Solo Exhibition UCCA Dune, Qinhuangdao
Yun Yun is an ongoing project that Birdhead started in 2021, inviting nearly twenty active online influencers to jointly explore the relationship between online and real-life identity. Birdhead sees these figures, whose online personas range from designers, musicians, tech geeks, philosophers and more, as particularly able to embody the spirit of a moment where we create parasocial relationships with people who share our interests. This search for connection is a theme that underlies a body of work where the artist photographs these individuals and then asks them to interact with these images by writing on or otherwise manipulating them. For the first exhibition of this project, Birdhead will transform UCCA Dune into an amusement park that hovers between the real and the virtual, where the voices of their subjects will be audible and visible throughout the space. The exhibition will be punctuated by a series of activations with the subjects and their followings. Through the project, Birdhead asks the vital question: in an age of expanding technology, what sort of information do we actually seek? This exhibition is curated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari.
About the Artist
Birdhead was established by the artists Song Tao and Ji Weiyu in 2004. Song Tao was born in Shanghai in 1979, and Ji Weiyu was born in Shanghai in 1980. They both graduated from Shanghai Arts & Crafts College, and live and work in Shanghai. The name “Birdhead” came from a random keystroke for file naming. Birdhead's artistic practice is based in, but never limited to, photography. Their lens captures all it encounters, gradually internalizing their thinking around their personal development into their evolving photographic context. With works that employ the photographic image through photographic matrix, collage, special mounting technique, installation, photobooks, and many other media, they realize their own multivalent and ever evolving “Birdhead World” across a range of exhibition spaces and environments. Their work has been exhibited at “Feeling the Stones” (Diriyah Biennale, Saudi Arabia, 2021); “Wave” (Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2020); “Living Cities” (Tate Modern, London, 2017); “How to Gather? Acting in a City in the Heart of the Island of Eurasia” (The 6th Moscow Biennale, Moscow, 2015); “New Photography 2012” (MoMA, New York, 2012); “Reactivation – The 9th Shanghai Biennale” (Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2012); “Illuminations” (The 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2011); “Artist File 2011 – The NACT Annual Show of Contemporary Art” (National Art Center, Tokyo, 2011); and “China Power Station II” (Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 2007). Their work has been collected by Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, and Power Station of Art Shanghai, among others.
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