How can conceptual video-art affect the world we inhabit and the way we experience every day? An exhibition at SOAS Gallery searches for answers
The Greek legend tells how Archimedes lowered himself into a bath and, seeing its contents overflow, devised a method for the calculation of volume. Beyond rudimentary physics, the bigger lesson here is this: observe your impact on the material world, and measure yourself against those effects. This also provides one possible framework through which to process In-/Visible Spectrums, which catalogues the recent works of video artists from the ‘Sinosphere’, as the exhibition subtitle declares. (In fact, all bar one of the included artists were born in mainland China.) The question here, with a little reframing, being: how can conceptual video-art affect the world we inhabit and the way we experience every day?
The exhibition begins with Not Here, Not There (2020), a single-channel videowork by Zheng Xinhao devoted almost entirely to an extended shot of a hanging lamp, swinging from the ceiling in a seemingly abandoned concrete space. The camera pans upwards from the lamp; watch as the shadow cast by the light shifts subtly with each swing, moving like a tidal water level in timelapse. Turn the corner, and there’s Length (2015) by Liu Guoqiang, where two screens each portray, in a matter of seconds, a falling pole. Initially, the two videos seem identical, but each is distinguished by variations in the camera’s focus: one fixates on the foreground, the anchored pole falling forward off a white wall into the crosshaired focus of the camera; the other sets the texture of the backdrop in harsh focus, the pole falling into the front of the frame and also into unfocused obscurity. Saying, with a dry wink, life’s all about perspective and a plea on behalf of the show’s five curators for visitors to train their attention.
Go downstairs to the basement gallery and this observable world expands: Xin Yunpeng’s Towards the World (2022) lines up a series of screens, each showing looped videos of arriving and departing metro trains, the horizontal installation giving the appearance of a continuous platform but an inconsistent sense of direction – some trains exit towards each other as if folding into nothing. You can see the influence of artists like Zhu Jia on Xin, and on others too – like Li Nu, for example, in whose looped video Endless Whip (2019) a boy skips over the shadow of a wind-turbine arm like a playground rope, making an absurd joke of observable phenomena; meanwhile Liang Yue’s Aurora in the Bedroom (2020), which projects shots of the titular light onto a hanging bedsheet, plays like an Ozuesque interlude. For this reviewer, there’s also an evocation of a distinctly 1970s New York spirit, like Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider’s conceptual-CCTV, or Nam June Paik’s videotape loops; Tong Wenmin’s Crawl (2018–19) here is almost Adrian Piper reincarnate.
There’s a banality to much of this, and, while In-/Visible Spectrums feels more interested in surveying video art rather than saying something with it (bar Hong Konger Siu Wai Hang’s Cage Bridges, 2021, an immersive video installation that arranges screens following the city’s caged walkways into a box, suspended from the ceiling – a metaphor that’s hard to miss – the politics on show is at most a subtext), the ordinariness of these works is something approaching the point. Look slower, closely, at the ways an artwork might capture something known but unnoticed. Like Xin Yunpeng’s two-channel Left & Right, Hesitation (2017), each part of which shows a thin curtain rhythmically flapping away from an open window on a draft, then sucking back against it according to the changing air pressure, each shift like an exchanging breath. Another artist wondering how the world, given the right methods – and our attention – might be measured.
In-/Visible Spectrums: Contemporary Video Art from the Sinosphere is on view at SOAS Gallery, London through 20 June
From the Summer 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
