Event 1: Youjin Cheng’s Dead Wood solo exhibition

For my first event, I attended Youjin Cheng’s Dead Wood solo exhibition. Upon first glance, Cheng’s work had a mysterious aura, yet when I took a closer look and interacted with both Cheng and the video game she created, I began to understand the underlying messages behind her work. The solo show featured two main pieces. One piece (as seen below) was a mechanical-like sculpture surrounded by 3 bright lights. Cheng described it as a depiction of the birth of a non-living thing, of which the lights symbolized the audience. The other, more central piece was a video game that featured a barren landscape made up of artificial, nonlinear objects. The goal of the game was to destruct the environment by using the controller to touch or obstruct the inanimate objects that appeared on the screen.

Sculpture of the birth of a non-living thing by Youjin Cheng

The video game’s environment, similar to the experience of the event, made me feel detached and unfamiliar, which, after speaking with Cheng, was actually her intention. Her work was inspired by a story in which a robot was killed in the streets by human beings, whose motivation to kill was rooted in the jealousy many of them felt regarding the “perfectness” of the robot. Additionally, Cheng discussed how her work is a reaction to the poem of a Chinese philosopher that highlights how it is important to know what is and what is not useful in the world. She further commented how although we tend to ignore or destruct materials/items we find useless, everything in fact has a use.

Students interacting with Cheng's video game 

Overall, Cheng’s work was an artistic expression that made viewers like myself question our human tendency to want things to serve our own needs. It is interesting to think about how we are the masterminds behind the robotic creations we see today, yet once we create these human-like robots, feelings of insecurity arise. If we continue to make these robots free of human flaws, will feelings of envy continue to increase or will people begin to recognize that these human-like robots can actually help us? If our natural instinct is to take materials and fashion them to our own use or deconstruct non-living things, how does this play into the production of robots? This is where personal customization comes into play, which we see with the control robotic companies give their users to make at-home robots more unique to the individual owner. Perhaps through giving users this type of power, human beings will become more comfortable with the idea of interacting and co-existing with these non-living objects.

Me (left), Youjin Cheng (center),  Jordan (right)

I would recommend this event to my fellow classmates because Cheng’s art helped me better understand the intertwinement of robotics and art as it touched upon the ideas brought up by both Vesna and Professor Machiko Kusahara regarding the creation of these human type machines. Although we saw these types of machines early on during the time of the Renaissance when da Vinci created the The Automata, with today’s advancements in the technological field, the robotics industry now involves great collaboration among both artists and engineers. While artists bring their design talents to the robotics field and engineers help build out the actual functionality, together, they are able to create a humanoid machine. A machine that Cheng’s art reveals is unfamiliar to many, yet is useful as robots ultimately can help take care of people and even rescue those in disaster, as pointed out by Kusahara.

The experience of Cheng’s solo show and the meaning behind her work was influential because it helped generate potential ideas for my midterm project. It made me think about how the advancements made in the technology industry are creating new opportunities for artists in regards to the type of art they can create and how they share their art. More specifically, it would be interesting to study the different ways in which art can now be created, such as using Adobe software or a drawing tablet, and how these tools have changed the traditional definition of both “art” and “artist”.

Link to event: http://dma.ucla.edu/events/calendar/?ID=1003