From 5 September 2019 to 26 January 2020, Kulturforum will present the group exhibition Micro Era. Media Art from China. Invited by the Nationalgalerie, the two artists Cao Fei (*1978) and Lu Yang (*1984) asked the artists Fang Di (*1987) and Zhang Peili (*1957) for a dialogue. The artists selected the works together with the Chinese and German curators Anna-Catharina Gebbers (Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegen-wart – Berlin), Victor Wang (freelance curator, Shanghai/London) and Yang Beichen (freelance curator and film reseacher, Beijing). The exhibition will be accompanied by Pi Li (M +, Hong Kong) as curatorial advisor.

 

Fang Di’s works (*1987 in Shenzhen, lives in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China) deal with issues of racism in a broader geopolitical context. By incorporating film materials from news and documentaries, his works combine various visual languages in order to critically examine these interconnections. In his first large-scale institutional presentation in Europe so far, Fang Di shows two multimedia-installations and one object. The three works “Minister” (2019), “Sepik River Ring” (2019) and “The Magical of Pipes” (2019) are based on Fang Di’s work experience in Papua New Guinea for a Belt and Road Initiative company (which has been pooling China’s interests and objectives to build up and expand intercontinental trade and infrastructure networks between the People’s Republic of China and over 60 other African, Asian and European countries since 2013). His activities in the South Pacific Island Nation allowed him, analogous to embedded journalism, an intimate documentation of the current social situation.