filling the Klein bottle (x){(y){(z){}}}

solo exhibition · 2020-02-15 – 2020-05-30
two-person multi-site exhibition with Wenxin Zhang, curated by Belinda Ho-Yan Kwan
Varley Art Gallery of Markham, InterAccess, Bunker 2 Contemporary Art Container, Toronto

catalogue ↗

Through the work of Xuan Ye (Toronto, ON) and Wenxin Zhang (Hangzhou, China), filling the Klein bottle navigates the touristic impulse of contemporary cyber-capitalist culture. In a world of hyperwanderlust and the tendency to dream of other dimensions, there emerges an undying itch to travel and chase novelty experiences all over the world and beyond. New media technologies intensify this longing; they program a thirst for tourism by cultivating viral notions of nomadic pleasure with vast social networks and rampant imagery reiterating over and over again that the world is indeed your oyster.

Matched by an equally powerful desire to document and disseminate images of travel, economies of tourism and visual culture merge to produce a globetrotting market of new and exciting things to experience. As "new," "refreshing," or "exciting" as these ideals may seem, however, they also depend on a habitual, albeit ever-expanding, feedback loop of carefully curated tropes: motifs of itinerant euphoria and routine romanticizations of the vagrant. And as much as we come across new content by browsing through the Instagrams of travel bloggers and the pages of Lonely Planet, it is the consistent wireframes and algorithms of visual recognition that keep us locked in the infinite scroll. Just as touristic notions of novelty depend on established tropes and well-defined, familiar algorithms dictate our exploration of new images, so too do we dream of and interpret new experiences based on established memes and memories. Recycled frameworks are vital to the unfolding of new encounters, and an ironic but productive friction between the familiar and unfamiliar, the objective and the subjective, the old and the new, keeps the touristic impulse alight.

Learn more from the exhibition catalogue.

Catalogue Graphic Design by Belinda Ho-yan Kwan