Erewhon is an online exhibited by Geng Dayou. An online art exhibition that’s literally out of this world, Erewhon was built with Unity.
Geng is an artist, curator, writer, and the co-founder of Vrch Studio, an interdisciplinary art, design, and tech collective operating in Shanghai. He was born in Shandong province, south of Beijing along China’s East Coast. Influenced by Eastern and Western philosophies, Erewhon is the climax of the artist’s critical exploration of gaming, theater, and psychoanalysis. As Dayou writes,
As the name suggests, Geng Dayou’s solo exhibition Erewhon presents an upside-down reality. Taking on the history of art and philosophy, the mysticism of the East and the West and mythological metaphors, the artist executes an absurd, nihilistic treatment of digital materials as land art, space and architectural installations in a 250,000 square-metre virtual space of natural and art museum scenes. Geng acts as both curator and game designer, exploring the technical boundaries of the Spatial Web to construct a massive multiplayer online (MMO) theatrical environment for relational aesthetics in which the created simulacrum distorts the viewer’s perception of various clichés. Deploying the digital-readymade, erewhon does not approach reality and the virtual as opposites; rather, it explores and plays with the boundary between them. In this virtual space of the near-infinite means of production, the artist applies creative restrictions according to the material properties in the real world and uses the inversions and limitations of this absurd creative idea to answer the question raised by the context of contemporaneity – that of how to create a new method to show this distorting reality, the erewhon.
LINK: Gen Dayou
