GUAN XIAO

Beijing-based Guan Xiao tries to steer away from the label “post-internet artist,” but it’s obvious the tool is a big part of her creative endeavours. Both her sculptural and video pieces, which are often interconnected, draw on imagery found on the net, treating it both as a source and a platform. Guan juxtaposes elements of the past with her digital finds, creating multimedia installations that disregard linear time and combine the primitive and classical, the crude and the high-tech, in a holistic and often humorous manner. David, her film at the Biennale, is a case in point. Named after Michelangelo’s sculpture, it is an absurdist commentary on the contemporary commercialisation of a centuries-old statue. Guan draws on a variety of online video material for it, pointing at the whole cloud of souvenir tat that has come to envelop this showpiece of Renaissance art as evidence that, in the case of certain mass-reproduced artworks, we have forgotten how to marvel at them.