Map Games: Dynamics of Change (2008)

Map Games was published alongside the exhibition in the Today Museum in China. The exhibiting artists created work that focused on urban growth, urban development and an approach of a (non)spatial concept of the city.

Abstract

With regards to the global progress today, urban knowledge has always been one of the focuses of discussion in the art and cultural fields. Especially in the current Chinese cultural context, the city is gradually becoming the focal point for the artists. Urbanisation is not only considered an emblem of modernisation and its material tendency, but it is also contextualised as the new medium for engendering cultural and value systems. However, the modern metropolis has always been a tremendous paradox with contradictions, offering complex emotions intertwined with pain and joy. On the one hand metropolitan culture channels into all aspects of our lives via material trends, storing our progressive value concepts of history and civilization that are yet experienced in the process. Moreover, this figurative phenomenon of the metropolis serves as a type of unrelenting rejection. The modern metropolises of today are filled with desires, diseases, crimes and grotesqueness. Its invisible hand reaches out to mold itself into an alternative existence oppressing its people. Especially during the transitionof Chinese society, urbanites psyches are unbalanced by desire, shock and anxiety. As a premise and as adoptable creative material, many artists contemplate, comment and express such unbalance with works of urban characteristics, and have clearly and distinctively concealed the discourse of the city in ther works.

Extract from Mapping Secred Codes by Feng Boyi.