Ding Shiwei, Specter’s Ventriloquism, at D-02, 798 West Street, Beijing

“Specter’s Ventriloquism” by Ding Shiwei, at D-02, 798 West Street, 798 Art District, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 13/07/2024 – 31/08/2024.

Hunsand Space (Beijing) presented a solo exhibition by Ding Shiwei titled Specter’s Ventriloquism on July 13, 2024. The artist has created five new works using media such as video installations, thermosensitive materials, AI-generated imagery, and simulated flesh, tailored specifically to the unique location and internal spatial structure of the gallery. These works conjure an apocalyptic scene steeped in authoritarian religious overtones. Yet, within this apocalyptic setting, Ding Shiwei posits the existence of Frankenstein-esque beings alongside us. Though lacking the eight-foot stature, these entities are omnipresent, embedded within human nerve endings, subcutaneous tissues, and ideologies, awaiting your invocation, ever ready to manifest. Our communication with them is exclusively through “ventriloquism,” a language that perpetually evolves. The small exhibition space at the second-floor entrance forms the first chapter of the exhibition, where the artist imagines a doomsday “trial” for Sam Altman, whose coarse-pored skin section pulses with a cryptic manifesto. In the sunken main hall and on the stepped podium of the second chapter, a single, fearful eye watches over a post-human, Anthropocene revolutionary remnant square, rendered in bluescreen color. A few indistinguishable reeds forge hope amidst the cracks of history. Every corner of the exhibition – the eyes glowing under firelight, the severed metallic serpent body, the six-fingered iron fist, the crumbling flag, and the dissected monument – whispers a Luddite murmur around the neck, ghostly and persistent. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin’s proclamation in 1754, “Join, or Die,” has become prophetic: if you do not become a ghost, or even create ghosts, what awaits you is but death. “Ventriloquism” here transforms into a lingua franca, the nerve endings of the eyeballs speak of a grand tranquility akin to tremors.