Dance! Dance! Doll of Mine!

Long March Project presents the group exhibition, Dance! Dance! Doll of Mine! on August 13, 2022. Curated by six young curators from China Academy of Art, the exhibition features 14 artists from departments across the China Academy of Art.

Following the presentation of Zheng Shengtian - I Was Supposed to Go to Mexico in 2021, Dance! Dance! Doll of Mine! is another large-scale exhibition of Long March Project, focusing on how young creative types confront and translate real life dilemmas. This show extends the organization’s long-standing focus on art education, including projects such as, Yan'an Art Education Symposium in 2006, Long March Project: Why Go To Tibet in 2007, Long March Education: Ho Chi Minh Trail in 2009, Trembling Surface in 2016, Long March Project: The Deficit Faction in 2019, etc. Long March Project has been providing young creators and students a platform to present and to produce through various projects and looking forward to inviting the spectator to gain insight into how fresh experiences and thoughts are translated into curatorial practice and creation.

From the works of their contemporaries, these six curators discovered sensuous observations on life, self-reflection of the individuals, and their somewhat bewildering imaginations about the present and the future. These contemplations on reality, profound and romantic, inspired the curators to adopt H. Christian Andersen’s (1805-1875) story published in Copenhagen's Children's Illustrated in 1871, Dance! Dance! Doll of Mine! (Danish: Danse, danse, Dukke min) as the title of the exhibition. In Anderson’s story, the children play with their dolls, singing and dancing. Yet the joy that belongs only to the children and their dolls cannot reach their aunt, which is delightful and unique. The riddle-like conversations between them lead to the pleasure beyond words.

In this exhibition, the dolls do not simply refer to toys that embody human or animals characters, but the individual who is gradually lost and assimilated through gazing, fantasizing, manipulating and performing. Dance here refers to the stretching or twisting of body under the spotlight, as much as the artists’ vision of possible solutions through self-exploration and social experimentation. Among the works by the artists born between 1990 and 2000, we discover the younger generations’ self-perception, view of the world and visions for the future, prismatic of the diverse and complex portrayal of human syndromes.

Chen Yin tries to deliver messages on behalf of mother nature, only when the sunlight deflects off a specific position would the spectator perceive the artist's pre-prepared text. Good luck!

Cui Yanran's oil paintings express open-minded reflections on the present, with randomness and uncertainty.

In exploring and experimenting with the viewing mechanism of the medium of video art, Kang Kaiwen, in collaboration with He Zhongxian, produces a video that connects reality and the human consciousness from everyday life fragments with a non-linear narrative.

Luo Xinling is concerned about the expansion of the viewshed in the history of medium. She uses VR video to tell a fable of "I" who constantly requests to the Ouroboros and eventually falls into the trap of a panoramic circular visual space.

Lv Yijie applies 3D animation, old photographs and video to imaging technologies to “restore” misplaced memories of his father and grandfather, addressing the replacing and packaging impact from the world of images on personal memories. 

Observing the obscurity and maladie of human society during the pandemic, Mao Zehao vigilantly conveys his concern for "blindness" and fear of the unknown in ink paintings.

Ouyang Haoming’s research focuses on the remaining historical memory and collective consciousness of the Slavic nations in Eastern Europe. From 2018 to 2020, he travelled to Moscow, Kiev, Minsk and Belgrade, while filming and interviewing continuously from the perspective of the Other for three years.

Wang Jiaxin focuses on the value of inconspicuous information around her in a state of exception. The disguised, invisible people appear randomly in various scenes, trying to be hidden and expecting to be gazed at in the same way.

Ye Zihang and Xu Yifan rethink about human’s attitude towards nature, inferring to a pessimistic future where human beings will be oblivious to marine life mutations.

Yang Sitao considers the 1kHz sine wave used to mask sensitive words as a "self-discipline voice". He plays it on loops with special cassette tapes, that are placed in endless recitations, wear and tear, until they're replaced...

Yang Zimin thinks that the technological society stereotypes people where its division of roles are like the pons on a chess board, revealing the relationship between database and artificial intelligence.

Starting with 3D images, Yu Hao observes the "shared" life space generated in the virtual world and re-examines the social distance and the substantive meaning of space.

The exhibition incepts from the complexity of “doll”, adopting “Dance!” as a metaphor for the artists' perceptions and reflections, calling for a differentiated existence in each individual, while pointing to a moment of liberation full of possibilities.

Dance! Dance! Doll of Mine!