Banyi Huang

BANYI HUANG is a contributor to the Brooklyn Rail.

In what ways have machines reconfigured or reconsolidated pre-existing social hierarchies, human relations, and cultural production?
Lee Friedlander. Boston, Massachusetts, 1985. Gelatin Silver print. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. E.T. Harmax Foundation. ©Lee Friedlander. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
Looping endlessly on twelve television monitors, close-up shots of hands frenetically scratch different parts of the body. Zhang Peili’s iconic piece, Uncertain Pleasure II (1996), ironically anticipates today’s highly mediated experience of viewing, as well as the challenges of giving a coherent framework to the chaotic history of contemporary Chinese art.
Installation view: Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World. Courtesy © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Photo: David Heald.

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