NADA Miami 2022 Art Fair
 
Artists: aaajiao, Katarina Caserman, Dan Zhu
30 Nov - 03 Dec, 2022
MIAMI
Online OVR

Tabula Rasa Gallery is delighted to participate in NADA Miami 2022 with a group presentation of three artists, aaajiao, Katarina Caserman and Dan Zhu， in booth 7.16 from November 30 to December 3, 2022. All three artists share a personal touch with sensitivity to self-identification, multicultural narratives and transformative energy of things, exploring the senses and sentiments of transmigrational experience in displaced and imaginary spaces.


About the Artist



The artist and activist aaajiao(b.1984)—the online handle of Xu Wenkai—draws on a broad range of languages including sculpture, painting, drawing, multimedia installation, video, sound and design, to explore the evolution of the human identity being assimilated by the digital world. Focusing on the experience of the new generation—the native inhabitant of the parallel worlds and saturated realities of the net—aaajiao’s work is a critical investigation into the countless possibilities offered by the digital and the numerous questions raised by this hyper-technologisation.


Since 2018, the artist aaajiao creates an “icon” yearly that can be seen as the reflection of his personal experience and the world’s happenings of the year. Icon 2021 and Icon 2022 are featued at NADA Miami. 

“I was born on the Internet, I was dead on the Internet , I was reborn on the Internet.(2) 

I cannot simply hide my identity dilemma with my Internet identity. I record my identity evolution and reveal the hidden part via icons. Icon is also my way of seeing. After I experienced the gradual detachment from my racial and national identity while using the language (Chinese), my nostalgia becomes place-based . It originates in Berlin and in the cyberspace. In the same time, the community of Sinophone that comprises of Continental Colonialism, Settler Colonialism, and [Im]migration  emerges before my eyes, which in here, I try to collect these landscapes in a cyberised Ukiyo-e.

In 2018, my icon was a half Northern-Han Chinese, half Tibetan Naxi User. The construct of national identity is an act of divination from big data DNA analysis. 

in 2019, my icon was a distant Mainland Chinese observer of Hong Kong, a ghostly witness in Europe.

In 2020, my icon was a player who sees the world reconstituted by computing power while trapped in the identity of Chinese diaspora.

In 2021, my icon was a hybrid form of a half-dead User on social media and a player awaiting for his reborn.

In 2022, my icon attempts to be a mobile presence of a place-based Sinitic speaker, who is wary of falling into the discrete ideology of Perpetual Foreigners  and a forced self-Minoritisation."

Katarina Caserman(b.1996) is a London-based artist originally from Slovenia. Her work is an attempt to understand the transformative nature of things. Each thing needs its kind of material to grow. As the artist writes: “We all know that nothing can be made of nothing and nothing can be reduced to nothing. Within the void, things take place. We cannot see our thoughts, memories, or time in the form we perceive everything that holds a different nature of its appearance.” Caserman’s aim is to give these unseeable things their material, skeleton, colour, shape, and movement. How to materialise a nonmaterial matter is a central question of her practice.


Dan Zhu(b.1985) lives and works in The Hague, the Netherlands. Working across painting, drawing and mural, she often juxtaposes natural objects with familiar figures, transforming them into unusual scenes and happenings that are in harmony with the energy on-site. They offer visual references to art history topics such as the gaze, animism, and cosmic immortality. It celebrates a transmigrational experience echoing a gravitating force in the cultural fields, being, a fluid and non-binary self-identification process in diverse communities and discourses. After completing her residency at the Rijksakademie in 2019 in Amsterdam, Dan Zhu quickly gained recognition from several institutions and won the prestigious Dutch Royal Modern Painting Prize in 2020. In the same year, she also won the annual C.o.C.A. award granted by the Collectors of Contemporary Art Foundation in the Netherlands. She presented her solo exhibition at the Kunst Institute Melly (formerly the Witte de With Center) in 2021.