Nowadays, video and mass media is no longer the carrier of mechanical reproduction. They smash the previous physical experience of people, and then revitalise them, to make modern expression of Scientism to be invalid. Meanwhile, contemporary thoughts still pin their hope onto “red” or “blue” modernism, to make a critical judgment about contemporary society.

Before an exhibition in 2014, Shao Yi had a discussion with young scholar Zhang Wei through annotating the excerpts of Benjamin’s writing “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Then he made silk printing on the mirror glasses and smashes them in the exhibition space. By using the glass as a metaphor, Shao Yi presented the violence in peaceful daily relationships between flesh and object, body and object, so that to compel the original feeling between human and object.

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One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art.