Boundless Flow

Curated by Eunice Chen

Artists: Simone Couto, Tianlan Deng, Matthias Liechti, W Teng

February 23 - March 2, 2022

In this day and age, global mechanisms unconsciously permeate every corner of daily life. The exhibition Boundless Flow scales down the hidden sides of our mundane daily lives which are either so ordinary that few people notice or too powerful to slightly change. The four groups of artwork bring the audience into fluid intimacy with repetitively hand crafts, representing how our world works right now. The exhibition proposes an ideal imagination that blurs the boundaries across race, gender, class and nationality.

Tianlan Deng’s 2428, a site-specific installation and durational performance work, records website search links on how to learn Chinese Painting in seven days, reenacting the tradition in the digital century. Simone Couto in her works A Day Has 12 Coats repetitively blends the prints to mimic the working situation of women laborers in NYC during the first half of the Century, while W Teng in the film Where are W Teng's Snowman Going? chronicles her experience of producing snowman decorations made in Chinese factories and then shipped to malls in the United States. Couto’s prints and Teng’s film, encapsulate the concepts of close connection to the earth, the opacity in global transmission, and the assembly line chain of society. Matthias Liechti repeats the word “EXIT” and rotates each letter 90 degrees to create a pattern, in which the single exit-symbol loses its former signification. The installation Holes, Blanks, Ways Out (picket fence) deconstructs and presents itself from a new perspective, which invites the audience for an imagination of a porous and interdependently responsible community.