Ephemeral Architectures:
Early video and performance art from China

Nov 09–Dec 08, 2023

Ephemeral Architectures: early video and performance art from China is a pop-up exhibition featuring early video and time-based media art from China. Artists included in the exhibition employ video and sound as means to remember spaces, movements, and moments amidst a time of profound socio-economic transformation within China around the turn of the new millennium.

Staged across the University of Chicago campus, this exhibition interrogates intersections between early moving image art and the physical precarities of public spaces in which many of these works were made. While artists like Liang Yue explore issues of ephemerality within changing urban spaces of her native Shanghai, Kan Xuan, Zhu Jia, and Yang Zhenzhong’s works emphasize evanescence through various modes of repetition along with direct employment of the camera’s lens. Collectively, these artists all share an interest in creating work that contemplates our everyday relationships with time, space, and memory.