Brownie Project is pleased to announce the presentation of group exhibition, OOO, on 1 March 2025. As a proper noun, “OOO” has gained widespread consensus in just over a decade. However, each word in “Object-Oriented Ontology” can be translated differently in the Chinese context. Even by consulting multiple Chinese translations of the works of Graham Harman, the original creator of this concept, one finds no uniformity. Object, Entity, or Thing? Oriented or Directed? Ontology or Existentialism? Behind each of these terms lies a vast corpus of academic literature, leading to rich and diverse cognitive frameworks. This very predicament of translation actually corroborates one of the claims of OOO theory—that the existence of objects transcends human definitions.
This inevitably brings to mind the limitations of language. Just as today, no matter how we describe an imagined image to AI in words, the result will always be unexpected. Artistic creation that primarily engages the senses, such as vision and hearing, requires the presence of the audience. What an exhibition text can offer is merely a supplementary role. This exhibition, titled “OOO,” brings together the diverse creations of eight artists: Chen Li, He Mingkai, Kong Kong, Dasy Li, Liu Fujie, Lou Nengbin, Pan Caoyuan, and Qin Jun. It attempts to address, through artistic practices that span media such as installation, video, sculpture, sound, and painting, how the anthropocentric cognitive framework fails on one hand, and on the other, how artists creatively use old media to establish new meanings.
Pan Caoyuan uses organic materials that exist naturally, such as fritillary bulbs, metal, and natural lacquer, to transform the creative process into a “bargaining between body and objects” through the itchy and painful sensations triggered by skin allergies. This highlights the coexistence of pleasure and pain. She is also concerned with how the so-called “marginal traditional crafts” like lacquer art can challenge the linear view of art history through the autonomy of objects. Since we cannot truly return to the past, we are unable to enter the universe and worldview contemporary with the artworks. This cognitive disjunction, caused by the temporality of objects, provides artists with the possibility of imagination. Instead, it allows traditional crafts like lacquer art to break free from historical preconceptions and reconstruct their material narratives in the present. Similarly starting from sensory experiences, Chen Li focuses more on visual elements with subtle tension and contradictions, represented by “crabs.” The hard, serrated structure and the moist, hair-like tactile sensation allow her to combine these elements with her previous emphasis on “sectioning flaws or scars between the organic and inorganic.
Kong Kong’s paintings employ elements of species that are relatively unfamiliar to the general public. She magnifies microstructures such as the compound eyes of hoverflies, the capillaries in bat wing membranes, and the filter-feeding pores of giant sea squirts to an almost oppressive scale. By presenting these elements in a portrait-like manner, she guides viewers to confront the visual hegemony of anthropocentrism and the crisis of flattened natural cognition in the digital screen age. The reflections on modernity’s exploitation of nature that this process evokes are precisely a resistance to the forgotten close connections that once existed between humans and non-humans. Qin Jun, based on his contemplation of the diversity in the evolution of life, touches on multiple fields including industry, biological history, science fiction narratives, and digital technology. He uses 3D digital algorithms to simulate the abstract forms of nutrient absorption by plant rhizomes, materializing the “life control” in laboratories into entanglements of alien organs. The chain reactions of plant growth are solidified in resin and metal, which not only demonstrate the reinforcement of anthropocentrism by technology but also reveal the potential of non-human life to break free from control. The artist’s fusion of digital technology and traditional materials suggests that the evolution of life always unfolds within the tension between human intervention and natural will. Liu Fujie’s sculptural installations, in the form of copper mirrors resembling landforms, position the works between biology, rocks, and fruit. Continuing her previous reflections on distant viewing, when humans gaze at themselves from the perspective of “another life,” the binary of subject and object begins to dissolve. The existence of outsiders, foreign cultures, and the “other” precisely proves the trajectory of humanity’s search for itself. However, all objects are islands of perception; their existence does not require human validation.
Undoubtedly, it is precisely because of the material properties of artworks that, no matter how artists attempt to criticize the human desire to control, their use of algorithms and materials cannot escape dependence on existing technologies. This technological paradox, in fact, corroborates the perspective of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) theory: any critique inevitably becomes entangled in the relational network of objects. A significant portion of the works in “OOO” also continuously pull the audience back into the context of reality. Dasy Li’s paintings present the artist’s experiences in the city in a seemingly abstract manner. She tries to oppose the “slowness” of the creative process with the “speed” of the algorithmic age. With the dissolution of recognizable elements, the artist’s intentional infusion of a sense of flux brings a non-empirical sense of time and space to the canvas. He Mingkai’s paintings either depict the gloomy moment of a body entering water with deep blue and black, where the solidification of ripples implies the incompleteness of the action, or use the metaphor of a beast’s bite to reveal the violent nature of power struggles. Through subdued colors and distorted forms, the artist reduces human narratives to a kind of instinctual contestation, questioning whether the “innocence” in historical writing is merely another form of object-oriented hegemony.
The presentation of cross-temporal dialogue embedded in the historical narrative dimension is also reflected in Lou Nengbin’s creations. If media are objects and also intermediaries, can the products of different eras’ technologies be rejuvenated through integration? He offers a new direction with his sound installation and vinyl records. The former anchors sound within a frequency range influenced by the urban tidal effect, reconstructing the master tape of the Voyager Golden Record by algorithmically converting the original images into grooves etched on the vinyl surface. By liberating sound from real-time constraints, different timelines can freely interweave within a unified field. Although the artist attempts to present a collective imagination of time and existence from a perspective close to that of an “eternal observer,” the work also reveals the solemnity and failure of information transmission. Meanwhile, vinyl records, as objects, carry the auditory memories of different eras, forming a non-linear temporal field. This sense of futility in motion is also reflected in Kong Kong’s video installation. The rotating carrier, modeled after the granaries of the Han Dynasty, serves as a memory vessel of agricultural civilization. It loses stability in the alienated forest of hair on its surface, forming a dual-loop system with the mechanically moving toy figures on the conveyor belt. They suggest the irreconcilability between cyclical and linear views of time. The dialogue among the three anthropomorphized characters (Sisyphean faith, labor reduction, and trivial daily life) further situates individual destiny within the vortex of the modern digital age’s crisis of subjectivity, with restlessness becoming a mirror of the human predicament.
The depth of the image, the temporal and spatial fluctuations of the soundscape, and the labyrinth of the creator’s consciousness — OOO aims to allow viewers to wander autonomously within these dimensions, achieving a “decentralized” experience. It also seeks to convey that the meaning of art is not assigned by humans, but rather revealed through the accidental encounter between the artwork and the viewer, uncovering the infinite possibilities of existence. Additionally, it is hoped that when viewers pronounce the exhibition title, they will intuitively arrange the order in their intonation, expressing both understanding and confusion in the alternation.