For the second edition of Curated by… UCCA is pleased to present Where and When an exhibition by An Xiaotong. “Supporting young artists is at the core of UCCA’s mission and Curated by… gives young or emerging talents a first opportunity to showcase their work to a greater number of people”, states Jérôme Sans, UCCA Director.

The work of An Xiaotong builds on a symptomatic phenomenon of our time: people’s connections on the internet.

New communicating mechanisms and concepts are replacing traditional means of communication; Simplicity of communication has on the one hand brought people closer together while simultaneously creating new distances. Life evolves between the virtual and the real worlds, with the former gradually replacing the latter and the concept of communication redefined by space and time.

Using images gleaned over the net: from web sites, blogs and chat rooms, An Xiaotong sets them free from the limitation of their formats and makes them her own. By enlarging these small pictures and by employing painting, the artist goes against the multiplication of images in our society and produces a unique work. An Xiaotong thereby immortalizes and exhibits people, whose status goes from being an anonymous lost into the pool of images available on the net to a celebrity that everyone in our star-obsessed society aspires to become.

Conceived as a single body of work, Where and When is exhibited in both “White Cube and Black box” and presents itself as a 360 degrees space crafted as a computer matrix where An Xiaotong has strategically placed her portraits of individuals.