Group Show, Series Exhibition “Stay Connected: Art and China Since 2008”, “Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud” Tai Kwun Contemporary HonKong China, 26 September 2025 – 4 January 2026
- xuchen zhao
- Sep 17
- 1 min read
Friday, 26 September 2025 - Sunday, 4 January 2026
11am - 7pm, every day except Monday
Location: JC Contemporary & F Hall Gallery
Stay Connected: Art and China Since 2008 is a two-part survey of 21st-century art responding to shifts in China and their global impact. Framed by digital technology and the manufacturing supply chain, Chapter 1—Navigating the Cloud (26 Sep 2025–4 Jan 2026)—features 50+ works by 35+ artists examining how the internet and social media reshape artistic practice and daily life; Chapter 2—Supplying the Globe (27 Feb–31 May 2026)—extends the inquiry to production and circulation systems.
Yao Qingmei
The Burrow - Monitor & Control
2021
video, 22’23”
This video work depicts a female security guard who is intimately connected to the security machines, situated in an underground surveillance room of a gated middle-class community in China. In this hidden digital prison, the controller perceives the time, nature, and weather of the outside world through LCD screens and cameras. The natural objects in front of the cameras—a few growing willow branches, vibrating leaves—playfully enter the dull image frame and obscure the cameras. The guard's task is to identify the cameras covered by the branches of plants and then notify the gardeners to trim them. The machines operate autonomously, as if they were living organisms, conducting the human body with incessant alarms, while the human becomes an integrated circuit board, gradually exhausted by the collaborative labor of the auxiliary digital machines. She herself is constantly under surveillance. This troubling central control room, echoing Kafka’s allegories of “Prometheus” and “The Burrow,” reveals the universal plight of human beings amidst digital noise.
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