Commissions

Commissions

Bare Screen

“Bare Screen” is not a theme or concept; it envisions circulation and exchange among isolated bodies that collectively participate in understanding and constructing the frontiers of change in the world. Cultural practitioners in the late twentieth century found a critical moment to insert experimental art, alternative education, and self-care into public media. Such attempts included the artist-curated multi-media content in Alive From Off Center, an art program on public television station PBS, the challenge to corporate control of broadcast media presented by non-profit media collective Paper Tiger Television, and Zhang Peili’s representation of official media imagery and its corresponding social and political environment through his early 1990s mock TV program. These strategic interventions in the consistency of mass culture were sometimes oblique and sometimes direct. Even as they employed technological mediums and tools that quickly intervened in public spaces, they presented rough, unresolved, and controversial issues to viewers. 

As a long-term program of commissions, “Bare Screen” is progressive, discursive, and non-panoramic, using the environments of social media platforms to produce, exhibit, and disseminate works of art. By assembling fragmented phenomena and connecting complex subjects, the project creates an organic chain reaction, or builds temporary sites that magnify current circumstances and emotions. All of the joyful and uncomfortable experiences that arise from this constantly-changing media environment infiltrate a deeper level of our culture and collective consciousness today.

Beginning on December 24, “Bare Screen” will present the work of Tao Hui, Tianzhuo Chen, Liu Qinmin, Liu Chuang, Payne Zhu, Tan Jing & Zheng Ke, Zhang Wenxin, Tang Chao, Hu Wei, and Liu Wa. Topics such as short video miniseries, ceremonial relics, music videos, meditative experiments, visual poetry, speech acts, mythology, and minerals will be studied and discussed in a series of online and offline events.

“Bare Screen” is curated by Yuan Fuca, the Chief Curator-at-Large at the Macalline Art Center.

The Macalline Center of Art (MACA) is a non-profit art institution located in the 798 Art District of Beijing and officially inaugurated its space on January 15, 2022. Occupying a two-story building with a total area of 900 square meters, MACA unites artists, curators, and other art and cultural practitioners from around the world. Through its diverse, ongoing, and collaborative approaches, the Center establishes a new site on the contemporary art scene. Guided by the “work of artists” and backed by interdisciplinary research, the Center aims to bring together a community passionate about art and devoted to the “contemporary” moment so as to respond proactively to our rapidly evolving times.