Intellectual Structures: Trigger, Judgment, and Decision智性結構：觸發、判斷與決策

25 April – 6 June 2026

策展文 / 齊 超

時隔兩年，由我再次策劃，藝術家大志、丁鴻丹、經傲、梁遠葦、文爵、徐渠參展的「智性結構：觸發、判斷與決策」此刻正呈現於亞紀畫廊。朋友們，不知你近來是否在工作與生活中大量使用AI？每天使用多久？排斥它嗎？你認為多久以後AI能取代自己？想到未來或會因此失業，你恐慌嗎？身處時代洪流的十字路口，關於AI、算法、Token、芯片以及社會變革，有太多需要深思。

而在本次展覽中，我無意討論AI本身，參展的六位藝術家也非AI領域的創作者。但設計師、行政文員、法律助理甚至程序員群體的日漸焦慮是不爭事實，人的價值在今日應當被謹慎審視。二戰後，甚至從杜象1917年的作品《泉》開始，當代藝術比歷史上任何一個時刻或流派都更仰仗觀念，而觀念的產生需要思想，思想則源於大腦——這個迄今仍未被科技所破解的複雜精密器官。

因此，本次展覽更意欲展現的是關於藝術家在思想與智識方面的結構性模型。「智性結構」即創作者將靈感轉化為作品的神經算法——觸發是感官與知識的點火瞬間，判斷是經驗與超驗的算力競賽，決策是理性與感性的終極定論，最終焠鍊出不可複製的藝術真實，其核心是人腦獨有的思維路徑，如基因般定義創作成果。

Curatorial Essay / Qi Chao

Each Modern and I present Intellectual Structures, a group exhibition featuring DAZHI, Ding Hongdan, Jing Ao, Liang Yuanwei, Wenjue, and Xu Qu, two years after our prior collaboration. Instead of directly engaging with the growing impact of artificial intelligence on labor, perception, and value, the exhibition probes a deeper question: what aspects of human thought and artistic creation remain uniquely human?

This exhibition focuses on the intellectual structures of artists, not AI itself. Contemporary art, heavily reliant on concepts since World War II, originates from the complex human brain. The exhibition aims to display the neural algorithms by which artists transform inspiration into works. This involves triggering senses and knowledge, judgment as a competition between experience and transcendence, and decision-making as the conclusion of reason and emotion, forming unique artistic truths rooted in the human brain’s thought process.

Ding Hongdan: Still Mad

29 November 2024 – 25 January 2025

MAMOTH

Rendered in bright, glossy oils and stylised strokes, Ding Hongdan’s collection of paintings en masse is a dip into image-obsessed youth. Spectating within the multi-tableaux of bright, bold figures drawn from the artist’s own friendship group as well as internet sources, the effect is a striking psychedelic whirlwind of overwhelm. In this way, it echoes internet culture and young people striking out who want the freedom to pose, play, dress up and come together in party and fashion subcultures. They perform their individuality in flashy fits and show off to the ever-present lens, and as such they make different choices and inhabit different subjectivities to their elders. As Ding notes, the collective endeavour by friendship groups of young people in China to leave their hometowns for the city lights, or leave China for the hedonism of the West, is their way of freeing themselves from tradition or the expectation of parents or previous generations. She sees the paintings as a celebration of friends, playfulness and joy for London – something the city’s regular grey inhabitants may often omit.

Motifs appear in some of the works, for example the ‘ghost’ in Stranger which she says is the spectre of the diaspora and the desire to feel liberated. China, having changed hugely over the last twenty years with the advent of the internet and more access to Western culture, still has limitations on what can be painted and exhibited. The artist’s quasi self-portraits in which she inserts herself into the canon of Western art history, depict her victorious on horseback, or reclining as Venus. These will not be exhibited in her home city of Beijing, where in the 798 Art District images of breasts have to be blurred by mosaics, much like Instagram’s own content rules. She notes that Chinese art does not have a history of realistic figure painting, so this is something that captures her imagination, particularly in the large free galleries at the heart of London. As an artist in residence here for a short period, she inhabits a kind of diasporic elation when she’s in the city, with the opportunity to express personal and sexual freedoms.

