WORK / LIVE 干活 Wei Chengcheng 魏成成, Li Zhan 李占

For this exhibition at Times Museum Guangzhou, Wei Chengcheng and Li Zhan, two of the most creative people involved in our department in Beijing, presented a retrospective of their earlier works together with some new ideas.

With Alessandro Rolandi, Wei Chengcheng re-staged the performance Mirror, here in its third edition. He also created a durational performance with a dancer and influencer he had met online. Together they choreographed a scene in which a diligent worker on an imaginary assembly line is constantly disturbed by a provocative dancer who tries to make him stop working and dance instead. The everyday gestures of work performed in the void, the cheesy pop hits and the seemingly impossible interaction between the two create a moment of suspension: through humour, we witness a tragicomic attempt to escape alienation by repeating these basic stereotypes. Wei Chengcheng also made a large wall drawing with his imaginary calligraphy and showed the white edition of his sculpture Evil Lotus.

Li Zhan chose to show her first design collection of hypoallergenic jewellery and used the occasion to launch her online brand, Crow. The museum kept her installation on view for a couple of months and promoted her new brand through its own channels.

The department also showed a series of handmade loudspeakers designed in the Beijing factory, carrying sentences and thoughts collected from workers and managers over the years. The sentences could be heard as recordings and taken home as small stickers, designed with the white characters on red background of traditional propaganda banners. This project of spoken and printed sentences is called Slogan.

Times Museum Guangzhou – Detour in Times