Artists Aspartime, Pu Yingwei and Joey Xia will participate in the “Parallel Universe – Parafacts and Parafictions”. The exhibition is presented by THE ARTLING in Design Republic and specially curated by Han Peipei. It will open on November 10, 2021. The building where the design republic is located retains the close connection between history and contemporary architecture. This exhibition combines contemporary art works with this historic space, and aims to connect the three fields of art, architecture and design, presenting a trinity language that combines these elements. The “Parallel Universe – Parafacts and Parafictions” transforms the colonial-style architecture into a parallel space with different narrative clues, exploring the relationship between different genres and media.

In understanding and reinterpreting the world around us, artists use fictional representations to interpret reality. Defining the lines between reality and fiction is blurring, and this state of confusion can have a positive effect, making it possible to critically examine the real world and reconsider what we are experiencing now; at the same time, it also raises questions about whether there are many different “reality” that allow multiple possibilities to exist at the same time in our narrow sense of what is real or unreal. A fiction in one world can be a reality in another.

These alternative realities project different dimensions in parallel universes formed by the overlapping of fiction and reality, constituting states of quasi-reality and quasi-fiction. Quasi-reality is strictly based on the real – but this “reality” is so strange, subtle and implausible that it calls into question its authenticity; And in quasi-fiction, real and fictional stories meet the real world, and fiction is being experienced as fact.

Aspartime is a collaborative artist duo made up of Qu Xiao and Liu Fengya since 2012. Their previous projects include Weibo Update Program, Ké, The Rabbit Hole Program, Outsider Program, Taobao Program and Brancusi·T’s Model Shop. ZigZag is Aspartime’s 2020 art design project, which includes design products, furniture and sculpture. Their art approach is to carve industrially produced foam with heating wire. While the body gets into the space of foam, sculptures are achieved in consequence. The process of carving involves controlling and crossing of time and space, which produces both intentional and unconscious, random and deliberate textures and forms that drift between figurative and abstract with the various visual experiences. Their sculptures may remind you of matters in the natural world: stalactite, sand beach, weathered rocks and wood grain; they might also be the solid-state of sound waves, radio waves and lightwaves; some of them even resemble industrialized forms of order brought by machines like 3D printer. The abstract and the figurative coexist in the course of selection and recombination.

Pu Yingwei, (b.1989) received his BFA from Sichuan Fine art Institute in 2013, DNSEP (MFA with Félicitation du jury) from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in 2018. Pu Yingwei’s work has been defined as an exercise in conceptual art with a strong utopian zeal. He is the artist who interprets the multiple media and identity narratives that he practices in the public sphere as a comprehensive mobilization. Taking personal history as an absolute starting point, with the exhibition, writing, design, lecturing, teaching, and other forms of work, he attempts to produce a kind of “meta-politics” that transcends grand topics such as race, nation, and ethics. Such politics is as complex and full of paradoxes as the reality we experience.

Joey Xia was born in Hangzhou, China in 1992. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL in 2016. Joey Xia’s works engages with issues related to the power dynamics and hysteria within the contemporary culture, under the backdrop of an unfathomable globalization. Joey’s practice are accumulations of material, texture and color fused together with a mixture of craft-based techniques, which he sees as materials of utterance in themselves – to contain emotions in a gesture, meanwhile, the work maintains a constant tension between functionality and rituality by using industrial material and handcraft procedure.