Geng Jianyi's installation THE CONTENT IS DISTURBED BY ITS SHADOW examines the relationship between inside and outside, using a pinhole camera to capture and project a still-life arrangement of aluminum-foil-covered furniture onto the inside of a black box. The utter darkness of the inner room, along with its fragmented projection surface and the upside-down rendition of the objects, makes for a visual puzzle as the viewer waits to see an image emerge. The disjointed familiarity of the projection is heightened by another "watery" device: an automatic bubble-blowing machine situated behind the pinhole, distorting, albeit imperceptibly, the projected image. For Geng, the demarcation between inside and outside—and the distortion that happens in going from one to the other—is an apt metaphor for how information and ideas from beyond are transmitted into China.
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