Tomorrow: Xu Zhen

A few months ago, in an Atlantic piece about the manufacturing boom in China, writer James Fallows detailed the nuts, bolts, and keyboard strokes of how the global economy works:

The other facility that intrigued me... handled online orders for a different well-known American company. I was there around dawn, which was crunch time. Because of the 12-hour time difference from the U.S. East Coast, orders Americans place in the late afternoon arrive in China in the dead of night. As I watched, a customer in Palatine, Illinois, perhaps shopping from his office, clicked on the American company's Web site to order two $25 accessories. A few seconds later, the order appeared on the screen 7,800 miles away in Shenzhen. It automatically generated a packing and address slip and several bar-code labels. One young woman put the address label on a brown cardboard shipping box and the packing slip inside. The box moved down a conveyer belt to another woman working a "pick to light" system: She stood in front of a kind of cupboard with a separate open-fronted bin for each item customers might order from the Web site; a light turned on over each bin holding a part specified in the latest order. She picked the item out of that bin, ran it past a scanner that checked its number (and signaled the light to go off), and put it in the box. More check- weighing and rescanning followed, and when the box was sealed, young men added it to a shipping pallet.

By the time the night shift was ready to leave--8 a.m. China time, 7 p.m. in Palatine, 8 p.m. on the U.S. East Coast--the volume of orders from America was tapering off. More important, the FedEx pickup time was drawing near. At 9 a.m. couriers would arrive and rush the pallets to the Hong Kong airport. The FedEx flight to Anchorage would leave by 6 p.m., and when it got there, the goods on this company's pallets would be combined with other Chinese exports and re-sorted for destinations in America. Forty-eight hours after the man in Palatine clicked "Buy it now!" on his computer, the item showed up at his door. Its return address was a company warehouse in the United States; a small MADE IN CHINA label was on the bottom of the box.

Which brings me to Xu Zhen's clever untitled contribution to Tomorrow, a two-museum contemporary group show and festival in Seoul at which I was effectively the critic-in-residence. Zhen's piece, pictured above and below, was a room-sized installation consisting of six or so weight-lifting machines, each with a corresponding remote control. The viewer was invited to pick up the remote controls -- picture the remotes you might use for a souped-up, radio-controlled car -- and move the levers to and fro.

Depending on what the viewer did with the remotes, the weight-lifting machines became 'active,' lifting heavy weights on their own, and then setting the weight down again. (The machines were invisibly operated with some type of hydraulic thingamajig.) A more direct metaphor for Fallows' Palatine-to-Shenzhen pipeline could hardly be imagined: Work is ordered remotely and it is invisibly done. And besides, the gizmos were a total blast to play with.

Art historically, Xu's work fits within the recent tradition of viewer-activated sculpture, a sub-genre pioneered by Bruce Nauman nearly 40 years ago when he merged sculptural objects that only became 'activated' when the viewer entered them. (These works include 1969's Performance Corridor and Live/Taped Video Corridor from 1970.)

For me, Xu's work is more directly related to Giovanni Anselmo's Invisible, a 1971 Arte Povera piece in which a slide projector is mounted on a pedestal. The projector is clearly on, but it doesn't seem to be projecting anything... until the viewer puts his hand in front of the lens. At the right distance from the projector the word "VISIBLE" is, well, yeah. With both Xu's installation and Anselmo's piece it is possible to ignore what we don't want to see: The man in Palatine dialing up a widget neither knows nor likely cares from where is widget comes. Once I began to play with Xu's remote control I wasn't particularly interested in how the machines' weight was magically lifted. I just saw that when I used the remote that 400 pounds went airborne. Anselmo's piece works on the same principle: You can't see something unless you try to. It kind of reminded me of the American 'return address' on those boxes from Shenzhen.

Related: Xu Zhen visited Everest. Or did he?

Previously: Inhwan Oh.