Heart of the Tin Man brings together works by twelve artists consciously revealing, investigating, or subverting current Internet or technological practices. Drawn predominantly from the M WOODS Collection and the post-internet focus of co-founder Michael Xufu Huang, the exhibition includes virtual reality, digital mechanics, and interactive works to stimulate our senses of sight, smell, touch, and sound, and to register emotion within a contemporary world increasingly governed by algorithms, measurements, and marketing.
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The ubiquity of new technologies in daily life serves as a backdrop for the diverse positions presented by the exhibition. Ryan Gander’s animatronic eyes engage visitors, a work using motion sensors and which has the ability to mechanically produce expressions to reflect nearly every human emotion. Main spaces on the first and second floors offer ruminations on internet culture from Amalia Ulman, a performance artist whose work exploring gender, identity and storytelling has largely been manifest on social media platforms; […]Through this presentation of recent acquisitions and selected loans, an inquiry is opened as to the place for feelings within what we perceive to be technological progress and development. Many of the contributing artists work in pursuit of highlighting something visceral, emotional or human in spite of the cold and scientific materials that are often claimed by the post-internet aesthetic. The struggle of Dorothy’s human-machine hybrid, the Tin Man is evoked as he re-emerges as an emblem of our continued search for meaning.Heart of the Tin Man is the most recent in a series of collection-based exhibitions at M WOODS. It is curated by museum co-founder Michael Xufu Huang, with texts written by Lauren Cornell, Curator and Associate Director of Technology Initiatives at New Museum, New York, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of Serpentine Galleries, London.Curated by Xufu HuangText: M WOODS, BeijingPhotos: M WOODS, Beijing
