Participatory Pop-up Show: "Labor" at "Chewing Monster" Organic Farm
NEW YORK, June 21, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Chewing Monster is an immersive and participatory pop-up game arcade created by Chewing Theory, a newly launched creative brand dedicated to sensory experience, cultural communication, and human-machine interaction through interdisciplinary art programs. As the brand's initial project, Chewing Monster explores intercultural, intergroup, intermedia, and "interspecies" communication in the post-human era from within the imagined context of an "organic monster farm", where a mother monster called "Chewy" with self-regenerative ability indwells and produces cognition-enhancing edibles from the visitor's input of digitalized human behavioral and emotional data. The exhibition brings together innovative ideas from the worlds of art, design, digital programming, gaming, and dining, showcasing to visitors an alluring world of intense visual, cerebral, and sensory pleasures.
Chewing is the first step in digestion, an intimate act in which what is alien to our physical bodies is internalized and incorporated. This act could also metaphorically apply to the process of conceiving and pondering intellectual concepts. "Monster", derived from the Latin monstrum, meaning "portent and the unnatural," usually emerges from the ether of fantasy, fear, and, many times, the unknown. Therefore, the expression "chewing monster" bestows a concrete form upon the embracement of the unknown, which has been an overarching topic of the previous practices of HE Wei, the Art Director of the exhibition and co-founder of HE+HU Creative Collective, the predecessor of Chewing Theory.
The narrative of the exhibition resembles "a sustainable agricultural system" that combines farming with ecological tourism. The entire space is divided into three sections: shelter, dining hall, and store.
"The shelter" is a place where visitors can gain "an immersive farming experience" by "petting" the mother monster and "interacting" with the facilities in three respective "bio-labs," where the activities of feeding, milking, and grooming take place. As visitors enter the gallery space, they will be asked to pluck a card off from a large cylindrical sculpture that resembles the body of Chewy, the farm's first monster inhabitant. This card functions as the key to the facilities in each bio-lab and registers the times of the visitor's interaction, which will constitute the unique formula of a monster baby "born" by the end of each visit. The video parts at the bio-labs come from the works of three respective artists. Cao Yuxi (JAMES)'s RedTide reveals the magic reaction inside the monster's milk. In a hologram display powered by the monster's "excreta" float the 3D images by Andrea K. Macias-Yanez of webpage-mapped herbariums. Aya Kawabata presents a whimsical world in which monster babies are conceived and hatched after their mother is fed.
"The dining hall" provides an authentic and entertaining "farm-to-table experience" open to audience participation. Tyler Henry, Miri Park, and Nitcha Fame Tothong have created an experimental arcade game, Lick It, in which the visitor controls a tongue-shaped joystick and steers it to "lick" the ice cream on the screen before it melts. Salad Simulator by Sierra Ortega is a virtual-to-physical experience where visitors are invited to fill a questionnaire listed with monstrous ingredients and a cook standing aside simultaneously makes customized salad dishes based on the indicated choices.
"The store" is where visitors can discover and shop a quirky and unique range of monster-related products and supplies. All who "labor" at the three bio-labs of "the shelter" will be granted a certificate of live birth of a monster baby in acknowledgment of their contribution. However, only a small proportion of visitors who stand out in their performance, evaluated by their times of interaction that are recorded in the card they carry around, will be rewarded with special gifts.
Chewing Monster, through the intimate act of chewing, attempts to bring forward an unconventional tale of "interspecies romance," a theme that has been integral to many cultures for centuries but purposefully suppressed or altered in recent decades to make less "creepy." In both Western and Eastern mythologies and folklores, humankind's commingling with monsters, beasts, and shape-shifting gods is part of human heritage. The recent revival of monstrous aesthetics, that is, the latest Oscar winner, The Shape of Water, and Gucci's recent "cross-species" collection, had transcended those ancient stories and proposed a way humans situate themselves in a post-human stage where what is non-human and beyond human acquires increasing legitimacy. Chewing Monster, following the same strain, addresses this question by inviting visitors to take on a "visceral encounter" with what can seem atypical, anomalous, or flawed to a normalizing eye. Additionally, the exhibition discusses another layer aligned with the post-human era: the digital domains of contemporary life where our input of information is constantly consumed and absorbed by an invisible "monster," usually referred as a hidden virtual host or a main engine in real life, while we, in turn, count on the feedback it produces to construct our self-image, social status, and networks in both virtual and physical worlds. Of course, it sounds terrifying to be dissolved into the vast outside world of data and code. However, the symbiosis between humankind and the cybernetic, also a relationship this pop-up mainly portrays, gradually seems to be becoming an inevitable trend. There might always be more curiosity and excitement than fears as we face the alluring world of the unexplored.
Chewing Monster
Curated by Chewing Theory
Art Director: HE Wei
Participating Artists: Andrea Macias-Yanez | Aya Kawabata | Cao Yuxi (JAMES) | HE Wei | Sierra Ortega | Tyler Henry | Miri Park | Nitcha Fame Tothong
Time: June 14 - June 24, 2018
Venue: Red Brick Space, 198 Allen Street, NYC, 10002
Opening Reception: Friday, June 14, 6-9PM; Press/VIP hour from 3-6PM
Website: www.heandhu.com/chewing-theory/
About Chewing Theory
Chewing Theory is a newly-launched creative brand by HE Wei, the member if NEW INC and co-founder of the HE+HU Creative Collective. Consistent with the collective's previous endeavor, the brand is dedicated to sensory experience, cultural communication, and human-machine interaction through interdisciplinary art programs, combining sculpture, installation, design, technology, performance, and food to create a participatory art event. We aim to explore the balance among space, art, and the digital (virtual) world that at the moment intersects closely with the physical one.
About HE Wei
Born in 1986, HE is the co-founder of HE+HU Creative Collective, founder of Chewing Theory, and also the first Chinese member of NEW INC, the world's first museum-led incubator on art, design, and technology hosted at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Using "play" as a methodology, HE attempts to evoke peoples' disturbing innocence while sharing love to eliminate prejudice. As a result, HE's work can be described as a form of social practice and, in particular, a performance about communication, social environment, virtuality, and dehumanization and rehumanization.
HE is one of the founding members of China Programs Advisory Committee in the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the partnership advisors of the Museum of Food and Drinks (MOFAD), the first New York food museum. HE has worldwide exhibition experiences in North America, Europe and Asia, with his works shown at Milan EXPO design weeks, NYCxDESIGN, Grand Central, the New Museum, and Asia Contemporary Art Week (ACAW), etc.
Team
Art Director: HE Wei
Executive Director: Tommy Chen
Technical Director: Debbie Zeng
Project Manager: Yangxingyue Wang
Senior Engineer: Rishi Zhao
Technical Team: Chris Hu | Chun Wang | Lingping Zeng
Fiber Designer Duo: Dili Zhu | Lei Li
Space Design: Afoam
Graphic Designer: Annnj | Zenghui Lin
Media Strategist (U.S.): Judy Cai
Media Strategist (China): Yiwei Zhang
Advisor: Sherry Tao | Wenrui Fan | Peng Zhang
Photography: RV Studio
Video: EI Studio
Project Assistant: Meihan Guo | Chuqi Wang
SOURCE Chewing Theory
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