In 2010, independent curator Zoe ZHANG Bing made three separate trips with artists to villages in Guangxi, Yunnan and Shanxi, to live and work with local HIV positives. This was the first time that Chinese contemporary artists organized to work so closely with HIV positive people. The purpose of this project is not only to eliminate misunderstandings and discrimination against them, but to more deeply engage in self-examination. While contemporary art is entwined with large problems such as commerciality, theoretical language, identity and discourse, when confronted with the microcosm of both typical and special diseases, the rural environment so different from urban living and the internet, the world of art and its mutual relationships undergoes subtle transformations.

"Absolute Distance" uses its process to explore the mutual relationship between people and HIV/AIDS, the multitude of social facts  affecting humanistic thought such as various different outbursts, conflicts of benefit, changing value and cultural disparity. There is no judgment on right and wrong, good and bad, reality and illusion. Absoluteness is relatively absolute; relativity is absolutely relative. Distance is a term absolutely full of relativity. By continuously exploring the relativity of distance, we can only ever more closely approach the absolute.

Curator: Zoe ZHANG Bing
Artist: Chen Hangfeng, Deng Hua + Fu Zhen,Gao Lei, Gu Yeli + Raquel Fernandez, Li Yifan, Zero Lin , Liu Ren, Miao Xiaochun, Michael Ziming Ouyang, Shen Shaomin, Shi Jinsong, Song Dong, Wang Taocheng, Wu Junyong, Xiang Jing, Yan Chao, Zhu Fadong