Musquiqui Chihying's solo exhibition I'll Be Back is on view at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.
I'll Be Back
Exhibition period: 25 August - 28 October, 2018
Venue: UCCA Beijing, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Beijing
UCCA presents the latest installment of the "New Directions" series, showing Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying. This recent series of artworks, "I'll Be Back," comprises The Cultural Center, The Guestbook, The Mask, and The Sculpture. These grow from the artist's sustained engagement with the history of Sino-African encounters, from Ming-era explorer Zheng He's voyage to what is now Kenya, to Zhou Enlai's diplomatic visits to ten recently decolonized African states. Through these cases, the artist pushes back against the simplistic, dyadic narrative of European colonialism.
"I'll Be Back" takes its title from Arnold Schwarzenegger's famous line from The Terminator. Such words-echoing both Freud and Frankenstein-betray a deep anxiety that our hubristic need to make automata in our image will result in monstrous half-human, half-machine hybrids bent on destroying the human species. In Chihying's films, however, it is not the technological sublime, but the figure of the native-of peripheral Africa, semi-peripheral China-that returns to haunt the European psyche.
Text and image courtesy of the artist and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
Learn more --
https://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/new-directions-musquiqui-chihying/
