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The Open Yoke

This is a part of ongoing practice-based research 'Inhuman Horizon'.

Continuing the research into contemporary violence and the concept of the Inhuman Horizon, I seek to construct a space that invites viewers to develop a new organ of perception for critiquing contemporary technology and the systems of violence it sustains. At the core of this inquiry is the representation of the technological legacy from wars—not merely as tools, but as preemptive threats that support an ideology wherein technological development becomes self-perpetuating and self-justifying.

 

I think this ideological paradigm depends on the retreat and vanishing of traditional violence from visual reality and the concealment of contemporary systemic violence simoutaneously. It is not technology itself that acts, but the ideology rooted in its destructive potential—especially as shaped through modern warfare.

 

My practice critiques this ideological framework and the contamination it produces. Central to my work are automated devices, metal structures, and heteromorphic meat-like forms, which collectively summon a return of explicit, stylized violence—drawing on the bloody aesthetics of B-movies—not into life, but into art. This interiorized, speculative space reimagines and contains violence, forming what he calls the Inhuman Horizon—a site not only for the presentation of art, but for the production of critical perception itself.

Motor, 3D print, Tube, Clamps,
Light box, Inkjet print, Generated Image, Heavy Duty Fire Retardant PVC Awnings Tarpaulins, Metal
200 X 170 X 200cm & 70 X 70 X120cm

The body of this work consists of two installation. A randomized swing system and a light box installation. The oscillating system developed from my explorations and critiques around the underground transport system in 2024, and now the ‘swing’ becomes a embodiment of technological ideology in the structure.

 

The broken hands from the previous practice is abstracted into a meat-like object, a tumor, a threat within the organism. At the same time, the tumor is also a living organism in a symbiotic relationship with the body, which fits into the atmosphere of threat and insecurity that the artist feels from time to time.

 

A generated image of a blue animal eye is placed in the light box installation, and this is a return to the artist's personal narrative, and the fingers growing out of the wobbly tumor imply the urge to gouge out this eye.

Install scene 15/01/2024
​Preview video

Installation video
Stainless steel, plastic, foam clay, motors
200X180X40cm

Exhibition scene at Central Saint Martins 2024 art programme interim show

 

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install development

At the beginning it all started from one question: What will people react to it if there was a severed hand on the tube? This question occurred to me when I was on the underground tube. In this space, everyone moves in the same tendency and direction, while we all give out the control of our own bodies. That is exactly how the quotidian apparatus transform us, on the way to work we are already dragged into a state of ‘exception’.

©Xu Ziqi | All Rights Reserved 2025

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