Antenna Space participates in the Art Basel Miami Beach online viewing room with artists Han Bing and Zhou Siwei, the viewing link: Antenna Space – OVR: Miami Beach

In an era of information explosion and rapid change, epidemic quarantine and isolation has forced individuals to be permanently overloaded with information. Han Bing and Zhou Siwei’s works form romanticized responses to the way information is disseminated in the information age.

Han Bing’s works on paper were originally tools that she used to wipe and dip her palette or brushes that she used while painting on canvas. Past issues of The New York Times coincide with moments of creation, when her palettes or brushes created connections between once important but now out-of date information. These “accidental” paintings transform the temporality of disposable news dailies, echoing the artist’s larger works where she captures an ephemeral nature of posters and scaffolding in the streets by painting them. Han Bing’s refusal to mention more details leaves space for imagination to make abstraction a transcendent and detached force.

Zhou Siwei’s works, on the other hand, are filled with the wit of Chinese literature. The green willow in the breeze are symbols of romance and hope in Chinese literary context, while the pollen-like yellow spots and the dusts seem to carry aroma and evoke a synesthetic sensation. Although these two works appear to depict a kind of technological progress and innovation – such as the arrival of the 5G era – the imagery is that of a boy squatting on the side of the road selling apples in a bamboo basket. He is wasting time on his phone (possibly an iPhone), while the Foxconn factory is failing to recruit workers. The images, symbols and narratives that Zhou’s presented oil paintings are associated are mixed – a dark joke on the capitalist society unfolds reality in colorful imaginations.