NOWNESS presents Out of Blueprints, a new online exhibition of moving image work on the occasion of Cao Fei’s solo exhibition, Blueprints, at the Serpentine Galleries, which has been temporarily closed in response to the global spread of COVID-19. 

In partnership with the Serpentine Galleries and K11 Art Foundation, this new program illustrates how artists and institutions have turned closure into creation, and adversity into innovation, as each week an East Asia-based practitioner releases a moving image work on NOWNESS. 

Standing in solidarity with artists affected by the outbreak, Out of Blueprints traverses borders to make thought-provoking art that is freely accessible to audiences around the world.

Asleep on a bench in a shanzhai park complete with replicas of ancient Egyptian monuments, an exhausted delivery driver dreams that his fellow workers have all stopped moving.

Operating at the intersection of fiction, documentary, essay, and investigative studies, Beijing-based artist Zheng Yuan’s 2018 piece Dream Delivery reveals the other side of the Chinese economic miracle. In an increasingly homogeneous urban life infused with technology and wealth, new kinds of labor and social exploitation surface, byproducts of society’s never-ending mobility and a world of speed without rest. For many of these hyper-mobile workers, sleep poses a costly risk.

In Dream Delivery, the artist captures elements of fatigue and anxiety in our current era, as ceaseless, day-to-day mobility is frozen in a virtual world, and the many unremembered faces encountered but not noticed in a busy worker’s waking life take on starring roles in his dreams.

Dream Delivery
9 minutes 50 seconds
Single-channel video
2018

The upcoming program so far includes Kim Heecheon (Friday 17 April) and Hsu Che-Yu (Friday 24 April)