The Screen Generation @ 9m² -Museum can be seen as a summary of the aesthetic exploration made by the Screen Generation Series. Compared with the previous two presentations, The Screen Generation @ 9m² -Museum addresses the interactive relation between man and screen in a more direct and clearer way. In the Screen Generation Series, the artist raises two propositions. The first is to transform application-generated data into images and sounds on screen and to give people sensual and emotional experience through constant presentation. The other is that as a generation having long been surrounded by information technology, “we” have gradually become information nodes. In other words, as digital screen users, we have been developed into a screen generation where we become the screen itself. Aaajiao’s work aptly evades concepts such as “personification” and “objectification” that would easily cause confusion and misunderstanding of new media art. In this piece, a complex issue as the interplay between man and screen, or say between man and technology, is skillfully encapsulated in something as subtle as a piece of jewelry. The wearing of these jewelry pieces epitomizes a connection between man and screen. By combining visual images (which are cool and rational as always), sense of taste (of the sugar crystals), psychological hint (given by the action of licking and fondling), and compulsion (on both physical and mental levels), Screen Generation @ 9m² -Museum manages to cast light on equality, co-existence and co-development of the relation between screen and man in a humorous way.

Goethe Open Space invited independent curator Zoe Zhang Bing to be the curator of its 2013/2014 art programme under the theme of “9m² -Museum”. The concept of a 9m² museum is proposed as an alternative to tackle the current boom of art museum construction in China. Under such circumstance, public art museums are witnessing changes in their social role and private art museums flourish in both size and number. China is now heading into an era of art museum, meaning art museum has become a phenomenon. In such a context, politics, capital and art museums are closely connected with art playing an interestingly significant role among them. Increasingly expanding museum space, in some cases, leads to an excessive dependency on good space conditions when artists want to present their practice. Given the situation, we start to wonder how artists would deal with a gallery covering only 9 square meters. How to tackle the proportional relation between the volume of their work and the space? How to maintain and manifest the aesthetic tension of their work? Is 9m² museum a restriction or an interesting challenge? 9m²-Museum is an opportunity for artists to withdraw from their previous experience of exhibition-making and to reconsider the relations between art creation and exhibition, exhibition and space, and space and the art system.

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© aaajiao