God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, including ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Humans strive to create the ideal society, killing many on the way. Short, but momentous animation that symbolically, yet clearly shows the rise and tragedy of various utopias.
This artistic piece includes two presentation plans. First, nine screens are used for presentation. Nine LCD screens are hung in the air facing the floor. The back of the frame are covered by black aluminium panels. Some aluminium panels and mirrors are installed on the floor and the mirrors are of the size of the LCD. The spectators can only see the image in the LCD from the mirrors on the floor, but they are unable to have a comprehensive view from whatever angle. The presentation of the installation emphasizes a way to view history, which can only be partially recognized. It also presents multiple paradoxical meanings of simplicity and complexity, group and individuals, as well as generality and individuality. Second, nine sets of screens are presented together. The images are projected on the wall in the exhibition hall full of machine-made fog, like the places depicted in the images. This way of presentation makes the spectators part of the works, offering them a feeling of immersive experience.

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.