Asian Dope Boys × Macalline Art Center:The Dust

2021.03.26 Friday 22:00

Location

Zhao Dai, Glass Hotel, Xin Yuan Li Xi Street No. 19, Chao Yang District, Beijing, China

On March 26, 2021, Macalline Art Center’s “Bare Screen” program will bring its first in-person public event to the Zhao Dai Club in Beijing. Together with Asian Dope Boys, Tianzhuo Chen will premiere his three-channel video The Dust in the club space, creating a truly immersive experience.

The premiere of the three-channel video installation version of The Dust follows the single-channel version released by “Bare Screen” a few months ago. The new version incorporates 3D animation, special sound effects, and rhythmic editing to create a stereoscopic sensory experiment. Live accompaniment by 33EMYBW will synthesize different sensory dimensions, bridging ethnic music, electronic music, rhythmic experiments, and many other fields.

All traces of humanity are absent from The Dust, but dancing bodies can disengage from the present time and space and leap into the video and the void.

 

About the Artist


Tianzhuo Chen

Tianzhuo Chen was born in 1985, and he currently lives and works in Beijing, China. After graduating from Central Saint Martins in London, he received his master’s degree in fine art from the Chelsea College of Arts in London.

Chen skillfully works between the artistic disciplines of installation, performance, video, painting, and photography, but he also creates events that require the participation of viewers or other people, such as underground parties, theater performances, or more precisely constructed ritual sites, to realize their transformation into dreamworlds. He assimilates elements and symbols from religion (e.g., Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and shamanism), subcultures (e.g., cult followings, drag shows, and raves), popular culture (e.g., cartoons, hip hop, and electronic music), and dance (e.g., butoh and vogueing) into his work, in the hopes that the viewer or participant will transcend the surface state of the body and spirit through that ambience and achieve what the artist calls a “state of madness.”

Recent solo exhibitions include “Trance” (M Woods Museum, Beijing, 2019), “GHOST” (Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur, 2017), “Ishvara” (Long March Space, Beijing, 2016), “Chen Tianzhuo” (chi K11 Art Museum, Shanghai, 2016), and “Tianzhuo Chen” (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2015).

 

33EMYBW

33EMYBW is a Shanghai-based producer and visual artist. She draws inspiration from modern dance music, ethnic music, and rich visuals, distilling multiple conceptual elements into characteristic bass rhythms and surprising experimental sound design. In 2018, her album Golem, released on SVBKVLT, was named one of the best electronic albums of the year on Bandcamp, and received praise from producers and DJs such as Kode9, Desto, Akito, and 8ulentina. In 2019, she participated in Nyege Nyege (Kampala) and the opening of the Warehouse Project (Manchester), curated by Aphex Twin. That same year, her third album Arthropods premiered at Unsound Festival (Krakow). The new album, released on SVBKVLT, continued her previous explorations of post-humanity and evolution, and experimented with rhythms over longer timeframes. Resident Advisor and FACT Magazine named Arthropods one of the best albums of the year, and FACT Magazine also called it one of the hundred best albums of the decade. She has worked with artists including Weirdcore, Marija Bozinovska Jones, Aisha Devi, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander. 33EMYBW has also participated in important music festivals and interdisciplinary collaborations, including the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), SXSW (Austin), as well as CTM (Berlin), Soft Centre (Sydney), and Recombinant (San Francisco) in 2019.

In 2019, she curated DONG, a project that re-envisions Dong culture through field surveys, music, publications, and exhibitions. She fused the traditional songs of the Dong people of Guizhou into her sound design, and the release of her album DONG2 on Merrie Records attracted attention for its novel reshaping of traditional culture.

 

The Dust at Zhao Dai Club

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.