The Cloister Project is Macalline Art Center’s special project space in Shanghai. Located on the second floor of the Cloister Apartments at No. 62 Fuxing West Road, Shanghai, the Cloister Project is a non-profit space for exhibitions, public education, and cultural exchange.

By recognizing the synchronous progression and twinned natureof screens and meditation, we can understand the impact of technology’s ceaselessness on the psyche.

Zhang Wenxin’s video project Two Passages into the Caves contains two works, HOGEN and illusion, which are both comprised of text and video. Both pieces will be presented in an offline screening and discussion at fRUITYSPACE (No. 13 Meishuguan Dongjie, Dongcheng District, Beijing) at 9:30 p.m., on Thursday, July 22.

The stories, creatures, and environments in “Shanhaijing” (Book of Mountains and Seas) gesture toward a cosmology that is correlational. Cross-pollinated species, transmutable beings, androgynous beasts and humans thrive in the infinite space between heaven and earth, where matter and phenomena are in a constant flow of exchange. This kind of imaginative correlation dilutes the contemporary desire for categorization, destabilizes hierarchical orderings. With roots in Taoist philosophy, Shanhaijing centers the body as an expression of the shape and logic of the cosmos, a way of living and knowing through embodiment. This radical epistemology enables us to think on a terrestrial scale, to form a deep and intimate solidarity with ourselves and our surroundings.

We invite you to participate in a meditative process, moving from obscurity, confusion, and dissociation to integrity, transcending the boundaries between creatures. When meditating, things in the universe gradually expand and develop in the body, making us one with all things in the universe.

We have invited artist Liu Qinmin, curator and art historian Wang Xin, and musician Siyu to an online public event for “Bare Screen,” Macalline Art Center’s digital video commissions program, where they will discuss how the music video, a global visual phenomenon, promoted and contributed to the visualization of a collective soul, a sense of identity and belonging, and the charms of social media.

17 December 2020, Beijing – Macalline Art Center, Beijing’s newest non-profit art institution, digitally launches today with a series of digital initiatives, including “Bare Screen“, a program of newly-commissioned digital artworks.