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Posted on 09.05.2024 17:51 Modified on 09.05.2024 17:51 Document A19
Xu Liqing, winner of the LG Guggenheim Prize
Three key words contained in his “Net Art”
A scene from the science fiction film “UKI” produced by Xu Liqing in 2023. LG and the Guggenheim Museum announced the winners of the second “LG Guggenheim Award” earlier this year.
Despite confusing expectations that he could be an AI writer, a 70-year-old veteran was selected. This is Taiwanese-American writer Hsu Li-qing. Interest has focused on this award as it is an award for global companies and major art museums to discover and support artists who engage in innovative technology-based artistic activities. Xu Liqing is considered the ‘progenitor’ of so-called ‘Net Art’, having experimented with digital art in the Internet space since the 1990s. He states: “Technology is an artistic tool” and actively uses the latest technologies such as virtual reality, software design and coding in his works.
However, what he reads is not such a spectacular technological feast. In a virtual world where the border with the real world is increasingly blurred, it focuses on the violent aspects of human society. It unhesitatingly exposes the extreme sexism and racism that is so easily committed under the guise of anonymity.
“People say it’s not easy to understand what I’m doing. Actually, I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing (haha)”
manipulated reality
We are trapped in a “digital” prison.
When it comes to Shuriching, “Brandon” (1998-1999) is considered his representative work. This web art from the early days of the Internet was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum and is also part of the museum’s permanent collection. Brandon focused on the 1993 case in Nebraska, US, where a transgender man, Brandon Tina, was sexually assaulted and killed a week after it was revealed that she was originally a woman. We have collected online discussions about this incident over the course of a year. It takes quite a bit of effort to see this discussion in person. Even digital natives get lost. You can see the artist’s work by clicking here and there on the navigation bar full of 90s-style thumbnails. Like branching paths and hidden quests in RPGs, you must pass through several gates in order to read the work.
As you move around, as if you were “hacking”, you come across various scripts and images. In addition to Brandon, similar cases are organized as study material for law students. The uploaded materials, such as the police’s request to detail the sexual assault process and the response to the victim’s complaint by saying “this is just a general investigation procedure”, are so graphic that it is difficult to read them even now. “Hacking”, “manipulating” something so that it can be used for a completely different purpose than the original one, is the author’s first keyword. ‘3 The role of a camera that photographs the outside and shows them to professionals has changed, to photograph the interiors and show them outside. In addition to the video sent from the camera monitoring them, visitors can also watch videos of 10 people who were imprisoned simply because they were sexual minorities.
Xu Liqing said: “There is physical confinement, but aren’t we now surrounded by things like social media and CCTV and constantly monitored? “The whole society is a digital panopticon (circular prison),” she explains.
Virus and subsidiary company
Surveillance of everyday life and the true face of biotechnology
“Mycelium Network Society”, an art installation that Xu Liqing presented with his colleagues. Xu Liqing is also known as a film producer. His recent work, “UKI” (2023), contains themes that the author was concerned about during the time the world stopped due to COVID-19. When a disease caused by a virus spreads, it contains questions about the workings of state power, social control, the virus itself, and a story about “biotechnology” that goes beyond the confines of the human body.
“The UKI scenario was written when COVID-19 was rampant. I spent the 80s and 90s in New York. The fear of AIDS and how the country deals with it is different from SARS and COVID-19, but there are also some similarities. This is true in the sense that it is used politically. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government has controlled, restricted and monitored people’s daily lives in the name of infection monitoring.”
In the film UKI, a world is revealed in which surveillance and reality control are further maximized. In that world appear Genome, a biotechnology company that commercializes sexual pleasure and carries out genetic manipulation and data collection to exploit humanity, and the discarded humanoid “Reiko” who opposes it. It’s an exciting science fiction film, but it’s hard to praise it for its “extraordinary imagination.”
strange agriculture
Pushing boundaries… Grow and issue garlic coins
“Baby Love”, a public participation art installation presented by Xu Liqing in 2005. One of his main interests is agriculture. She moves between the extremes of delving into science fiction and the digital world while simultaneously exploring the real world. The project, which calls itself “Geek Farming,” is about both the respect for planting and growing things in the ground, and the hope that there may be a way to restore what we’ve already ruined.
The author started growing garlic around 2000. When an acquaintance explained to me, “If you plant one clove of garlic, six will grow,” I jumped in, believing in the 600% return rate. After harvesting the garlic the way he wanted, he loaded it into his truck and started the “Wi-Fi sharing movement.”
“If you eat garlic, your breath smells even after you eat it, so people know you ate garlic. Likewise, I approached well-known organizations and convinced them to open invisible Wi-Fi instead of hiding it.”
The strange coexistence between garlic and the Wi-Fi sharing movement was born from this poetic imagination. They didn’t stop there and also printed garlic currency. In today’s terms, it’s like creating a “garlic coin.” In this way, Xu Liqing’s world of work ranges from ultra-thin units such as viruses to the grand discourse of global society, and from the real world of agriculture to the cyberspace represented by the Internet. As an Asian woman, her experience of living as a minority and marginalized person in Western societies such as the United States and France suggests a unique perspective that the general public cannot imagine.
New York = Lee Hanbit, arts columnist
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