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Two warnings on the tech companies’ pages:

Note that after a software update is installed, it cannot be downgraded to the previous version.[1]
You can’t stop updates entirely.[2]

A tendency for continuous upgrading: The anxiety felt between the risks of updating and the end of support is not far from the mental illness caused by geopolitics; however, writing the current globalization model as a simple ‘Do Not Disconnect’ seems to convey the dilemma more intuitively than complex theories.

If we consider this culturally neutral technological governance as a pharmakon, it might temporarily block the identity anxiety under globalization and reveal another form of domination. For example, considering from the perspective of Updatism: why did the European mosaic architectural finishes introduced to Shanghai in the 19th century become ruins in the urban renewal of the 21st century? Its conclusion is likely – there is no absolute Western center, only the difference between the success and failure of updates.

In this update-centric world, we can simplify the question. Is globalization a form of anti-life? After all, if current sustainable development solutions cannot resolve global psychological anxiety, what are these solutions trying to save – life or globalization itself?

The globalization machine always abstracts things and sends them afar, creating smooth networks and gaps around the world; but life seems inclined to pause and readjust itself with the surroundings.. This indicates that life has its own method of self-updating and can always re-establish a connection with the world. Amidst these divergent logics of updating lies a potential contradiction that resonates with individuals in this era.

[1] Apple security releases

[2] Windows Update: FAQ from Microsoft

About the artist

Chen Wei (b.1980, Zhejiang) currently lives and works in Beijing. Initially a sound and performance artist, Chen Wei’s interest developed into photo, video and installation art. Staged mise-en-scène and scenario re-enacting are often seen in Chen Wei’s photography. In recent years, he has been working on the combination of stage setting and multi-media installation as an on-site extension in his work.

Ho Rui An (b.1990, Singapore) is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. Across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, his research examines systems of governance in a global age. He has presented projects at the Bangkok Art Biennale; Asian Art Biennial; Gwangju Biennale; Jakarta Biennale; Sharjah Biennial; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien; Singapore Art Museum; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Japan. In 2019, he was awarded the International Film Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. In 2018, he was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.

Li Tao (b. 1971, China) is a Beijing-based artist known for his use of diverse industrial materials as agents of intervention. His repurposing of materials challenges viewers to consider new perspectives and provides a critical lens through which to explore contemporary social, economic, and political systems. Through site-specific installations and sculptures, Li reflects the cultural and political context of the local area, prompting viewers to rethink their assumptions about the world around them.

Wan Chaoqian (b.1995, Hebei) currently lives and works in Beijing. Through the collection and re-creation of fragmentary images from the internet, visual culture, and everyday life, his pictorial approach echoes art history to create a pictorial landscape of absurdity and paradox. Abstract and figurative, random and established, creation and destruction, empathy and indifference, wit and seriousness collide in his works, exploring the overwhelmingly enjoyable and wearisome mechanisms of control and existence in contemporary society in a richly layered way.

Xie Qi (b. 1974, Chongqing) currently lives and works in Beijing. The body and portraits have long been important motifs in XIE Qi’s paintings, appearing throughout her various creative periods. Drawing on a sweeping imagination and rich perceptions, Xie Qi bestows on these shifting figures the warmth of emotion, the tension of desire, and tones of gloom. She sources her subjects of depiction from friends, everyday objects (portrait-bearing banknotes, plants resembling human organs), candid photographs, and classic themes, capturing and depicting them in an approach akin to “psychological profiling”—the artist refines the components of the image through observation and perception, adding or removing details, destroying and reconstituting whole forms, restoring the figure to magnify parts and moments filled with dramatic tension. Xie Qi’s depiction takes place between recollection and creation. The concealed brushstrokes, blurred boundaries, and phantom colors of the pictures often radiate with a mysterious air from a pastime.

Trevor Yeung (b.1988, Dongguan, China) graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2010, and currently lives and works in Hong Kong. The practice of Trevor Yeung consistently excavates the inner logic of closed systems and the way in which such systems contain and create emotional and behavioral conditions. In his mixed-media works, carefully staged objects, animals, and plants function as aesthetic pretexts which delicately and ironically address notions of artificiality and the processes of human relations.

Yu Bogong (b.1970, Inner Mongolia, China) works in Inner Mongolia, Beijing, Fuzhou, and Shaoguan Danxia Mountain. In the middle 1990s, he was one of the artists in the Avant-garde art movement in Yuanmingyuan artist village in Beijing. Yu Bogong’s artistic practices involve multiple forms, such as sculpture, installation, and drawing. In recent years, he focuses on projects of social engagement. Mobile Academy, Mobile Camp, and Discovery Library, are the three projects initiated from nature as the maternal perspective, focusing on a series of on-site educational practice.

Hugo Servanin (b. 1994, France) lives and works in Paris, FR. The work of Hugo Servanin revolves around the creation of sculptures that the artist calls Géants
[Giants]: hybrid beings that are first molded on human bodies and then assembled with an array of synthetic materials. Referencing the aesthetics of classical sculpture – busts or naked bodies displayed on plinths – Servanin’s Géants express the visceral, fragile, and ephemeral nature of human bodies. These characteristics are conveyed through the minute study of the bodies’ armatures and an empirical approach of materials. Once his sculptures are shaped, Servanin composes immersive installations in which, using a wide range of advanced technologies and artificial intelligence, he recreates the conditions of organic life. Acting like a scientist in his laboratory, Servanin is constantly inventing new methods to animate his sculptures; for instance, by using humidification/evaporation procedures that progressively modify their shape and surface color, heat monitoring incubators that crackle their epidermis, ventilators that make them breathe, or complex mechanical systems distributing their body fluids. By bridging traditions of ‘good form’ with cutting-edge technologies, Servanin composes alternative environments through which he critically analyses the success and failure of the cornucopian civilization we live in.

Zhuang Hui (b.1963, Gansu) left his hometown to study in Luoyang City at the age of thirteen and started to study painting by himself. In 1979, after graduating from high school, he became a worker at the state-run Luoyang No.1 Tractor Factory. In 1996, he moved to Beijing and became an artist. Zhuang Hui’s artistic creation originates from emphasizing and reflecting on themes such as bodily experience and personal consciousness in the soil of real existence and cultural status quo. In his artistic creations process, he is adept at flexibly applying multiple media and trying to push the boundaries of artistic expression.

About the artist

MAGICIAN SPACE 魔金石空间

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