The “Sight Adjuster” series was created between 1995 and 1999. One defining feature of these artworks is how they present the ways electronic equipment intervenes and interferes in sight. While humans are the viewing subject, electronics can be understood as an extension of the eye. They are also a technological limitation; the retina and the charge-coupled device combine to form a single sensory apparatus. In 1998, the video installation Sight Adjuster 7 was presented at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. It is the only artwork in the series never to have been publically shown in Mainland China until now. Recorded by a pair of cameras on the streets and alleys of Guangzhou in the nineties, the piece once again returns to a Chinese social context. One might understand this itinerary as an adventure—one that the film itself has undertaken. By viewing this artwork, audiences join the film on its journey, traveling through different times and spaces.

Chen Shaoxiong once said that he “believed humans have three eyes. When we use two eyes to see things in the external world, the third eye silently appraises our way of seeing.” This quote encapsulates one of Chen’s fundamental concerns, namely exploring the relationship between the object of the gaze and the gaze itself. Landscape-1 records the artist’s friends discussing how they understand landscape. Their conversation touches on the many valences of the word “landscape.” It functions as an external “object,” a part of cultural identity, and many other roles. At this moment, the artist becomes an observer and listener. The artwork’s subject and discursive authority is thereby ceded to more people.

Chen Shaoxiong created Landscape-3 in 1999 using the World Wide Web, which had just recently began to flourish. It is perhaps the first work of internet art from China. Possessing a keen foresight, Chen felt a futurist directive during the last few years of the millennium. As a virtual platform, the internet creates a new space that can in turn contain landscapes. The artist invited audiences to email him photographs they had taken and insights they had gained while traveling. He thereby hypothetically joins them in the act of “seeing” . In the present era, when mobile networks and social media are ubiquitous, looking back at internet culture twenty years ago is a kind of archeology, recapturing the days of “low tech.” Yet doesn’t the way in which these earlier “landscapes” were expressed and “shared” in the virtual domain anticipate today’s fast-paced consumption of images and video clips?

In this group of artworks, Chen Shaoxiong photographs dioramas he fabricated against real urban street scenes, creating an optical illusion effect. Toward the beginning of his career, the artist called these three-dimensional assemblages Street Dropped from the Sky. Critic Hou Hanru has argued that these “images dropped from the sky” demonstrate a “style of amateurism,” “encouraging people to destroy the deeply rooted modernist ideals and hierarchies pertaining to artistic media.” They are “prehistoric expressions” of image sharing, so prevalent in the age of social media. According to the artist, the juxtaposition of true and false spectacles is akin to “reality squared.” When today’s audiences take selfies in front of these works and circulate them on social media, we might understand this as reality cubed.

Chen Shaoxiong began the “Collective Memory” series in 2004, though here we situate these works in the context of Chinese cultural production in the nineties. As with earlier pieces, this series embodies Chen’s unique understanding of the dialectical, paradoxical interplay between ways of seeing and the creative subject. The process behind “Collective Memory” is also an integral part of the artwork’s meaning: for each work in the series, the artist chooses an iconic landmark and digitally renders it as a grid of pixels. He then invites people from outside the art world to use the grid as a kind of template. They dip their fingers into a black ink paste and press their prints onto the canvas grid, thereby completing the painting. The work thus engages the public in two ways: in the content of the image, and in its authorship. Fingerprints are indelible codes of individual identity, and here they are permanently embedded within a painterly image. Collective Memory – Big Pants was made in 2015, and its title reflects the artist’s iconoclastic bent. “Big Pants” is a popular nickname for the China Central Television Headquarters. In this way, Chen employs irreverent, folk discourse to dispel the discursive power of the media.

Early in his career, Ren Jian was a member of the Northern Art Group. As a student in the Lu Xun Art Academy, he began to incorporate Northern Chinese culture into his practice. His work from this period touches on mysticism, grand narratives, and ultimate concerns. Ren was also influenced by the artistic and cultural trends of 1980s China. He explored notions of human existence in a collectivist context and developed an artistic language that stressed life knowledge and a sense of ritual. In the nineties, while serving as a professor at Wuhan University, Ren co-founded New History Group. Artists who joined the collective include Zhou Xiping, Zhu Xikun, Liang Xiaochuan, Yu Hong, Zhang Sanxi, Wang Yubei, Zhao Bing, Wei Ming, Dao Zi, Gong Ke, Fu Zhongwang, Ye Shuanggui, Ye Niu, Yu Youbin, and Chen Mo. Ren and the other members began to engage with social issues through performances such as Disinfection and New History, 1993 Mass Consumption. In the nineties, Ren found himself playing a similar role to the one he had in the Northern Art Group: as Chinese culture witnessed the rise of consumerism, he sought to redefine and represent these societal transformations from within historical discursive structures. By treating practices of consumption and production as artistic concepts, he could unite art and reality. One example was a clothing brand, designed by Ren, whose patterns were images of national flags. Another was New History Group’s planned exhibition in China’s first McDonald’s on Wangfujing Street in Beijing. The New History Reading Room is a dynamic textual space, bringing together background materials on Ren’s individual practice and New History Group’s artworks. The four main sections are “Context,” “Criticism,” “Trends,” and “Practice.” This is in keeping with Ren Jian’s idea of “textual conversion,” and offers viewers a systematic presentation of China’s cultural trends in the early nineties.