We live in increasingly violent times. Our lands, as a body, are mapped, pierced, ruptured, and reshaped to conform to notions of capitalistic development, and altered cartographies play out an authoritarian agenda that expresses itself on our lives and experiences. For contemporary artists living in Mainland China, major cities have become a site of struggle as they attempt to make sense of the communal terror, the prevalent profiling of the different classes in lieu of the deepening the poor-rich divide, and the continued marginalization most classes are exposed to.

The Dada movement, in the early 20th century, first emerged as a fervent but playful “protest” against the incomprehensible destruction of bodies and cities during World War I. Global cities have since transformed from being key exporters of art, culture and commodities into sites and sources of fear, power and opportunism. These multiplying paranoid urban spaces harbor fears of irrational violence equated to moneyed and power terrorism, inducing a “society of control” in which surveillance, intimidation, and the erosion of personal liberty force forms of artistic resistance that employ strategies drawn from Absurdist traditions.

In this project, made specifically for two differing locations in Thailand, testifying to Lin Yilin’s response to

LIN YILIN

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