Dreaming the Red City
An entirely virtual exhibition that showcases the 3D constructed photos of the ‘Red City’, which visualizes the Chinese social media Little Red Book as a virtual city we lived in. From the point of view and narrative of a resident, the images resemble the compositions of street photography and possess ultra-realistic qualities. They represent the representational and symbolic power of images as well as questioning the blurred boundary between what is ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ in digital age.
3D rendered images and video
August 2022 - November 2022
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Chinese social media Little Red Book, which has 300 million users, is known for its massive sharing of purchase records and lavishing lifestyles. On this platform for strangers to socialize, everyone will appear in the lives of others in the form of a photo and a sentence. On this platform, you will find everyone so beautiful, rich, and happy, it seems that everyone’s lives are forever in a state of unassailable perfection. Using images, they confirmed their authenticity, as if the images were real, and the images objectified their subjective wishes and turned them into symbols that convey information. Together with textual information, they became stained glass and religious totems in the new era.
The photos and text narrates the experience of navigating in the Red City, that is, the social media platform, from a perspective of a user/resident.
