WEST BUND ART & DESIGN 2025

The center of the booth is a multimedia room showing a video artwork by Lov-Lov (est. 2024, an Al-like artist identity developed by Lin Jingjing) and a video game work by Mitchell F. Chan (b. 1982, lives and works in Toronto). In Lov-Lov’s There are No Safe Games (2024), AI-generated feminine humanoids speak softly of the chaos of reality. Equivocal yet evocative, the delivery of danger through their tranquil and beautiful faces elicits both enchantment and unease. Imitating the format of reels, the artwork points at the potency of media and the pitfalls that wait behind its candied façade.

Mitchell F. Chan’s Moonboi (2025) is an endless runner game, wherein the player is cast in the role of a currency trader. Chan imagines the game as a metaphor for platform capitalism, in which the illusion of agency, and therefore empowerment, is fabricated by suggesting freedom of choice within what is actually a limited arena. Under the encouragement of flashing colors and fictitious rewards, viewers will willingly subscribe to the rules set forth by the game and the artist.

The City DNA series (2012-18) by Lu Xinjian (b. 1977, lives and works in Shanghai) is created using Google satellite images that the artist translates into abstract lines and shapes. His characteristic visual elements distill imagery into symbols, compressing the memories of a city while alluding to the homogenizing effects of globalization. Caison Wang (b. 1991, lives and works in Shanghai), conversely, contemplates the future of faith and imagines a unified system guided and executed by AI. In Wang’s imagined world, spiritual notions of life, death, desire, and sin are entrusted to digital algorithms, and emotions that were expressed through literature, mythology, film, and personal narratives are now rewritten as data logic and interfaces.

Wang Jiajia (b.1985, lives and works in Beijing) creates artworks influenced by art history, traditional Chinese painting, as well as animation, video games, and Internet culture. His artwork Summer Sunday Nights (2023) depict an array of piercing eyes, watching from behind thickets of intense and layered colors, creating a two-way channel between the observed and the observed.

Zhong Wei (b. 1987, lives and works in Beijing) deconstruct contemporary interactions – between human and human as well as human and AI - into abstract chaotic landscapes built of digital codes and interfaces. Often incorporating organic motifs into his compositions, his artworks also imagine entities born from new identities gestated under the influence of new technology.

Zhou Wendou‘ s (b. 1970, lives and works in Beijing) My Right Arm (2022) is composed of a resin model of the artist’s own arm holding a fluorescent tube lamp. A Tesla coil is embedded inside the arm, which generates a high-voltage arc that activating the lamp while producing a burst-like sound. As if triggering a laser sword, the artwork recalls a common childhood fantasy of wielding supernatural power and becoming a superhero, realizing simple innocence through meticulous engineering.