Gaoyuan Chen
Shadong Boardgame
Shadong Boardgame is a multiplayer board game that parodies the drinking culture of Shandong Province, China and incorporates elements of performance and ready-made installations. I am trying to engage the public and make them pay attention to and reflect on this bureaucratic and patriarchal cultural phenomenon.
Game Installation Performance，2021-2022-2023-
Water Race Cup International Contemporary Art Award（WICAA）
WICAA is a spoof art competition that I have been planning since 2023. I parody the art competitions in the Chinese art world that aim at power and money transactions, and package WICAA in a seemingly professional, international, and large-scale style, intervening and deliberating on issues such as university performance appraisal models, art world evaluation standards, and identity anxiety with a kind of anti-artistic black humour, and dissolving its authority in the midst of absurdity and revelry.
participatory event，2023-4
FCIPC
During COVID-19, I organised an offline racing gaming competition in the panoramic map of my mobile map app. Players will control the movement of the "map car" by tapping the arrow keys on the screen in the panoramic map of the map app, and constantly break the limits of hand speed and internet speed to find the fastest way to victory.
Film, Game, Performance，2021-11
Facial Recognition to Smash Walnuts
After the start of COVID-19 to date, almost all Chinese colleges and universities have installed access control with face recognition function for internal personnel only.
I tied walnuts to my school door equipped with a facial recognition system and drove the door to miscellaneous walnuts through dozens of facial recognition entries and exits. I was trying to talk to and exploit a vast system through an act of absurd unproductivity.
Performance ，13m48s，2021-6
Catching Sheeps
"Sheep(羊)" in Chinese sounds like "Yang(阳)" and is often used to refer to COVID-19 positive(阳性) patients.
I used this depersonalized nickname as a starting point to capture my observations and feelings during my three months of life in locked-down Shanghai in 2022, using a darkly humorous visual style.
3D film，2m39s，2022.5
On Your Threshold
Film，7m03s，2021.4
This three-channel video installation employs a triptych structure: the left screen documents the school gate exit, the central panel features gameplay footage, and the right frame captures the entrance facial recognition system. Through this cybernetic surveillance allegory, the work dissects institutional violence during pandemic lockdowns - when the entrance scanner authenticates a face, the gameplay accelerates by 50%; any exit attempt (successful or failed) freezes the central narrative until renewed biometric compliance. This closed-circuit mechanism visualizes how authoritarian logic colonizes the interstitial spaces of quotidian existence.
Performance，2021.12
The Wave is a participatory performance work. The project was inspired by my experiences while studying in a junior high school in China with a semi-military management model. Participants receive texts with rule instructions to read out in the live space accompanying my performance, together creating an abstract soundscape of noise.
The Wave
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Gaoyuan Chen & Xiaoyu Jia ，3D film，5m44s，2022.1
This is a short digital film about contemporary life and escape. In this world, the circadian sense of time has been blurred or even lost. Digital technology and the internet have created a myriad of landscapes in our world, where the boundaries between the virtual and the real are gradually blurred, and the human body is objectified, randomly placed and distorted. We jump back and forth from grid to grid, torn between work, capital and eternal anxiety.
Confidential Video - Brother Dragon，Film，6m，2022.11
"It took us seven days and seven nights to finally fix Agent Murphy's last footage. "
The short film mimics a surreptitious point of view, using gritty video textures and absurd plot setups to respond to my impotence and irony at the cascading absurdities during the 2022 epidemic.
