≠ 个展 Original

From December 1, 2024, to February 7, 2025, the Art Museum of Guangming Cultural and Art Center will be honored to invite artist Xu Jinlong to launch his first large - scale museum project: ≠. This project is also the fourth installment of the "Y+" project for young artists at the Art Museum of Guangming Cultural and Art Center.

This exhibition will utilize a series of new technological achievements based on mechanical structures, automated processing, and programming. From the artist's personal perspective, it will narrate and approach the boundary between "virtual and real." In contrast to similar projects that discuss the "virtual boundary" and show a huge centrifugal force between advanced technology and daily life, Xu Jinlong's creations tend to bury the edge of technology in classic and simple mechanical structures such as gears, levers, and hinges. Combining basic geometric principles and laws like parabolic and Archimedean spirals, he constructs a "mystery of materiality" that can be observed, described, and even influenced.

As an important relationship in mathematics, the emergence of "equal" (the equal sign) is related to the birth of equations and is closely involved in the basic operations of almost all human technologies. The unequal sign is derived from the equal sign. Compared with the single - directivity of "equivalence," both "greater than" and "less than" belong to the category of "inequality." In a sense, the emergence of "inequality" has developed the meaning of "equality."

Looking at Xu Jinlong's creative journey, from his academic sculpture education to self - learning mechanical engineering, and then to embracing virtual modeling and AI, the evolution of his creative forms at each stage is based on the previous one. He closely bridges the seemingly contradictory two ends: the presence of art and the automated substitute of technology. This makes Xu Jinlong's case highly representative of individuals from the perspective of technology popularization against the backdrop of East Asian "pragmatism" and the current global "technological class stratification."

At the same time, how does his artistic creation melt and blend things as opposite as the two poles of a magnet? Through this exhibition, with the "unequal sign" in the exhibition title, we can conduct a reverse investigation of the prevalent "equality" in the above - mentioned topic of "art and technology."

Since the topic of technology and art emerged, the relationships between virtual and real, technology and art, ethics and creation, and thought and body have often been discussed in contrast. Issues such as their cycle, symbiosis, and antagonism are often eagerly raised and attempted to be solved, but they are always limited by the disconnection between theory and technology. Just like the confusion brought by transitional questions such as "Can humans also be regarded as machines?" from the perspective of "DNA replicates itself based on mechanical action."

This exhibition will lead us to suspend the comparison (opposition) between virtual and real through the view of mechanical philosophy questions like the classic useless box. This corresponds to the non - negligible spatio - temporal factors in the artist's psychological process of self - subversion and iteration: perhaps new technologies do not have more superiority or even transcendence than old technologies, and the reverse, non - equivalent comparison of "art" may be the butterfly effect that ordinary people outside the eye of the technological storm, including artists, can trigger.