Weicheng, Another Side of the City

The two artists have their own views on "city", one based on the present, the other exploring the future. For the city, it is a figurative representation of the abstract concept of society, and its essence, like the definition of society, is a gathering space for non-agricultural labor, "a collection of human beings", which is naturally separated from nature and parallel to technology. Tracing the history of the city, we can see that the relationship between technology, people and the city has undergone a complex evolution. The development of technology, the convergence of urbanization, the gradual reduction of geo-cultural differences, the globalization of the mode of production, the development of the city from a "big city" to a "world city", the connection between people is so close and yet so unfamiliar at the same time, and the city feels familiar and distant from the city. The connection between people is so close and yet so strange at the same time, city to city is distant yet familiar.

Artists think about the growth of cities and the symbiosis of people, explore the harmonious development of cities and nature, and put forward the future possibilities of "brain-computer interfaces" and "trans-planetary colonization", etc. Generally speaking, it is a change in the understanding of the possibility of the world's development, and in the view of some scholars, it is "a change in the understanding of the world's possibilities". According to some scholars, "the understanding of the world will thus be governed again by the logic of the way images move and the mechanisms by which they work."

In the present or the future, the construction of space is moving from the real to the virtual, the physical space is developing from the building to the cyberspace, and the cyberspace is digitally reconfiguring the subject's real life, spiritual life, and habits of life, and the new social life creates the lifestyle of the contemporary people, and Descartes's famous saying, "I am thinking, therefore I am," is becoming Descartes' famous saying "I think, therefore I am" is changing into "I am online, therefore I am" (online), and the famous saying "My home is my castle" will change into "My home is my castle" (online). "My home is my computer". In terms of aesthetics, the subjectivity of cyberspace has led to the reconstruction of postmodern aesthetics, and the advent of postmodern society has led to a paradigm shift in aesthetics in terms of aesthetic objects, subjective values, representational strategies and aesthetic forms. De Bourgh said, "The symbol is better than the object, the copy is better than the original, the fantasy is better than the reality". The development of technology has changed the way we look at it, we have reshaped the world of landscapes, but we are too deep in them to see the whole picture, and we do not realize whether there is any inversion in them, and when the real world becomes pure image, the pure image becomes real existence.

In the end, the artists may be asking the question, so that "we", who are gradually urbanizing, can look at today's "city" with a more macroscopic and essential perspective!