There exist two different methods for contemplating time and space: by way of meditation or through screens. Meditation incites one’s inhalation and exhalation, traverses the body, and reconnects its inside and outside. Screens are akin to the facades of buildings – both shape the urban dwellers’ sights by cutting through light and shadow, like furniture in motion. As an experimental medium, digital screens have embodied attempts to intervene in public consciousness and collective memory and to bring social and political change. While giving concrete form to the beholders’ fantasies and identities, screen culture has increased our feelings of restlessness and time-based anxiety, fragmenting our attention spans. For this reason, we need to acquire the art of meditation more urgently than ever before. Television networks once expanded in parallel to the rise of hippie culture; in similar fashion, our contemporary era prizes the contradictory values of technological efficiency and meditation at once. By recognizing the synchronous progression and twinned nature of screens and meditation, we can understand the impact of technology’s ceaselessness on the psyche.

From September 29 to October 31, 2021, Macalline Art Center’s program of commissions Bare Screen will create a temporary meditation chamber at The Cloister Project, located on the second floor of the century-old building Cloisters Apartments, 62 Fuxing West Road, Shanghai. The screens scattered across several rooms will present commissioned works by artists Tao Hui, Qinmin Liu, Zheng Ke and Tan Jing, Wenxin Zhang, Tang Chao, Hu Wei, and Payne Zhu. Esteemed guests, please come to meditate with us in this chamber of furniture in motion.

Special thanks to THE SHOUTER for supporting this exhibition.