Buffet Time
August 7.2021-Sptember 11.2021
[Jiang Zhuyun: Buffet Time]
"It is obvious that we do not live at the same time."
—— “Date Line” by Ezra Pound
A behemoth being strands off the future seashore, people call it "time." Under the action of the sizzling sun and the air, time transforms quickly. Scanning the interior of time's cavity, researchers found a roughly symmetrical and linear structure with a vaguely industrial sense, which again makes people question its abiotic nature. However, the current scanning speed cannot keep up with its changes, at a rate even faster than the time required for reflecting visible light. Therefore, the faulty scans are blurry that eventually become part of the content of "time’s" transformation, bearing witness to technical failures on paper.
——Jiang Zhuyun, "Buffet Time"
This short statement opens Hangzhou-based artist Jiang Zhuyun’s fifth exhibition, "Buffet Time," at Hunsand Space. In the past, Jiang Zhuyun’s practice adopts modern technology such as extensive computer programming to produce artworks. For this exhibition, the artist attempts to capture the childhood moments of modern technology. Applying a wide range of installation materials and images, Jiang adopts cross-stitch to create drawings of the Brazilian butterfly Morpho rhetenor, hand-woven cables into a net, modified steering speakers for motorized transportation, a series of street facilities, and standard parts from factory assembly lines. Some materials are easy to understand, such as cables, often perceived as part of modern technology. If one were to adopt critical thinking, cross-stitch should also be considered an essential technology, and the butterflies’ lightness and ability to migrate intercontinental have sparked sci-fi imagery. For example, Ray Bradbury's depiction of a butterfly whose death triggered a seismic change in history in his 1952 science fiction "The Sound of Thunder." A decade later, meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz followed the novelist's sci-fi imagination to illustrate a cutting-edge idea in climatology – the butterfly effect. In this exhibition, Jiang Zhuyun embeds “climate” change into his everyday art practice to convey his views and sense on time and technological life. The rupture between modern "space-time" and daily experience begins to elucidate.
Jiang Zhuyun (born in 1984) is a problem-oriented artist who covers many fields of media art, including installation, painting, performance, conceptual art, acoustic arts, phonography and audio visual. Recent solo exhibitions include Buffet Times (2021), Hunsand Space, Beijing; Sublog（2019），Hunsand Space，Beijing；IF THE END PRECEDES THE BEGINNING (2018), Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing; Survival in System Project (2017), West Bund, Shanghai; I Talk to the Wind (2016), Hunsand Space, Beijing, etc. In addition, his works have been exhibited in many important group exhibitions, including: “Transfor Mation: duration Chinese art in” （2020）, Beijing Mingsheng art museum;“Meditations in an Emergency” （2020）, UCCA Beijing； "China Land Scape" Selection from the TAIKANG Collection (2019), 798 A07, Beijing; 8102 On Reality (2018), OCAT, Shanghai；AS WE MAY THINK: Feedforward (2018), Boxes Art Museum, Guangzhou, etc.
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