aaajiao
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2022
1984
China
Tabula Rasa
Diaspora as History
Presenting two ongoing series “icon” and “landscape”, aaajiao explores the senses and sentiments of himself, who struggles to remain mobile in his identity. The sense of identity dilemma derives from the notion of being a place-based Sinitic speaker, who seeks identity independence from his national origins and his use of language. Further influenced by recent literatures in Sinophone studies, he presents us a visual thesis about the evolution of his identity and the world he sees. It responds to his personal experience, the socio-political tension specific to Chineseness, and his dual existence on the Internet and in this world.
Explore the Installation via
icon series (2018 ~ 2022)
“I was born on the Internet, I was dead on the Internet, and I was reborn on the Internet.“
I cannot simply hide my identity dilemma with my Internet identity. I record my identity evolution and reveal the hidden part via icons. The icon is also my way of seeing. After I experienced the gradual detachment from my racial and national identity while using the language (Chinese), my nostalgia becomes place-based. It originates in Berlin and in cyberspace. At the same t ...
In 2020, my icon was a player who sees the world reconstituted by computing power while
trapped in the identity of Chinese diaspora.
- aaajiao
In 2021, my icon was a hybrid form of a half-dead User on social media and a player awaiting for his reborn.
- aaajiao
In 2022, my icon attempts to be a mobile presence of a place-based Sinitic speaker, who is wary
of falling into the discrete ideology of Perpetual Foreigners and a forced self-Minoritisation.
- aaajiao
landscape series (2022)
Shanghai entered a draconian city-wide lockdown in April 2022 in a take-no-prisoner attempt to enforce China's nationwide "Zero Covid" policy. As a result, my friends, my colleagues and my LISTE-bound artworks were trapped in the city. Over the last two months, even though I stayed in Berlin, my emotional experience was in sync with Shanghai's, overwhelmed with feelings of absurdity, grief, despair and numbness every day.
The planned exhibition Diaspora as History envisions self-emancipation and self-empowerment. It acts as an escape from the pains and tragedies of contemporary China and restores one's ability to express freely. However, the lockdown of Shanghai is attempting to imprison me again. I do not want to give in. I want to give my artworks another means of escape and come to LISTE, least of all to share our courage with people who choose to live free.
- aaajiao
The artist and activist aaajiao—the online handle of Xu Wenkai—draws on a broad range of languages including sculpture, painting, drawing, multimedia installation, video, sound and design to explore the evolution of the human identity being assimilated by the digital world. Focusing on the experience of the new generation—the native inhabitant of the parallel worlds and saturated realities of the net—aaajiao’s work is a critical investigation into the countless possibilities offered by the digital and the numerous questions raised by this hyper-technologisation.
aaajiao’s works have been featured in numerous museums worldwide, including OCAT Biennale (Shenzhen), Institute of Contemporary Arts (Boston), HKW | Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), HEK | Haus der Elektronischen Künste (Basel), How Museum (Shanghai), Turin Castello di Rivoli (Turin), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing), Yuz Museum (Shanghai), ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe), among others. aaajiao is the artist-in-residence at the Delfina Foundation (London) in 2019, the winner of the Art Sanya Awards 2014 Jury Prize and a nominee for the first edition of OCAT - Pierre Huber Art Prize in 2014.