Artist in the Media Age
—— Review of the Media Interference Exhibition

Visitors to the Media Interference show held in mid-October last year were attracted by an unusual display at the Qingdao International Artists' Workshop at the Haiqing Art Centre in Qingdao.

Two TV monitors showing different views were installed in the doorway of the workshop. One presented a series of unconnected scenes, shot by an automatic rolling camera, including sky, ground, rock, a cement floor,a beach, people and garbage. The pictures moved fast enough to dazzle viewers. Another one featured the shooting procedure of the sequence of the pictures: the artist unfolded a big newspaper ball which was wrapped around a video camera at different sites. The automatic camera kept shooting and recorded scenes while it was being wrapped.These were Zhu Qingsheng's contribution to the exhibition The Rolling Ball.

This work revealed the elusive relation between the disturbed media and the audience's acceptance.The show was organized by Wang Nanming, involving 15 artists from Beijing, Hong Kong and Qingdao.

The development of media has kept up with the pace of China's modernising drive, along with the booming progress of commerce, market, society and the information industry. Thanks to globalization and the wide spread use of computer and electronic technologies, Chinese artists have had enconters with the same digital information world as their foreign counterparts have. For many Chinese artists, the development of media has raised a question both concerning history and current international issues. However, since major differences always exist between China and other Western countries in terms of ways of thinking, cultural traditions and ideology, contemporary Chinese artists have different perceptions of media as well.

Human beings cannot live without the media which has swept across the world with the help of modern arts. People's ability to learn, express and communicate rely more on modern media. The development of media has offered a much more convenient condition and development space for human progress than ever before. Media has changed our minds drastically.

Many new words such as ``network'' and ``interaction''have been coined to express today's condition. Media has brought us a new world and new challenges. How we examine the development of the new world, to some degree, depends on how we consider the media.

Today's Faces was authored by Sun Guojuan, the only female artist in the show . The work was composed of hundreds of photos of ordinary people, covering a two-metre wide desk. Most of the photos were shot at Tian'anmen Square but the background of the photos was painted in red. Even the desk was painted red. This work stands in the middle of the showroom. Viewers were soon impressed by the fact that the figures on the photos were surrounded and isolated by a red flood, which demonstrated the artist's perception of modern media.

In the same room, an installation by Qingdao based artist Zhao Dewei, entitled Covering the Media was hanging on the wall. Red determined the tone of the work. It was a cluster of old broadcasting equipment including an old TV monitor, an old videotape player and a speaker typically produced in the 1960s and 70s. All these things were attached and painted in red. The speaker was even broadcasting the news of decades ago.

Everything was out of date or an old device, had old broadcasting content and an old ideology. But the art form was new. The new work loftily entered the experimental art playground and spoke loudly of the creator's attitude towards old media.

Du Huan, a Hong Kong based artist, brought over a work called Freedom or non-freedom. He set a glass-surrounded platform in the middle of the second floor of a winding staircase near the windows, and put a desk and a chair on the platform. Mirrors were placed on the desk and chair, meanwhile books and magazines were placed randomly on the desk. Sunshine, a blue sky and trees were reflected on the glass and mirrors. Visitors could not get a complete view of the platform when they walked past it from downstairs or from upstairs.

They got difference views from difference angles. This piece of work reflected the feature of media whereby show the same thing can beshown from different angles. Only when we see from multiple angles, can we get the entire view of the matter.

Zeng Weiheng, another Hong Kong based artist, adopted an existing man's room as the background for one of his art works Completely Drainage. The artist covered the walls and floor of the man's room with newspapers but left the urinal exposed. When entering the room, most visitors did not pay attention to the newspapers but showed interest in the urinal which seemed ready for using, because it was stunk and was still leaking. Women visitors showed a little hesitation when they entered the room.

Whether this work wanted to reveal the natural relationship of media and human beings, to test the women's attitude to public media and a male dominated arena, or to indicate the cyclical feature of media? No one knows.

Liu Chao, an undergraduate of Peking University, showed his computer art work. He invited visitors' participation in order to change his computer video-audio program. Visitors could change the existing picture and music at their wish by clicking the mouse.

The show had a very clear theme -- media's interference, which aimed at calling on artists to pay more attention to the influence of new and high technologies, and to media and public culture which may change audience's lifestyles and levels of understanding.

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