“The Y Generation” refers to those born during 1981 and 2000. This generation grew up in an era when digital technology had yet become popular; but as they entered adulthood, they have found themselves living in an environment characterized by digitization and information. Zhan Jia-Hua has gradually discovered that modern people’s genuine physical perception is eroded by virtual perception in this era. Her work often focuses on visual elements that can create a perceptual impact and continuously explores the relationship between “digital technology” and “corporeality.”
The Y Generation: Artificial Corporeality - Solo Exhibition by Zhan Jia-Hua adopts the concept of “artificial reality” proposed by Myron W. Krueger. Through technology, people can experience virtual reality. When the distance between people and technological products becomes much shortened, our bodily senses expand into “artificial corporeality” incorporated with electronic products. With this exhibition, the artist hopes to explore the authenticity of perception created by artificial and virtual products. Meanwhile, she also poses a question: “can such perception be deleted immediately like that of the virtual world?” Through her work, she attempts to guide viewers to discover the boundary between real bodily perception and virtual artificial perception.
Continuing her long-term focus on the subject of “digital technology/corporeality,” Zhan employs the idea of the Greek word “soma” (body) and incorporates a temporal element into the concept of solid forms defined by length, width and height. For the artist, the human body grows and accumulates as time progresses and is in a real-time and constantly updating state, which is represented with technological media in her work. The exhibition opens with the work, Virtual Role: Artist Zhan, which pinpoints the issue of “identity” in the virtual world. The series, SomaMapping II, started in 2012 discusses the possibility of using virtual structures to re-construct the relationship between the self and spatial environment. The Message L series, created specifically for this exhibition, evolves around how human behaviors have become controlled by online information. The Squeezing Citizenship series, displayed at the end of the exhibition, serves as a response to using “the human body” as a means of resistance and documents the relationship between people and the society.