From March 26 to June 25, 2023, UCCA Dune presents “Optimized Heart,” a dual solo exhibition by David Douard (b. 1983, Perpignan, France) and Liu Shiyuan (b. 1985, Beijing). Through more than 30 multimedia works that span drawing, photography, video, sculpture, and installation, this exhibition invites the artists to discover the heretofore unexplored connections and shared inspirations that link their respective creative frameworks. “Optimized Heart” features recent pieces by both artists, including some commissioned by UCCA and being shown to the public for first time, as well as earlier representative works. Although Douard and Liu come from different backgrounds and operate in different creative territories, both of them use multimedia artworks as a means to express their personal perceptions of and insights into the state of the contemporary world, fostering reflection on how individuals may free their minds from the constraints of “self-optimization” and “psychopolitics.” “Optimized Heart: David Douard / Liu Shiyuan” is curated by UCCA Curator Yan Fang. 

In the new material politics of the post-pandemic era, humans exist in a symbiotic relationship with all the other ecological participants of this crowded planet. New technologies and globalized, online social lives are constantly transforming the ways we think, feel, and communicate. As people, society, and non-human life overlap and evolve together at an accelerated pace, we must address the crises in our increasingly more complex living environments and the mechanisms of our behavioral control and emotional alienation. As new technologies depart from their original intended uses, they have begun to assume a more dominant role in society, obsessively pursuing rationality and optimization. In parallel, the logic of personal optimization has embedded itself into the contemporary mind, throwing exhausted human lives into a precarious, naked state. However, this craze for and internalization of self-optimization, a contemporary technology of governance that Byung-Chul Han has dubbed “psychopolitics,” does not directly control the individual as a mode of exploitation. Rather, these psychopolitics are already lodged deep in our emotions, stabilizing and maintaining current systems through psychological programming, and leading individuals to extract happiness and achievement from willing self-exploitation. By internalizing power relations, the subject enacts their own subjugation. In this urgent moment, there is a pressing need to build a new ecology that is wiser and more altruistic—not necessarily the most optimized. How might we disarm psychopolitics? Can we discover a new technological ecosystem built upon an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things, one that departs from the myth of anthropocentrism and realizes a more-than-human life? Might art be capable of rescuing contemporary society from its worship of optimization and allowing new forms of life to emerge from the ashes?

This discourse forms the context for the artworks of David Douard and Liu Shiyuan. Though they have never worked together before, and they come from very different backgrounds, their art represents an exploration—albeit one that takes on different forms—of this topic and its significance from the individual to the universal. Closely associated with the Post-Internet art movement, French artist Douard often sources materials from the networked world and anonymous members of the public, working with sound, video, poetry, and text from everyday life. Exploring the relationship between user and machine, and its complex and protean collective emotions, he employs sculpture and video installations to create a fluid social space and imagine potentials of resistance. Commissioned by UCCA, Douard’s new installation O’t’kappa (2022) stands like an all-seeing monster in the center of urban life, its apocalyptic aesthetic connecting reality and the dark web. It chews up and spits out all the hidden, lowly things of this mortal plane, out of which grows a tender and beautiful “flower of evil” that castigates the real world. In the installation Canary feel it (2022), the half-beast, half-cage form recalls the figure of a masked animal trainer, which frequently appeared in the artist’s early works. It marches forward unimpeded, but its mission is also its cage—the paradox of modern human existence. Douard’s distinctive formal language reflects an incisive understanding of the ongoing corruption of the human world. He injects the energy of Fluxus art, underground culture, hacktivism, and other movements into his fluid aluminum forms, resulting in artworks that resonate like an otherworldly melody, heralding a return to a new nature within the eternal molding of the self.

Similarly, Liu Shiyuan considers the complex ethical questions posed by a globalized world. Through her image-based drawings, photographic collages, videos, and installation works, she interrogates the impact of consumer culture as well as how constantly changing technology infiltrates private spaces, voicing a serious concern for the fate of humanity. In the new UCCA-commissioned video installation Green Blanket Dream (2023), dream-like scenes depict how individual lives and the world as a whole pulse in sync. From a feminist perspective, Liu tells of the mutual emotional care between humans and their environment. Meanwhile, From Whatever to Happiness (2023), a site-specific collaboration between Liu and Kristian Mondrup Nielsen, activates the museum space as a new context—through an imaginary forest habitat, they offer the viewer a meditative space.

“Optimized Heart” represents a hard look at the contemporary world through an interdisciplinary understanding of the hidden commonalities and connections between the two artists’ modes of thought. The exhibition invites the viewer to consider how the transmission of information, consumption of images, and control of the digital world shape perception and emotion in social life, reflecting on the shape of the earthly forms we rely upon for survival.

Text by: UCCA Dune