Project ShanghART WB Central, Shanghai , 2F Bldg.4, 288 Ruining Rd. Shanghai
Artist Sun Yuefeng’s solo project A Natal Chart of Forking Destinies has opened at ShanghART WB Central Platform Space. Centered on the idea of a “chart of destiny,” the exhibition features kinetic installations activated by the viewer’s gaze, integrating thermal sensors, microcomputers, and mechanical systems. In the Foxtails series, the installations mimic the trembling gestures of dog tail when approached, echoing evolutionary strategies of mimicry and survival in nature—while metaphorically addressing how individuals reshape their fates under observation and control. At the entrance, Praise Mechanism reveals the ambiguity of social interaction in today’s technological milieu, where a single motion may signify either flattery or irony depending on the viewer’s perception. Continuing Sun’s ongoing inquiry into how images operate, the exhibition transforms visual attention itself into a medium of fate, presenting a living experiment in which machines and gazes jointly construct meaning.
Forward: A Natal Chart of Forking Destinies
Article / Zexi Zhuang
A man might be an enemy of other men, of the differing moments of other men, but never an enemy of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams, or the West wind.
But why not? Once perception is interfaced—when one believes that only artificial mediation can manage the incessant influx of life—it means we have already merged with the dehumanization conceptually. A concrete person is compressed into a phrase, an expression, an image, a sign; manipulated by others, turned against others, or conversely, adored. Jia Yutsun, who time-travels into a German spy, compresses a man—the benefactor who studied his ancestor’s life and literary labyrinth—into a place name to be annihilated, in order to delay the fall of an empire. It is technology that guarantees the reality of this absurd intent and also reveals the essence of modern conflict: It is no longer combat; it is cartography—masking or erasing what is visible on the map, and determining it again. (Harun Farocki, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1989). The map of destiny—whether called horoscope or star chart—is among humanity’s earliest operational interfaces. Yet what does it mean that humans locate their fates spatially?
The solo project A Natal Chart of Forking Destinies by artist Sun Yuefeng, presented at ShanghART WB Central Platform, seeks—as its title suggests—to restore “destiny” to an operable, visible map. The Foxtails forming the Platform Garden consist of thermal sensors, microcomputers, and stepper motors that collaborate to perform the gestures of a pleading dog’s tail only when approached by a viewer. These are operational images that speak of meta-images: they “think” whether they are being watched, thus alternating between two figures—“wheatgrass” and “foxtail”—simulating the evolutionary history in which foxtails mimic wheat to escape the farmer’s scythe. Likewise, even the slightest displacement caused by tail-wagging gradually reshapes the garden’s terrain under the constant operation of the gaze, transforming it into a dynamic map of attention and destiny.
Images alter destiny through their own operations; humans, through interfaced images, come to govern themselves. The origin of this mode of exchange first appears in our growing tendency to misuse symbolic expression as a calculative token for social relations—viewing seeing and being seen as a kind of scientific-astrological chart predicting the self. Yet as Sun Yuefeng’s Praise Mechanism installed at the entrance suggests, social relations still fail to converge within the current technological paradigm. Signs are saturated with polysemy. Though they may be biomimetically fitted into precise and vivid forms, this simple mechanical motion—driven by some primal force—is always assigned opposite values by the viewer’s interface experience: pure praise or biting irony. In fact, the mechanism of viewing also shapes the artworks’ own destinies—most works in the exhibition move only when being watched. Hence the more “flattering” foxtails and devices are favored by the audience, but also “age” faster. One is reminded of Ji Xiaolan’s late-life notebook, where he asks himself: why did my nephew, born at the exact same hour, minute, and second on the other side of the wall, die decades earlier than a household servant? His answer: it depends on how often one is looked after. Thus, from the same horoscope, two entirely different lives unfold.
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