, the curatorial team wanted viewers to notice how much the artists had to say about their subjects.

Take Omikuji, by Elena Knox and Katsumi Watanabe, which looks at how deeply contested belief systems shape cultural exchange in a globalized present; or Noise Aquarium, by the American media artist Victoria Vesna, which sets out to wake people up to the crisis in marine ecosystems; or Beijing 2101, by Xu Lin and Cai Yuxiao, which takes Beijing's current smog and traffic and argues them out again in the setting of a technologically advanced 22nd century.

"We're not using a technology platform like VR to do something superficial. We're having a deeper argument about what this medium can do as a form of artistic expression," Yao Dajun said.

Daito Manabe's team, Rhizomatiks Research, has made many well-known projects, for Paris Fashion Week, the Milan Expo and the Rio Olympics' "Tokyo Eight Minutes," among others. Fade Out, the interactive laser installation they brought to Hangzhou, was originally a six-minute piece: a visitor was photographed in front of the installation, then waited several minutes while a laser burned the image into a phosphor-coated screen; the likeness appeared on the glowing surface in an instant, then faded away.

On opening day, Daito Manabe noticed that many Chinese visitors wanted interaction to be instant and had no patience for a wait that long. Early the next morning he adjusted the piece, compressing the time to one minute to produce an image.

"In China, interactive art has become very popular, but at some point all these forms of interaction started to look alike," he said. Many instant-response installations are fairly primitive, he thinks: "You move in front of an installation and it moves along with you. But interactivity shouldn't be about the form. It should be about the fun."

In the section "All Things Move in Waves," the Finnish contemporary-art duo Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen showed three works: Orbit, Matter Wave and Open Reel.

These are works that are enormous fun to watch in person.

Watching Orbit brings the motion of the planets to mind: a stainless-steel ball 40 centimeters across moves slowly along a stainless-steel track 8 meters in diameter, while a light source at the center of the track throws the ball's shadow onto the surrounding walls. A microphone fixed to the track picks up the sound of the ball rolling, and the hall's speakers play it back in real time.

Matter Wave sounds like the sea. On a surface that tilts back and forth, thousands of metal bearing balls flow from one end to the other, moving slowly at first, then suddenly tumbling over like a breaking wave.

Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen said: "Spatiality is the direction we want to stress. We don't want to give a direct, concrete reading of the work. We want to give the audience a direct, immersive experience."

Open Media Lab, the creative team Yao Dajun runs, brought the section "Brain Space: Sci-Fi VR," which focuses on the problems that accelerating technology may set off: the design of future Chinese cities, ecological breakdown, species degeneration, the merging of human and machine, memory stored outside the body.

Inside that space, besides the VR headsets laid out on each table, screens ring the walls. Yao Dajun put them there to try to improve the experience of visiting.

He has been to plenty of VR exhibitions and always hit the same problem: while some people are inside a piece with a headset on, everyone next to them waits a long time with no way to take part. So he arranged these screens, so that visitors waiting for a headset could still watch in some form.

Yao Dajun is now deputy dean of the School of Intermedia Art at the China Academy of Art, and director of both its Open Media department and its Virtual Reality Lab. He has spent years on experimental work at the frontier of digital technology and art. In the early days of the internet's spread he was already using computers and networks to make and test work in many forms, and he has toured on invitation from major art festivals and institutions in Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Paris.

For a long time the label he was best known by was "the father of Chinese sound art."

He began curating audiovisual art projects as early as 2003: "Beijing Sonar: Electronic Arts Festival," "Taipei Sonar: International Technology Art Festival," and "Revolutions Per Minute: Sound Art China," staged in New York, Shanghai and Hong Kong. In 2005 he set up a systematic sound-art curriculum in the China Academy of Art's New Media department.

"People easily assume audio-visual work can only do dazzling tricks with sound and image, but that's just because they haven't seen good work. I make a point of teaching my students not to take the wrong road — they have to get past meaningless tricks made of dots, lines and planes. My students' performance works have ranged from real-time intelligent analysis of human life drawn from Buddhist scripture, to the extraction and mockery of social-media data, to future landscape aesthetics and science-fiction cities. The subject matter is rich and deep. The medium itself has no edge and no limit; it all comes down to individual creativity and the standards you set for yourself."

In recent years he has turned more of his attention to science-fiction VR, leading the Open Media Lab team through a series of science-fiction art works: "Tech Odyssey" in 2016, "Brain Space: Sci-Fi VR Exhibition" at Guangzhou's Fengmian Art Center, and last year's "Sci-Fi VR Urban Village" project at the Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture.

Yao Dajun's stress on science fiction has nothing to do with the current wave of VR.

He was reading English-language science fiction back in the early 1970s — Asimov's I, Robot and The Stars, Like Dust. What hit him hardest were the "Three Laws of Robotics," ideas at once wild and precisely engineered, which kept widening the world he could imagine.

While working in the United States he came across a newer generation of science fiction. William Gibson and Alexander Besher suited his taste even better, because at the time he was developing new computer media himself.

"Science fiction is really the hidden throughline in my teaching," he said. Open Media differs from other departments in many ways, one of them being that the required reading list for incoming students includes science-fiction novels and films.

