失真的马可波罗

与艺术家翻看画册时，聊到马可波罗，马可波罗是谁？大家几乎同时说出了不同的答案：旅行家、瓷砖、游戏里的二线角色。“马可波罗是谁”已经不重要，他成为了数个符号，正在被丰富的同时也不断被分解，各自游离于原型生产出了不同的摹本，出现在印刷品、地板和视频里。摹本被有规律地撒播在各处，人们各取所需，分别消费，在此过程中“马可波罗”变成一个不断失真的“拟像”。

“拟像理论”是鲍德里亚最重要的理论之一，他认为，正是传媒的推波助澜加速了从现代生产领域向后现代拟像(Simulacra)社会的堕落。而当代社会，则是由大众媒介营造的一个仿真社会。本次展览的艺术家大多都是出生于九十年代后期，是与自媒体共同成长的一代，他们（她）以不同方式回应了“拟像社会”的视觉立场。在当下，或许马可波罗的拟像无处不在。大量失真的信息和碎片化的认知方式把人们导向误读。问题在于如何处理和使用这些充满噪点的信息？能否在众多差异和踪迹之中建立自己的真实判断？也许是当今时代发出的诘问。

Vague Marco Polo

While leafing through the albums of painting with artists, we talked about Marco Polo. But who is Marco Polo? Different people can provide different answers almost at the same time: a traveller, a brand of ceramic, and a second-line role in electronic games. The answer of “who is Marco Polo” may be no longer important, because the name or the image, being enriched while being continually split, has become numerous symbols, respectively dissociating from the original archetype and becoming different copies, being used in print products, ceramic designs, and videos. Those copies have been regularly scattered everywhere, enabling people to consume for what they need, and in this process “Marco Polo” has become a vaguer and vaguer “simulacrum”. ***

Simulacra Theory is one of the most important theories of Baudrillard, who believes it is just the mass media that has accelerated the deterioration from modern field of production towards post-modern simulacra society, and the contemporary society in nature is a simulated one built by the mass media. The artists involved in this exhibition were mostly born in the late 1990s and they have grown up together with the we-media. In these works, they respond with different modes to the visual stance of the “Simulacra Society”. At present, maybe the simulacra of Marco Polo can be seen everywhere, and vast vague information and fragmented cognitive styles may also misinterpret people’s orientation. However, the question still lies in the methods we use not only to dispose and utilize the information that is full of noisy points, but also to build our own real judgement in the midst of numerous discrepancies and traces. Perhaps this is also the question put forward by the present era. ***

展览团队

2023.12.11