KARA CHIN / Closer Than We Think!, 2020
PRESENTING THE EKO 8 ART PROJECTS
KARA CHIN / Closer Than We Think!, 2020installation; digital animation on three screens with soundcourtesy of the artist and VITRINE, London/Basel
produced in the framework of the Art & Well-being project with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union
Chin’s Closer Than We Think! is a new three-screen digital animation work. Her multi-dimensional timescapes bring together the present-day storage room of the MTT together with her study of the textile factory archives. Maps and drawings of the floors and ceilings form part of the work, as do the textile machines that used to operate in these industrial spaces. The spinning of yarn, and the processing of textiles and its now total absence is a fundamental starting point for the artist for this new commissioned work.
Developed during the restricted times of lockdown where travel wasn’t possible, Chin came across the iconic cartoon illustrations made by the American illustrator Arthur Radebaugh (1906-1974) titled ... Closer Than We Think! These were illustrations of a techno utopian futurism and were published weekly from 1958 through 1963 in the Sunday funnies or cartoon strips of hundreds of newspapers in the United States. Radebaugh’s educational futurism provided a playful,tongue-in-cheek visions of a technological utopia that the public could understand. Solar powered cars are on view here, as are distanced-learning classrooms of the future. These prescient images reach out to us in this suspended Time of the pandemic where, for a while at least, everything stopped and ground to a complete halt.
Chin’s practice focuses on the implications of evolving technologies and the ethical conundrums and potential consequences of developing robotics and artificial intelligence. She works in both sculptural installation and digital animation. The working subtitle for this work to be developed as an installation next year is A Future Ghost of an Exhibition. As with much of Chin’s practice, she is drawn to the tradition of domestic objects, being given power and presence, such as those in traditional Japan folk history and the story of the yōkai or tsukumogami where objects older than 100 years old, having a spirit existence.
Chin’s animations are rendered animate by giving life to the machines, the working industrial process of textile making at the MTT. Clothes on mannequins, tools, appliances, and mechanical constructions appear and disappear in repeated sequences. Close listening reveals the watery sounds that form part of the research for this work and the broader thematic of EKO 8. It will be a shared future fate for millions of people, if and when the glaciers melt and raise the sea in the way that the reports predict.
Kara Chin (b. 1994, Singapore) is a visual artist, born in Singapore and raised in the UK. She lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne.
