Description
No other mass media can achieve such rapid influence and popularity as television. 'Our Television, Your Success' is a series of works by artist Li Jiaqi, including photography, imaging, and oil painting. They collectively showcase the main element of the work - television, as a successful paradigm of images, in different states of production, transmission, and consumption. The combination of online videos and manufacturers' official websites, where people are crazily competing for televisions, makes the prices on the websites the biggest irony to reality. In this series of works, Li Jiaqi explores the contradiction between utopian imagination and traumatized reality.Throughout the 1980s in China, television played a very important role in the situation of economic overheating and material shortages. During this period, only China was a country with more television than telephone in the world.
Due to the rapid popularity of television, "watching TV" has quickly entered people's lives as a leisure activity during their leisure time. Television programs are constantly emerging, becoming the most powerful means of influencing public opinion, educating, and cultivating audiences in this era. But narrative and propaganda are never objective and neutral, and the media is always used for power. Today, with the gradual development of the Internet, although smart phones and computers have become increasingly important media carriers, the existence of television is still in an important position. Unlike smart devices, televisions typically only passively receive signals. This passive approach precisely strengthens power, that is, the role of discourse power downwards (towards the general public).
Television is not only a means of entertainment for households, but also reflects the imbalance in class sense. As the center of home entertainment, the television is placed in the most prominent position in every living room. The act of everyone sitting together to watch TV during gatherings and meals is depicted as a symbol of family harmony. It is precisely because the television is a "must-have" item to purchase at home that its price related advantages and disadvantages have become the only things we can compare with each other. TV manufacturers will advertise as if promoting a luxury item, incorporating elements of natural scenery. In the advertisement, they placed the TV in the mountains or by the lake, and the screen still played the same mountain or lake. Although none of us would buy a TV to watch the mountains and waters inside, it seems that as long as we purchase such a high-performance TV, we can escape from the inescapable reality.
Class is a structured feature of television. Whether it is the purchase of promotional advertisements on television or the content about class output to viewers by various television programs, they enter the real world through the square box of television, penetrate the permeable screen boundaries, and subtly influence people's beliefs, social communication, and social structure, thus shaping an "unrealistic" expectation.
| Period | 22 Jun 2023 → 20 Aug 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Exhibition |
| Location | Changsha, ChinaShow on map |