Teleoplexy

Les Voies de l’art Association and espace temps are honored to announce that art critic and curator Dr. Martina Köppel-Yang, along with Director of espace temps, Joseph CUI, have selected the curatorial project from nearly a hundred submissions: “TELEOPLEXY” by curation group One time, featuring artist LIU Puqi. This marks LIU Puqi’s inaugural solo exhibition in Paris. The exhibition is scheduled to commence on April 5th, 2024, running until May 4th, 2024, with the opening reception set for April 5th at 6 p.m. The project has been awarded €2,000 to support its curation, organization, and ongoing research on the focal topic.

 My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining, and analyzing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me – a light so brilliant and wondrous……

— Mary Shelley, FRANKENSTEIN, p49

TELEOPLEXY, is the living entity in the immanence of mechanical assemblage or coherence with kinetic energy, which is not only the renewal of function, but also how the fascicled antenna perceptron is out of control.

LIU Puqi’s labor engage on the orbits of the technological universe, he transforming them into incredible mechanism installation. He uses semi-industrial 3D printing technology, whether it is the fiction of artificial limbs, simulated body parts, or “external organs” modified based on chameleon eyes, he explores the relationship between tool manufacturing and production from the evolution of posthumanism perspective, deconstructing the boundaries between human, machine and animal behavior.

LIU Puqi’s work revolves around studying the relationship between machines and sensory organ. When the  <<BOA>> swims through the smooth gray pipe, its spine can freely twist and undergo new changes, making it the most powerful weapon, entangle the prey and evolve again. The special visual structure of the  << Caméléon >> can create a scene with a wider field of vision for people, but at the same time they are unable to accept excessive rotation and a large amount of information that makes them dizzy. The physical flesh is compressed under the control unit, and the limitations exposed are undoubtedly a kind of irony. The virtual weapon << L’arme virtuelle>> imitated the cold fantasy presented by the camera lens in the semi-virtual device experience. It examines how to re-observe the world from parallel inverted perspectives based on different positions.

LIU Puqi’s early work << Extension >>, installed prosthetic limbs on the body and controlled them with his own arms and legs. If “Marionette” is like the description of a disciplinary society under a semi-closed combination, in that way, will the freendom of human being just be a desiring machine? As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari described in << Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia >> “Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it.” The body and the machine together build a linkage device, the essence of production contains the tension and contradiction of “anti-production”. Just like the work << Le 6ème doigt >> its creation concept comes from the independent printing prosthetic service of an organization called E-nable. Users can download the 3D file by themselves, and the sense of touch is in the process of new adaptation stage, it’s forced to become clumsy rather than improve it.

To a certain extent, abandoning the quantification of engineering, and simply conceiving an unnamed gear as a “divination” with the nature of assembly randomness, can it be understood as a flare derivative of re-emancipation? And as its naked data 360 60 6 2 2 2 3, 23 19 5 4 8 8, perhaps it is a mechanistic interface with “unconscious molecular functions ” ?

What lies behind Liu Puqi’s works is an exotic semi-virtual order, which is exposed through “coincidences”, “synchronicities” and comparable signs of intelligent destiny, such as the sensibility hidden in the transition between “reality” and “virtual” entrance – shuttling back and forth under the interactive space, this mode opens up a reflection on the universality of contemporary society as a result of technological penetration, and allows us to think about how to reopen the creation of the “coexistence” to the percipient access. But supposing that we dissolve the cryptic data particles and reproduce them so that let them continue, it’s the procedure of merging with the source and re-perceive the fragility of the work. As Nick Land said, “Humanity is a compositional function of the post-human, and the occult motor of the process is that which only comes together at the end ”.

—— Curator : LI Yaxuan, March 27th, 2024

Overview of the exhibition

ARTIST｜LIU Puqi

Graduate of the Master’s program at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, LIU Puqi lives and works in Paris. He participated in the pre-doctoral program at the Spacial Media laboratory of Ensadlab. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Hubei in China, then from the Marseille-Mediterranean School of Arts and Design and the Nante-Saint-Nazaire School of Fine Arts.

LIU Puqi’s artistic research primarily explores the extension of the human body, its relationship with tools, and new ways of seeing the world. LIU Puqi mainly utilizes 3D printing to create mechanical devices, such as prosthetics and external organs that people can use to experiment with new physical behaviors and visual sensations.