Last year, while preparing the third-year VR course, Yao Dajun suddenly saw how alike science fiction and VR are as platforms: both cut you off from the present world and put you inside an invented one. His audio-visual courses already taught students to design moving science-fiction interfaces and discussed the principles of science-fiction film. This time he simply had students spend two months making a science-fiction VR exhibition — one month of classes, one month given over entirely to making the work. The result was "Brain Space: Sci-Fi VR Exhibition."

In an interview and an artist talk on the exhibition's second day, Yao Dajun laid out a number of thoughts on contemporary art: the relationship between technology and art, how Open Media should be defined, how to train artists who can work across several technical disciplines. What follows is our edited excerpt of the conversation.

"It's awkward that the term 'tech art' has suddenly come up in China."

I think "tech art" is a fairly pointless term, because if you look at art-making through technology, then the whole 20th century was tech art. Photography, for instance: when the technology first appeared it was extraordinary high technology. Film was the same — in the period when it went from nothing to something, film was high technology too. Later nobody thought of these as high technology, because we had all grown used to them and taken them for granted.

Anyone who has actually seen or heard my work knows that not one piece of mine stresses technology. Making work often requires many technologies, but they are only tools, like a paintbrush: essential, and yet you don't go around mentioning it. Technology and art have never been apart, from ancient times to now.

It's awkward that the term "tech art" has suddenly come up in China. In the modern era, work that deliberately sets out to join technology and art has been going on for 60 or 70 years, and was long ago absorbed into media art.

To go further into how technology and art relate within media art: the most elementary approach is technology-led — experiment for the sake of experiment, research for the sake of research. The representative institution is MIT Media Lab in the United States. That is research and development meant to widen the possibilities of artistic expression, and it matters a great deal — but it is not meant to be looked at as art in itself, or it comes across as media stunts. Some people in this field mistake science or technology for art's future or its savior, which is like believing a newly invented instrument can rescue a crisis in composing music.

I don't think technology and art add up, and I don't think they merge. Years of my own practice have shown me that the relationship is closer to alchemy. Only a highly original artistic idea can turn technology that has no art in it into art. That is what I teach in class as "art-technology," "making-technology." It's why what I have always stressed is science fiction, not technology.

How do you define the name "Open Media"?

The Open Media department at our academy is a fairly loose body — students from any year, and even graduates, can take part. We are called a department, but I prefer the name Open Media Lab, because it describes what we do as experiment rather than the old-fashioned idea of a department.

With every incoming class we become a very close creative team. Beyond being their teacher, my relationship with the students is more like being a collaborator. A lot of things get made together, and I am deeply involved.

Schools usually have an animation department or a film school, and those are precise names. When we say Open Media, we mean that it isn't pinned to any one medium, such as doing only animation. "Open" means we want to break the constraints of medium and platform: whenever there is a platform we think is better or more interesting, we want to try it.

In 2010 I opened a course called Social Media Art Live, about making work with social media as the platform. WeChat didn't exist yet and Weibo had only just launched — very few people even had accounts — but we could see it was likely to have an enormous social effect in China, perhaps even a revolution in how people relate to each other, so we started using the platform for all kinds of experimental work.

We put on an exhibition then with more than 20 pieces. Neither the school nor the academy took it seriously, and many people said they couldn't make sense of it. The viewers probably didn't have Weibo accounts yet, didn't know what Weibo was, and didn't know what this kind of social media meant. That exhibition may simply have come too early. Looking back now, though, you can see it went quite deep. Take a piece called Micro-Sayings (《微语》): the "micro" is from Weibo, the "sayings" from the Analects.

Weibo started out as a text-first platform where you could post 140 characters — all very short sentences — and it had a repost mechanism, much like the Chinese Analects. A line such as "Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?" gets quoted, reposted and spread again and again in the culture that follows, and shapes that culture as a whole. We weren't using the platform to do something superficial. We were having a deeper argument about what this medium can do as artistic expression, rather than simply staging something to look at and be satisfied by.

"You can't define whether something is avant-garde art by the technology it uses"

When we talk about contemporary art, some works are so far out in front that the question of new mediums has to come up.

But I don't think you can define whether something is avant-garde art by the technology it uses. This isn't a matter of technology, because technology has existed since ancient times — an axe is a very early technology. What we call high technology now often has a computer behind it. The gap between a computer and an axe feels enormous to us, but in essence they are the same thing. So technology and art have never been separate. It's only that in one era its technological side may stand out more, while in another, because people have grown used to it and accepted it over time, we stop noticing that side at all.

We stress artificial intelligence now, for example, because we are still at the start. In 20 or 50 years none of this will count for much; you won't say a work is "an AR piece."

"The talent we want to train is a new Renaissance figure for the post-internet age."

Others may see us using a great deal of science and technology, but what we are really trying to express is no different from what people expressed in ancient times. So the slogan for the talent our Open Media department wants to train is a new Renaissance figure for the post-internet age — an all-around person, skilled in many directions. That is our ideal.

The trend is already clear. The young artists you see from our Open Media department are all in their early twenties, but every one of them has to handle video, sound and interactive motion capture.

Technology is a delicate matter. Stress it too much and you lose your hold on making art. But if you can't do it, then at this stage, or in the near future, you won't be able to make anything at all — because avant-garde art is precisely the continual widening of expression, of the means people have to express themselves.

Image credit: Open Media Lab; photographs by Wu Yuan'an and others.