Ding cites Chinese female artist Pan Yuliang, who studied in Paris in the 1920s, as one of the first Chinese artists to go to Europe. Pan Yuliang painted many nudes of herself and other women and then returned to China to experience what might later be termed slut- shaming and general vilification. ‘It is over one hundred years since the nude came to China, but it’s still a very sensitive subject,’ Ding reflects. The artist’s own process of representing herself this way, as with many female artists before her, has allowed her to learn and to embody a truer sense of self. In the post-pandemic era, China’s ideological control is becoming increasingly strict, and artists’ freedom of creation is reportedly being confined. Ding notes, ‘where you paint or live is not important, the most important thing is the freedom of creation, independent personality and critical spirit.’

In Still Mad, astride a horse, paintbrushes in hand, the artist rears above her own disembodied head – a reference to the part of her she is letting go. Ding suggests the woman is always sacrificed or saved in narrative and representation, so here she is depicted in a position of dominance, still nude, and in the power stance typical to men of the time and taken from Rubens’ Saint George and the Dragon – another layer of colonial and historical conflation that buttresses her slippery palimpsest of visual quotations. While women rode side-saddle – often linked to them preserving their modesty and for young unmarried women the sanctity of their hymen – men charged into battle to live and die by the sword. Here Ding chooses the power of paint through self- representation and self-actualisation over the sword.

The canon of Western visual art that privileges the problematic male gaze, as revised by many feminist artists and covered in detail by theorists like Griselda Pollock and Linda Nochlin, is present in the artist’s preoccupation yet far from formulaic; she further layers in a conversation on youth, identity, cultural history, race and political and personal autonomy. Ding explains her interest in the image of the goddess/woman/ whore archetype that continues to titillate and trouble, even in the perceived freedoms of an increasingly pop and image-obsessed culture. In Caught by the Tides she represents her friend and fellow artist Li Hei Di as a gangster in a still reminiscent of the film Young and Dangerous. The works are feminist, triumphant, joyful and, not least of All, funny. In Hello, there the oversize artist gazes into the river and into the portal of her phone at the same time, her butt poking out from the river. Cartoonish cats pose around her, sourced from memes half- recognisable to the chronically online. Cuteness and uncanniness clash in the primary palette. In the work Y2K girls with pink hair and bikinis pose with small round blank labels on their upper arms, ‘like you get on fruit’. Ding keeps them empty so that ‘they cannot be labelled or owned’.

Other subtler touches are laced throughout, distortions on image representation, questioning where we situate ourselves in relation to these media-savvy young people. Delicate strokes of line work echo the traditional painting techniques of traditional artists such as Pan Yuliang and the formal style she was trained in, which are usually reserved for ink and here she renders in the Western medium of oils, exploiting a clash in both imagery and zeitgeist and a conflation of mediums between traditional and future-facing.

Text by Susanna Davies – Crook

A Cloud in Trousers: Painting Today

26 October 2024 – 5 January 2025
West Bund Museum | Gallery 0

Meet the Contemporary Chinese Artists Reimagining Painting Traditions

The West Bund Museum and Pond Society jointly present the exhibition A Cloud in Trousers: Painting Today. As the first collaboration between the West Bund Museum and a local Chinese art institution, this exhibition continues Gallery 0’s commitment to research and support for contemporary artistic practices. Bringing together 23 artists from different generations and backgrounds, the exhibition explores the interplay between figuration and abstraction, tradition and modernity. With distinctive personal styles, these artists express their reflections on the present across various temporal coordinates, offering the public a first-hand experience of the diversity in contemporary Chinese painting. The exhibition will be open to the public free of charge from October 26, 2024, to January 5, 2025.

In contrast, Ding Hongdan, the youngest artist in the exhibition, paints a different picture of living in a cosmopolitan city. In 70 Queen’s Road Central (2024), she captures two fashionable women in conversation on the corner of a building in one of Hong Kong’s bustling streets, showing city life in its never-ending movement through the high-contrast colors reminiscent of digital flash photography. “I’d often visit Hong Kong because it was close to Guangzhou, where I grew up,” said Ding. “I was always intrigued by this place that existed in the gap between Eastern and Western cultures.”

While one woman is caught mid-sentence, the other is absorbed by her explosive thoughts, only revealed through the graphic symbols that surround her and recall those often found in comics. “Living in this gap leads people to struggle with reality and are left with uncertainty and confusion instead,” she added.

Text by Sara Quattrocchi Febles