DSL Magazine: Issue 11

67 Mostly active in Shanghai, Xu Cong is a ‘post-80’s’ media artist whose work spans the vocabularies of video art, multimedia installations, 3D modeling, sound art and data visualization. Developing his solo career in parallel with his frequent collaborations with Xu Wenkai (Aaajiao) and other artists, Xu Cong exemplifies the shifting role of authorship and creative labor in China’s contemporary media art context. The central conceit of Xu’s artworks is turning the technological gaze on itself, deploying pattern of machinic abstraction to blur the boundary between reality and virtuality. While Xu’s production is inevitably informed by everyday entanglements with the internet and computation at large, many of his works correlate flows of data and algorithmic aesthetics to traditional practices and religious imagery - ranging from the 3Dmodeled foam rocks of the Karesansui 枯山水 (2014) garden to the topological modeling of tattoos visualizing acupuncture points of Body Shadow (2014). Buddha Online (2016) Developed as a modular arrangement of video visualizations, Buddha Online (2016) is Xu Cong’s response to the phenomenon of online shaoxiang [burning incense] - a kind of Buddhist offering performed on purposefully- designed websites where users could burn virtual incense sticks, express thankfulness and leave requests for blessings. As Xu himself explains, the amateur design of these shaoxiang websites (as well as the occasional scams connected to them) prompted him to investigate their use and to research how people were interfacing with religious practice via the internet. The videos composing Buddha Online, screened or projected in different configurations, including ASCII renderings of rotating Buddha statues, collages of web design elements, kaleidoscopic patterns looping across windows and animations morphing between multiple representations of Buddhas. Citing Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Xu correlates the unsurprising presence of religious practices on the internet to the rapid changes experienced by China in recent decades, and takes this phenomenon as one further confirmation of the disappearance of the boundary between online and offline life. 许聪 Xu Cong