RESIDENCY IN RMB CITY at Gendai Gallery (Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, 6 Garamond), to January 29, closing reception/online launch 2-5 pm January 29. 647-200-6161. Rating: NNNN
Under the guidance of Gendai Gallery curator Yan Wu, a provocative project has morphed from a residency to a kind of artistic intervention into the often limited gamer aesthetic of online virtual world Second Life.
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It began when the Reel Asian Film Festival brought Beijing-based Cao Fei’s RMB City to A Space Gallery last fall. Cao’s avatar, China Tracy, took us on a video tour of her Second Life island metropolis, a wildly imaginative pastiche of contemporary and traditional Asian culture (rmbcity.com).
Wu was inspired to invite Toronto artists with Chinese connections to respond to Cao’s work. Their projects began as gallery installations but at the end of the month take a new form as they move online to Second Life.
Multimedia artist and York prof Yam Lau contributes Princess Iron Fan. Based on a 1941 animated film of stories from Chinese classic novel Journey To The West, the big black-and-white figure stubbornly retains the two-dimensionality and awkward gait of primitive animation, ready to present a ghostly reminder of the past amidst the digital wizardry of RMB City.
Artist/architect Adrian Blackwell’s Lóng Sùshè (Dragon Dormitory in Mandarin), two rows of wooden bunk beds like those in China’s factory workers’ residences, represents the dragon energy of Chinese economic growth through a sinuous conveyor-belt-like wooden form that pierces the structures. In Second Life, it evolves into a curved dormitory building that hypnotically falls apart and re-erects itself.
The installation by GestureCloud (OCADU digital art profs Judith Doyle and Fei Jun) involves both film and motion-capture animation of workers at a Beijing art-book print shop who check presses, stomp down garbage and take smoke breaks. The artists insinuate workplace reality into the Second Life fantasyland by offering the workers’ gestures for sale in RMB City’s vending machines to avatars who pay with lindens (the platform’s currency).
Even for digital novices like me, Cao’s show and this one open accessible, fascinating windows onto contemporary China and the possibilities of new artistic media.
art@nowtoronto.com
