Shanghai in a Dream
"Plugged In" is an exhibition where Shanghai's sights and senses are witnessed as if in a single dream.
From scenes as epic as an infamous urban tragedy, to moments as swift as the view of a passing pair of fashionable shoes, life in Shanghai is captured from skyscrapers to crevices in the vivid, dynamic artworks of island6.
In this dream, Plugged In merges imagery from 1930s Shanghai with the city of today in "Rickshaw Going By", morphs traditional clothing into surrealist architecture in "City Uniform" and "Qi Pao Rising", and brings static goldfish (Chinese symbols of good fortune) into exciting, LED-animated life in "Night School".
The exhibition captures the otherworldly city where one has daily visions of anachronistic wagons bustling through a network of crumbling pre-war alleyways beneath a skyline bathed in streaking neon and glimmering LEDs.
Themes of voyeurism and fantasy are applied to a range of the city's tiniest details to enshrine them in an electronic form, while traditional Chinese imagery is combined with the sense of futurism found throughout Shanghai.
The dreamlike world of Plugged In is the result of the blinding sensory experience Shanghai provides with its 21st Century pace and aesthetic, and also speaks of the reveries and ambitions of immigrants, visitors and residents alike who envision success, wealth, fame, love or glory from the city where they revel. Hypnotic LED animations circle within the narratives of papercut imagery and sleek stainless steel frames to depict Shanghai's smallest visual details, booming infrastructure and everlasting exoticism.
Through almost surreal vignettes, Island6 invites us into a vision of Shanghai that is part real, part imagined. The bright lights of their LED medium reflect the neon soaked skyline of contemporary Shanghai, while the imagery evokes a romanticized impression of the city's colonial past, replete with discomfiting wafts of orientalism and exoticism that is inexorably linked to the collective memory of "The Paris of the East."
– Tally Beck, Tally Beck Contemporary
Plugged In exposes the blossoming high-tech infrastructure of present China as well as the talent found in emerging contemporary artists who live and work in the metropolis of Shanghai, known as island6. These Chinese artists form a collective of eclectic talents producing dynamic, innovative multi-media artworks that light up faces and minds throughout the world from a nucleus in their Shanghai studio. The collective is aided by directors, writers, technicians and performance artists who share a passion for incorporating cutting edge technology into contemporary art. Through these collective efforts, island6 reflects a time in history too fleeting to be caught otherwise.