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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For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech. A film operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the images at the speed of an actor’s speech.

Note 手: Which is lightly described by Benjamin, but it is the possibility to save the future.
Note 镜头: Where should we put the camera? How to become a point in the space? When the space is not indoor anymore, not the cloth surface of light anymore, how can the eyes persist in the space?
Note 眼睛: The invention of photography is indeed the victory of “reproducing” concept. The secrets with masters are just trying to please the public with claptrap.