Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech unveils its first award-winning exhibition “Balcony of the Brave—Nutrition, Materials, and Future Ecology”in Beijing

TEXT:CAFA ART INFO    DATE: 2022.4.22

2841650009829_.pic_hd.jpgHyundai Motorstudio Beijing announces “Balcony of the Brave—Nutrition, Materials, and Future Ecology”, the first award-winning exhibition of Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech, opening on April 27, 2022. Revolving around balcony—the extension of the interior space, the exhibition takes the imaginary “future balcony” as the blueprint, to conceive the “balcony landscape” can be independently forged by future technology.

Balcony of the Brave — Nutrition, Materials, and Future Ecology

Something that has always been vivid in my memory is the balcony of my grandma's house. It was stacked like a treasure chest with all kinds of things, abundant yet orderly: food, materials, tools, and green plants, were all there, and it was also the space where my family and I could easily observe the sky. The balcony is a living space that we are most familiar with in our daily life, a place for residents to breathe fresh air, dry clothes, and place potted plants; it is bonded to both life and nature, an individual space accompanied by social activity.

This exhibition takes an imaginary "future balcony" as a blueprint, conceiving a "balcony landscape" — a post-human living landscape, where people create independently through future technology. It is like a research laboratory for people: they convert nutrition, create living materials and build "ecology" here. A balcony is a place where technology and nature unite to create, also a future life scenario constructed with local technology.

Confronting a geological epoch in which a new intelligence and ecology evolve together, James Lovelock, who proposed the Gaia Hypothesis, envisions that Cyborg and Gaia will jointly govern the earth for the first time. The "balcony" as a metaphor, symbolizes the ecology created by technology and nature, life and non-life, reflecting an epitome of human life in the future, which will be a huge system of nature and machine hybridization. Nowadays, we need to rethink the relationship between technology and ecology. The synthesis of technology and environment constitutes its own beginning and the corresponding autonomy; we could reconsider this beginning, or place it in a suitable cosmic reality. Donna J. Haraway proposed the notion of “Staying with the Trouble”. And with “Chthulucene”, the other concept, Haraway hopes to help us with is “learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth”; to inspire us to abandon arrogance and passivity, to have a discussion rooted in reality, to explore a non-typical scenario, unlike the past, top-down authoritative narrative. She expects the exploration could bring us the possibility of human transboundary survival and symbiotic harmony of all things. This requires today’s artists and designers to be like "the brave ones" who are not afraid of difficulties and troubles, who rely on personal research and action to foresee the future crisis and challenges of human survival, to think about the possibility of technologies in a holistic and locally applicable way. They would also need to change their inherent ways of thinking and strive to find possible solutions so as to provide new frameworks for the symbiotic development of technology and ecology. Only through these new frameworks can we imagine the harmonious coexistence of “Cyborg and Gaia”.

Facing such a chaotic present and an uncertain future, we need a technology rooted in life and an experimental field to unite all forces, and to reconsider the present correlation between people and everything in this pragmatic action. Maybe the future ecology is not in the distant future, but at everyone’s feet.

This exhibition presents a slice of life of “the brave" when facing "trouble": the balcony. The exhibition is divided into four sections: Nutrient Converters, Material Makers, Garden Planters, and Stargazers, exploring the relationship between technology and ecology from four perspectives respectively.

Nutrition Converters

Nutrition is necessary for surviving. Through photosynthesis, organisms convert conditions from surrounding space into nutrients needed for their survival. Modern molecular biology has given "the brave ones" new capabilities: They can create new ways of nutrition intake and new forms of food production for people through fusion and conversion. Ultimately, human beings and other living beings on earth share energy from the sun and other energy necessary for living.

Material Makers

Technology development has provided people with the possibility of new technology and material integration. If people once relied on nature to meet their own needs for survival and development, now “the brave ones" have used their foresight to synthesize new materials by using molecular chemistry, bacterial culture, and other artificial interventions to "collaborate" with nature, which also offers a new material profile for the future of human life.

Garden Planters

A garden is not only a place where plants grow, but also an ecosystem of technology, life, and intelligence in a hybrid state. New species and new forms of life are constantly arising from the combination of technology and life. The sutured technological intervention and the application of laws of life could complete the transboundary coexistence and co-prosperity.

Stargazers

Casting our eyes to the sky, space is the place where we can unfold our infinite imagination. With the continuous deterioration of the earth's environment, how will we survive in the vast universe? How will we live in the future world? These "future proposals" are full of the artists' limitless creativity, and more importantly, while “stargazing”, we can reflect on the current environment through a new perspective of life and ecology.

Text by Diane Xing


Exhibition View

Community Co-Creation Project, 2022

Project Initiator: Diane Xing

Installation Designer: SHA Jinghai

Photographer: CHEN Rui

Project Coordinator: YAN Jianyun

Community Co-creator: Community members from Nanhuqu and Houshayu, online content creators

Ornamental grass support: Institute of Grassland, Flowers and Ecology, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences


LIANG Wenhua

DNA Soup, 2018

Installation

2. The Hive Explorer_1.jpg


LIVIN Farms 

The Hive Explorer, 2018

Insect Farming Kit


The Center for Genomic Gastronomy

De-Extinction Dinner, 2018 (ongoing)

Mixed media


GONG Yining, SUN Aijia

Melting Myth, 2022

Installation, digital image 

1'30''


CHEN Pengpeng, LIU Xing, LIANG Yuhong,

XU Haomin, ZHAO Hua

Miasma of the Rocks II, 2022

Mixed media installation


XU Chaofan

Urban Mini Farm, 2021

Installation


QIU Yu 

Where to Go, 2022

Real-time video, installation

8. Ground Station & Ground Station Nephogram _1.jpg


LIU Xin

Ground Station, 2020-2021

Video installation

Loop

9. The Wilding of Mars_1.jpg

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

The Wilding of Mars, 2019

Video

60'00 

© Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Courtesy to the artist  

Commissioned by the Vitra Design Museum and the Design Museum

With support from Cité du Design, Saint-Étienne

10. ALMA Music Box Melody of a Dying Star_1.jpg

Whatever 

ALMA Music Box: Melody of a Dying Star, 2014

Installation

Credit: Whatever + BASSDRUM + Qosmo + Epiphany Works + NOAJ


LIANG Shaoji

Get Square into a Circle, Get Circle into a Square, 2015-2021

Installation, video (2001-2003, 4'00) 

Dasha Tsapenko

Fur_tilize, 2020

Installation

In collabration with Han Wösten

Photo credits: Hanneke Wetzer, Romy Finke


Julia Watson 

Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, 2019

Documentation

The Merging Place1.jpg


QIU Yu

The Merging Place, 2022

Video, multi-channel audio


About the exhibition

3451650350992_.pic_hd.jpgExhibition Time: Apr 27th, 2022 to Aug 28th, 2022

Exhibition Opening: Apr 27th, 2022, 2PM

Curator: Diane Xing

Organizer: Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing

Participating Artists

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

CHEN Pengpeng, LIU Xing, LIANG Yuhong, XU Haomin, ZHAO Hua (Group)

Dasha Tsapenko

The Center for Genomic Gastronomy

GONG Yining, SUN Aijia (Group)

Julia Watson

LIANG Shaoji

LIANG Wenhua

LIU Xin

LIVIN Farms

QIU Yu

Whatever

XU Chaofan

Exhibition Venue: Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing (E-1, 798 Road, 798 Art Zone, Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, P.R. China

Courtesy of Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing.