Ling U

Technological advancement has profound social implications. My talk focuses on technological imaginaries in artistic works that are both critical and propositional. I will focus on two new commissions from the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020–2021). The first case study, Jimeimen by Sun Xiaoxing and team, speculates on the social potential of Kuaishou, a short-video platform from which an eccentric grassroot culture emerges. More than rendering what is produced on the platform as art or in an artistic way, the artists proposed a structural collaboration with the platform itself. The second case study is the retro-futuristic sci-fi Qian Xuesen and the Yangtze River Computer by Shi Qing. Qian Xuesen was the scientist behind China’s missile and space program since the 1950s.

Subsistence crises have recurred throughout Vietnamese modern history, notably in the contexts of French colonialism, Japanese occupation, and postcolonial and postwar communist economic centralization and agricultural collectivization. The Great Famine of 1944-1945 - whose causes have been attributed to the convergence of natural disaster, French and Japanese mismanagement, and American bombing – has been significantly commemorated within Vietnamese revolutionary history. Other, more recent, episodes of hunger have been creatively remembered through a range of official and unofficial forms, such as film, literature, and museum exhibitions, even if such episodes occupy a more uneasy place within the sphere of state culpability and thus national historiography. Nonetheless, there is clearly a rich body of artistic expression and remembrance of the crisis of hunger in Vietnamese history.