WORK / LIVE 干活 Group Exhibition at CAM Museum Hangzhou

Workers/Artists Mrs. Wu Shuqing, Mr. Kong Fanglong and Mr. Bai Jihong, have been invited to show their creations at the Award Winning Emerging Curators Exhibition "Cosmos and Hearth, living together in the Age of Technology" at CAM Museum in Hangzhou.

 

Here the curatorial team comment on Mr. Bai Jihong's ongoing 100m long calligraphy scroll which is working on at the factory in Beijing:

 

"While waiting for oil to be pumped into an actuator, Bai Jihong transcribes classical Chinese poetry on a piece of cardboard laid across his workbench. Picking up a calligraphy brush once again, he remarks, "It’s been seventeen years since I last practiced calligraphy!" Though he has lived in Beijing for over two decades, his heart has never left his hometown, Baijia Village in Gansu. Conversations with him always gravitate back to the people and events of that place; stories and memories are recounted and reconstructed time and again.

He has been capturing these fragments on a hundred-meter-long scroll, a work that remains an ongoing process."

 

Here the curatorial team's press release for the exhibition:

 

Reaffirming the significance of the "hearth fire" is not an attempt to retreat into a closed, conservative, or archaic notion of home. Rather, it seeks to trigger a micro-level mechanism of "place-making" from within the fissures of macro-structures. The "hearth fire" signifies gathering, lingering, and care, it is an embodied, relationship-oriented technical practice. Through such practice, individuals can reclaim the power to define and interpret their surroundings, transforming cold, abstract "space" into a "place" that is tangible and inhabitable.

This serves as a modest form of resistance against accelerationism: it reclaims abstract, decontextualized environments, turning them back into shared moments in time and spaces for narrative. Through the medium of art, we wrest space from the inertia of accelerationism, redirecting it toward coexistence, care, and interdependence. Against the backdrop of this grand, sweeping era, we seek to reaffirm that even when caught in the torrent, people can, by choosing to linger and connect, rekindle a "hearth-fire home" of dignity and warmth from within the heart of a cold, impersonal system.

 

In today’s highly urbanized and technologized global production landscape, production structures and technical systems are continuously reshaping human lifestyles. While platform-based work, fluid labor, and digital technologies have rendered social operations more efficient, they have also made labor relations increasingly flexible and fragmented. Human connections are now forged primarily through function and efficiency, leaving a void of spaces where people might linger and share experiences; human existence is effectively deconstructed and embedded within isolated, functional systems. As individuals are subsumed into these highly instrumentalized social structures, do there still exist spaces and practices capable of reorganizing experience and fostering genuine connection?

 

The title of this exhibition draws upon the conceptual framework proposed by Yi-Fu Tuan in Cosmos and Hearth, re-examining two extreme scales of contemporary existence: the "Cosmos" and the "Hearth." Here, the "Cosmos" does not refer to the starry sky in a natural sense, nor to a metaphysical order; rather, it denotes a sociological scale, a totalizing system composed of global industrial production, the flow of capital, logistics networks, technological infrastructures, and institutional frameworks. In this sense, the "Cosmos" is a highly abstract, "placeless" structure, governed by the principles of efficiency, calculability, and fluidity, which transforms the world into a totality that can be managed, replicated, and accelerated.

 

Within the context of globalisation, individual existence remains suspended across three scales: the World, the Hearth, and the Self. The "World" corresponds to the macro-system constructed by capital and technology, a system that is ever-expanding, yet often devoid of human warmth. The "Self," meanwhile, is compelled to constantly adapt, deconstruct, and reassemble itself amidst a highly competitive and unstable environment. The "Hearth", or "home", serves as the vital intermediary between the two; it is neither an escape from the world nor a retreat into the self, but rather a micro-order that emerges from within the macro-structure, a space where new forms of practice can take root.

 

This imbalance of scales has become increasingly pronounced in contemporary society. While digital networks, platform systems, and highly organized production structures continue to expand the reach of human connectivity, the physical spaces for gathering in everyday life are steadily diminishing. Amidst the process of urbanization and ongoing migration, a vast number of workers have flocked to rapidly growing cities. Their lives are often fragmented across factories, construction sites, rented dwellings, and transit networks. Work hours are strictly regimented, while time for rest is compressed into mere fleeting moments, just enough to recover one’s physical strength. Within this highly instrumentalized and transient social structure, people are connected to one another, yet find it difficult to truly put down roots. Individuals are subsumed into a vast, sprawling system, while the "hearth fire" of everyday life, the warmth of a settled, human existence, grows increasingly rare