CURATION GROUP｜One time

LI Yaxuan

Dancer, performer, independent curator, an uncertain substance combining liquid and fire. She focuses on introspection and self-observation of the spiritual universe, as well as some reflection and questioning on the world of will. She hopes to observe and describe its human beings that are not given form and are in an unbalanced dynamic state, in a strength of natural growth of an instinctive organization.

In 2023, she participated in les gens d’Uterpan, a 6 hour performance at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

She pays attention to mysticism on the perception of consciousness and supernatural form, associate the field of correlation and the relative of biopouvoir. Her recent research direction is to use deep ecology as the source of ontology for creation, deconstruct and reshape the concepts of poetry, text, choreography, movements, and performance in contextual art. She explores the interactive evolution relationship between individual construction identitaire, desiring machine, and inconscient collectif.

LIU Yanxiu

Research: Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity explores the constant flux and reconstruction of individual identities and cultural symbols in contemporary society. In parallel, I study the production, dissemination and consumption of works of art under capitalist conditions, and how these processes affect social structures and individual ideologies. The research also addresses the relationship between geopolitics and art, examining the political connotations and implications of the production and exhibition of artworks in different geographical and cultural contexts, as well as how art shapes and is shaped in the context of geopolitics.

WANG Ying

Wang Ying focuses on the emergence of a singular aesthetic imprinted by everyday life. This may be linked to the misuse of objects, or to the meeting of two cultures when a person moves to another country. This appropriation of objects, or invention of the everyday, is for her a form of “individual resistance to control mechanisms”. How does the change in the relationship between people and places play out in everyday life? How do objects tell the story of a person’s situation and the configuration of their daily existence? How can an artist seize upon the everyday from a creative point of view? These questions are central to his theoretical research and artistic practice.

DIRECTOR OD THE PROJECT｜Martina Köppel-Yang

Dr. Martina Köppel-Yang is an independent scholar and curator specializing in contemporary Chinese art since the mid-1980s. She has authored extensive works on the subject, including her noteworthy Ph.D. thesis, ‘Semiotic Warfare – The Chinese Avant-garde 1979 – 1989: A Semiotic Analysis’ (Hong Kong: timezone 8, 2003), which has become a reference book on Chinese art from the 1980s. Additionally, she serves as a member of the advisory board of Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong.

RESPONSIBLE OF THE PROJECT｜Joseph CUI

Joseph Cui, director of espace temps, curator and art critics. Specialized in Chinese artists in France. He holds degrees in philosophy from the Ecole des Bernardins and in Comparative Literature from Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III. With a background of dedicated researcher, his focus holds within study consists of a whole century of Chinese artists in France, spanning from the beginning of the 20th to the actual generation. As a close associate of François Cheng, he has initialed to build up an archive of Chinese artists in France and to analyze the transcultural phenomenon of their artistic creations.

ORGANISER｜Les voies de l’art Association

The association “Les voies de l’art” succeeds the VIA Paris association (since 2013). With the aim of creating a new momentum, we have decided to pool our resources, establish ourselves in a permanent space (espace temps), and initiate this new identity: “Les voies de l’art” (given by François Cheng). This new framework will enable us to build a meeting place, develop more qualitative, relevant, and regular projects. The “Les voies de l’art” Association continues the mission of promoting intercultural exchanges and working in the wake of the academician Mr. François Cheng, who has always experimented with and sought artistic collisions between different cultures.

ORGANISER｜espace temps

espace temps is located in the heart of Paris, close to the Centre Pompidou. It is dedicated to the organization of exhibitions and research events, while promoting encounters and exchanges.

COLLABORATING INSTITUTION

CHINA SOUTHERN AIRLINES

Headquartered in Guangzhou, China Southern Airlines Co., Ltd. is China’s airline with the largest number of transport aircraft, the most developed route network, and the largest annual passenger volume. China Southern’s Guangzhou-Paris route was first launched in 2004 and now has five flights per week. In 2024, China Southern will take the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France, the France-China Year of Culture and Tourism and other important events as opportunities to continuously enrich its aviation products, provide more friendly and refined services, and become your first choice for travel.