EVENT: GTOPIA: GAME SITE (DECEMBER 30 2021 - MARCH 13 2022, SHANGHAI)
GTOPIA: GAME SITE
December 30 2021 - March 13 2022
TANK ART CENTER, Shanghai
2380 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District, Shanghai
Producer: Yang Jing, Consultant: Li Zhenhua, Curators: Liu Xiaoyi, Li Ruixuan, Li Zhen
Yang Jing is the curator of Gtopia: Game Site, an ambitious exhibition about art and games at TANK Shangai, which is still running at time of writing. The show features almost twenty indie and alternative video games installaed in the futuristic gallery space of the TANK Art Center. As Jing writes, so far more than ten thousand people visited the exhibition, which will close in mid-March. Here's the full description:
Before discussing games in the abstract and broad sense, Gtopia: Game Site tries to scrutinize the games in the concrete, real historical context, dismantling them one by one as information processors and cultural entertainment bodies. At the same time, the exhibition also extends the field of research and exhibition, pulling the lens back farther to include the people, organizations and systems that make games: the R&D company (Coconut Island), the independent media (indienova) that silently cultivate the ecology, and the social platform (TapTap) that directly links games and people through arithmetic. Today everyone is talking about games and all the buzzwords related to games, but we are not talking about the same thing. We start with a certain game, a certain type of game, a certain era of game, and we soon find out that they are separated from each other by mountains and seas. (You can read more here)
Below are a few images from the exhibition:
Yang Jing is a curator and researcher of game art, PhD from School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. She curated "Game Symbiosis" at Shenzhen Animation Biennale, which is the first time in China to present independent games in a contemporary art style, and "Forgotten Engineer", created in collaboration with French contemporary art collection institution DSL, which is the first experimental work combining art collection and video game in the world, has won many awards in the game industry and contemporary art field, and has been exhibited in art academies and art museums at home and abroad. Her academic works have been presented at DIGRA World Video Games Annual Conference, ISEA International Symposium on Electronic Art, Linz Electronic Art Festival in Austria, Christie's Global Art Education Forum, Documenta seminar in Kassel, etc.
LINK: Gtopia: Game Site (all photos courtesy of Yang Jing)