Mengbo 2012

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Opening time:
Duration: 2011.10.29 -- 2011.11.12
Location: 2nd floor exhibition hall of building 1
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Exhibition Preface

Since their birth in 1992, video games and game music have been the main inspiration of Feng Mengbo’s art. As one of China’s earliest artists who applied computer technology, Feng always leads the tide and even before media art became the mainstream he had completed and exhibited many important works, including My Private Album shown in Documenta X in 1997, Q3 shown in Asia-Pacific Triennial in 1999 and others. 2010 witnessed his solo exhibition in PS1 in New York. In the same year, his massively epic video game Long March:Restart was collected by MoMA, and V&A carried out an itinerant exhibition of his new work Not Too Late.

Mortal Combat is a fighting game installation in which Feng uses himself, his relatives and friends as the main characters, all of whom appear on the stage with their real identities, showing rich personality and sense of humor through the ferocious fights. Feng is an enthusiast for Bruce Lee and Street Fighter produced by Capcom, and he intends to explore the experience, emotion and values presented by human beings when they are using their bodies as weapons. The exhibition hall of Today Art Museum will dramatically turn into a rural-urban fringe zone of Beijing, and provides the game with a broad stage with the technology of Holovision.

Q2012 is a new chapter of the award-winning dance mat game installation Ah Q. In the melody of Why Are the Flowers So Red, an endless interactive dancing is put forward by Quake III Arena, a shooting game produced by id. Death changes magically into a rose garden in slow blooming.

Feng created two fonts, Bitmap and Vector, and printed Eye Chart with them. He wants to quicken the weathering process with the aid of digitization, and makes the fonts only retain the most basic elements like those of stone rubbing inscriptions of ancient times, something between the readable and the unreadable. This is an aesthetic experiment of using software to set reading and writing experience exactly as the artist wishes. These two fonts will be released by Founder Electronics Co., Ltd. at the opening ceremony for Feng Mengbo 2012 and they are free for personal use.

Curator

Artist

Feng Mengbo

Opening