David Douard and Liu Shiyuan: Optimized Heart

From March 26 to June 25, 2023, UCCA Dune presents Optimized Heart, a dual solo exhibition by David Douard (b. 1983, Perpignan, France) and Liu Shiyuan (b. 1985, Beijing). Through more than 30 multimedia works that span drawing, photography, video, sculpture, and installation, this exhibition invites the artists to discover heretofore unexplored connections and shared inspirations that link their respective creative frameworks. Optimized Heart features recent pieces by both artists, including new UCCA commissions, alongside earlier works. Although Douard and Liu come from different backgrounds and creative contexts, both use multimedia artworks to express their personal perception of the contemporary world, fostering reflection on how individuals may free their minds from the constraints of “self-optimization” and “psychopolitics.” Optimized Heart: David Douard / Liu Shiyuan is curated by UCCA Curator Yan Fang. 

In the new material politics of the post-pandemic era, humans exist in a symbiotic relationship with all the other ecological participants of this crowded planet. As new technologies depart from their original intended uses, they have begun to assume a more dominant role in society, obsessively pursuing rationality and optimization. In turn, the logic of personal optimization has embedded itself into the contemporary mind, indirectly governing exhausted human lives through what Byung-Chul Han dubs “psychopolitics.” Already lodged deep in our emotions, psychopolitics use psychological programing to maintain the status quo, leading individuals to extract happiness and achievement from self-exploitation. There is a now pressing need to build a new ecology that is wiser and more altruistic—not necessarily the most optimized. How might we disarm psychopolitics and discover a new technological ecosystem built upon an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things? Might art be able to help us move beyond anthropocentrism and optimization?

This discourse forms the context for the artworks of David Douard and Liu Shiyuan. Closely associated with the Post-Internet art movement, Douard often sources materials from the networked world and anonymous members of the public, working with sound, video, poetry, and text from everyday life. Exploring the relationship between user and machine, he employs sculpture and video installations to create a fluid social space and imagine potentials of resistance. Commissioned by UCCA, Douard’s new installation O’t’kappa (2022) stands like an all-seeing monster in the center of urban life, its apocalyptic aesthetic connecting reality and the dark web. It chews up and spits out all the hidden, lowly things of this mortal plane, out of which grows a tender, beautiful “flower of evil” that castigates the real world. In the installation Canary feel it (2022), the half-beast, half-cage form recalls the figure of a masked animal trainer, which frequently appeared in the artist’s early works. It marches forward unimpeded, but its mission is also its cage—the paradox of modern human existence.

Similarly, Liu Shiyuan considers the complex ethical questions posed by a globalized world. Through her image-based drawings, photographic collages, videos, and installation works, she interrogates the impact of consumer culture as well as how constantly changing technology infiltrates private spaces, voicing a serious concern for the fate of humanity. In the new UCCA-commissioned video installation Green Blanket Dream (2023), dream-like scenes depict how individual lives and the world as a whole pulse in sync. From a feminist perspective, Liu tells of the mutual emotional care between humans and their environment. Meanwhile, From Whatever to Happiness (2023), a site-specific collaboration between Liu and Kristian Mondrup Nielsen, activates the museum space as a new context—through an imaginary forest habitat, they offer the viewer a meditative space.

Optimized Heart represents a hard look at the contemporary world through an interdisciplinary understanding of the hidden connections between the two artists’ modes of thought. The exhibition invites the viewer to consider how the transmission of information, consumption of images, and control of the digital world shape perception and emotion in social life, reflecting on the shape of the earthly forms we rely upon for survival.