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CONTEMPORARY ART EXHIBITION DESIGN & SCENOGRAPHY
A seasonal exhibition comprised of artworks by artists Jon Rafman, Adrian Wong, and Lantian Xie. Showing artworks referencing Hong Kong’s cityscape, this exhibition attempts to examine how popular media construct the image of a city.
An astronomical asterism—a grouping of stars, typically smaller than a constellation—with its defining vertices at Altair, Deneb, and Vega, the Summer Triangle is an essential navigation coordinate in the northern hemisphere’s pre- GPS summers. “Constellations are a way in which we make sense of the sky.”(1) They trace the reverie of humans’ sensory perceptions and imagination projected on the firmament. The shapes of asterisms and the boundaries of celestial spheres evolved fluidly according to changes in cosmological views, constantly modified like a palimpsest. The constellations generally recognised in modern times were born in 1930, when the International Astronomical Union divided celestial territories, assigning names and boundaries to 88 constellations, while expelling other ancient ones at the same time. Meanwhile, humans continue to freely link their fate and images together with celestial movements. The propensity to do so famously prompted German sociologist Theodor Adorno’s analysis of horoscopes published in the Los Angeles Times from 1952 to 1953, resulting in a polemic against the ignorant masses’ willing submission of their subjectivities to imaginary fatalism. Demarcated by humans’ optical parallax and self-awareness, constellations form dialectical relationships in non-linear space and time, composing what Walter Benjamin termed the “dialectical image.” Like star patterns, the image and identity of a city are at once the intermixture of history, politics, language, and the crystallised essence of a mass culture that takes the form of film, literature, pop music, and computer games, in which the lived and imagined spaces of a city form a symbiotic heterogeneity.
LOCATION: Shenzhen, China
AREA: 10,000 square feet
ARTISTS: Jon Rafman (乔恩·拉夫曼), Adrian Wong (王浩然), Lantian Xie (谢蓝天)
CLIENT: OCAT, Shenzhen
COLLECTIVE TEAM: Betty Ng
COLLABORATORS: Venus Lau, Artistic Director OCAT Shenzhen/ Curatorial Team, OCAT Shenzhen
IMAGE CREDIT: OCAT, Shenzhen