Future as Manufactured History: Garden of Earthly Delights by Zhou Xiaohu

We are excited to announce Future as Manufactured History, the fourteenth online screening in the Cosmos Cinema educational film program as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale. This week we present Garden of Earthly Delights (2016, 15 mins), a film by Zhou Xiaohu that will be available through February 23 on the Cosmos Cinema website.

Having adopted computers as an artistic tool in the late 1990s, Zhou Xiaohu is a pioneering figure in contemporary Chinese art. His performances, installations, sculptures, photographs, videos, and animations provoke the kind of bewilderment that is closely related to wonder, forcing viewers to question their senses and reexamine their assumptions. With a recent focus on the interplay between moving images and material objects, Zhou examines how truth and history are manufactured in a digital age.

For Garden of Earthly Delights (2016), which is exhibited as part of the Of Time and Space section at the 14th Shanghai Biennale, Zhou collaborated with a puppet-theater troupe from Taishun. Set between the idyllic landscape of south Zhejiang and its decaying industrial zones, the film’s voiceover adapts the quotations of Zhuangzi, whose paradoxes are prompts to philosophical speculation. The marionette figures allude to the Daoist myth of the Eight Immortals as well as the eponymous hellscape by Dutch Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch also lends a title to Ship of Fools (2018), Zhou’s sculptural installation on view at the Power Station of Art alongside his film. The installation, which features the marionette figures on a boat, transposes the eight immortals from The Garden of Earthly Delights from the filmic space and into the space of the museum. A motor shakes the boat that carries them on their passage across sea, though whether the passengers are in the grip of divine revelation, delirium, or madness is left to the viewer to decide.

Don’t miss this magical work, available on cosmoscinema.art until February 23.

The Cosmos Cinema website is where the histories of cinema excavated in weekly screenings at the Power Station of Art meet the moving-image works of artists represented in the 14th Shanghai Biennale. Each week, in alignment with one of the nine thematic sections that structure Cosmos Cinema, a selected moving-image work by one its artists is presented online with new contextualizing information. The Cosmos Cinema website features works by artists including Itziar Barrio, Yin-Ju Chen, Saodat Ismailova, Deimantas Narkevičius, Liu Xin, Maha Maamoun, Agnieszka Polska, Raqs Media Collective, Ho Rui An, Liu Yujia, He Zike, Julieta Aranda, Jakub Štourač and Anna Lunakova, and Zhou Xiaohu, among many others.

Cosmos Cinema Educational Program and online platform are made possible by .ART Registry.

It is also co-sponsored by Aesop and Humanities Research Center, Division of Arts and Humanities, and DKUNST Art on Campus of Duke Kunshan University.