Ding Shiwei

Lives and works in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

Artist statement

Ding Shiwei (b.1989) holds an MFA degree from the School of Intermedia Art at the China Academy of Art and now lives and works in Hangzhou, China. His works unfold in various mediums such as video installations, sculptures, images, videos, and interactive installations based on the experience of the screen. He invokes and appropriates a wide range of ideological discourses, popular images, and philosophical symbols, opening up the viewer's perceptual channels through the media interface, filtering and intervening with the individual's degraded user experience, thus revealing the screen landscape as an anti-utopian self-fulfilling prophecy of contemporary politics and beliefs. As a mediator between the material world and the digital simulacrum, the screen is constantly involved in reshaping and disciplining the viewer's body. On the one hand, his works re-pierce the viewer's silently alienated interface body and the observation senses, and on the other hand, ultimately adopting "kawaiification" as the categorical imperative to obscure the fanged structure, they constantly stitch together the real and virtual branching in a paradoxical perception of wit and pain.

Artwork