EVENT DESCRIPTION
DE SARTHE is pleased to present Soul Light Legacy Plan, its fourth solo exhibition by Shanghai-based artist Wang Xin that posits itself as a fictional service agency that provides what humans have coveted for centuries – immortality. Unveiling a new body of interrelated sculptural, multimedia, and interactive installations, the immersive exhibition appears as if a showroom of unusual artefacts imagined to preserve spiritual consciousness via the technological avant-garde.
An eeriness emerges as one’s instinct oscillates between feeling at ease and alarmed, as accents of artificiality become evident in the objects and processes that the fictitious agency presents as human or spiritual. Asking visitors to perform physical tasks such as scanning books and meditating, the agency proposes a standard ritual that translates and encodes personal tactile and sensory experiences into algorithmic data, alluding to the increasingly formatted means through which individual identity is expressed.
ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER
Wang Xin (b. 1983 in Yichang, Hubei, China) graduated from China Academy of Art with a B.F.A. in 2007 and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an M.F.A. in 2011. Her artworks take the form of installations, moving images, and new media. Unconsciousness, art world systems, and posthumanism are key features in her creation. Often challenging the status of the artist and the functioning of the art market today, her works consider her own position in relation to the art world while crafting a critique of the larger ecosystem of art. She is also a certificated hypnotist and often explores the creative ways to use hypnosis in art. Wang Xin is also the founder of "The Gallery" project, which is an alternative art space/system.
Wang Xin currently lives and works in Shanghai, China.
