Ding Shiwei (b.1989) holds an MFA degree from the School of Intermedia Art at the China Academy of Art and now lives and works in Hangzhou, China. His works unfold in various mediums such as video installations, sculptures, images, videos, and interactive installations based on the experience of the screen. He invokes and appropriates a wide range of ideological discourses, popular images, and philosophical symbols, opening up the viewer’s perceptual channels through the media interface, filtering and intervening with the individual’s degraded user experience, thus revealing the screen landscape as an anti-utopian self-fulfilling prophecy of contemporary politics and beliefs. As a mediator between the material world and the digital simulacrum, the screen is constantly involved in reshaping and disciplining the viewer’s body. On the one hand, his works re-pierce the viewer’s silently alienated interface body and the observation senses, and on the other hand, ultimately adopting “kawaiification” as the categorical imperative to obscure the fanged structure, they constantly stitch together the real and virtual branching in a paradoxical perception of wit and pain.

His solo exhibitions include: Faith on Tap, Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, 2021; Enter The Void, Imagokinetics Lab, Hangzhou, 2020; What We Talk About When We Talk About Sea Horizon & Moon, One Way Art Gallery, Beijing, 2019; Daybreak, Beijing Art Now Gallery, Beijing, 2016; Meteor Sonata, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2016; and Disparate Illusion, Mao Space, Shanghai, 2015. Selected group exhibitions include: Surplus Space, Wuhan, 2022; Wind H Art Center, Beijing, 2021; K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai, 2020; MOCA Yinchuan, Yinchuan, 2019; China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, 2018; Musée-Château, Annecy, 2017; Castello Di Rivara Center for Contemporary Art, Turin, 2016; CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, 2015. Ding was the recipient of a special award for the Prix Videoformes in Clermont-Ferrand, France, in 2015 and a silver medalist of the Chinese Film Festival in Washington D.C., US, in 2014. His animated short films had screenings at various international film festivals, including Festival International du Film d’Animation d’Annecy, Holland International Animation Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Tampere Film Festival. His work is featured in the collections of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, DK; CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, CN; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, CN; By Art Matters, Hangzhou, CN, etc.