Liu Jiaying (CryptoZR), by her practice in the field of blockchain, ends up forming an interesting whole by virtue of artistic representation.
This can be seen as a result of the concept of artefacts (readymades) since the Dadaist movement, to the wider scientific, economic, and communal activities based on rules, challenges, and interactions.
As Duchamp’s work challenges the art system, aesthetics and inherent notions of what art might be? Does Liu Jiaying’s work also continue to suggest the operation of art and the contemporary society, what is possible for art to be! For example, in her works such as ‘More is Better’, ‘Small Goal’, ‘100,000 Billboards’ and ‘TopBidder’, The interaction of multiple people involved in the financial system and virtual currencies built with the help of different blockchain contracts. Never before have ideas been so involved in the workings of far-reaching societies. Understanding how Duchamp’s creations, for example, changed one’s understanding of aesthetics and materiality is now over a century since the rise of Dada. Liu Jiaying’s work is a much tighter synthesis of emerging media, artistic ideas and social operations, directly acting in the present.
It is also because of the involvement of financial activities and social media in everyday life that art is able to live in the minds of people with a more immaterial character, and to intervene in life in a concrete way.
Does Liu Jiaying inject humanity into the blockchain idea, for example? In addition to the sense of play, the anonymous majority of the population involved, there is the portrayal and provocation of the human mentality, reminding once again how the human being, in the concept of economic activity, is shaped and, following this concept, calculates all aspects of life. Are the values of what is valid, valuable, transformable, everything being calculated according to this logic, also provoked and subverted in her art? When greed becomes the driving force behind the workings of society, and thus introduces the idea of the ‘wealth of nations’ or ‘evolutionary biology’, human, psychological activity is also within the scope of her work. The expansion of art has accompanied the evolutionary human understanding of the self.
Is art psychological? Could art be a dependency under the geological concept of the Anthropocene? Liu Jiaying’s works also have their concrete practice of materiality, from Chinese painting, oil painting, sculpture, virtual reality, screen and other concrete media to find a communicative and comprehensible reference for the concept, completing the long-lasting relationship between materiality and human co-existence.
I have mentioned the concepts of pro-media and anti-media, and in Liu Jiaying’s creations and concepts, the two merge into one, with the practical use of technology, change and reflection forming the driving force of her artistic creation. And the exploration of the boundaries of art allows her to subvert the dilemma of conforming to the user of media technology. On the contrary, her entire project’s experimentation with the medium is close to life, close to everyday matter. For example, the specific contract application in Liu Jiaying’s blockchain system will eventually meet with people in space, conception – art – work, reversible intellect, emotion, and the discovery of the beauty of art, can we also understand another dimension of seeing the world in it?
The exhibition is entitled “Cookie Cookie”, which aims to invoke the role of social issues and alludes to Liu Jiaying’s work “Small Goal”. The use of cookies in English, a system of definitions borrowed from internet technology, and the insignificant biscuit in everyday life, has a double semantic meaning.
Curator, Li Zhenhua
March 24, 2021
