The culmination of a three-part project exploring wanderlust in cyber-capitalist culture, filling the Klein bottle (z) { }}} considers the digital artifice of the contemporary tourism industry.

Xuan Ye’s ongoing series The Spectacles Before Us Were Indeed Sublime (2018 – present) uses cruise-ship imagery as a speculative vantage point for reimagining the colonial past. In a new work called Overture (2020), visualizations of movement-tracking data gathered in Belly of the Whale (a previous phase of the series) are recast and projected onto a laser-cut model of the fictional cruise ship “E.” Navigating the matrices of sea, diaspora, and territorial conquest, Overture elicits implications of capitalist control and surveillance. All hitherto existing ocean (2020) constructively interferes with Overture using machine-generated images of seawater. Employing stock photography as its source material, it interrogates the notion of oceanic desire and its mass-media reproduction.

Meanwhile, Wenxin Zhang’s Memory Caustics (2017) reconstructs sites photographed on past travels with 3D computer graphics, transplanting the artist’s experience of time onto a virtual avatar. The psychological landscapes of Zhang’s cosmos venture further with The Inorganic Mysteries (2019 –). Using algorithmic 3D modelling and physics-based rendering, the artist surfs the relationship between human sentience and ritual, pushing the boundaries between organic and inorganic landscapes.

Curated by Belinda Kwan