Fir Gallery is pleased to announce its second group exhibition “ERROR·Restart” on July 2nd, 2022. The exhibition will feature a total of 31 works produced by 13 artists,whose visual expressions embody the quintessential characteristics of the digital age and prioritize succinct information on the pictorial surface. Canvas is occupied by mixed media, and recycled electronic waste turned into readymade sculptures. The emotional responses evoked by these artworks become highly abstract and elusive. The exhibition aims to revive the inherent vitality of artworks, calling for a suspension of art historical chronology and the writing of history at a time when texts overflow and images oversaturate our senses.

When digital technology has introduced a more efficient multiprocessing productivity and replaced the single-track flow of operation from industrial age,computing errors and disorder become random events that are inevitable and haywire despite the intervention and maintenance attempted by humans. When an error happens, the user’s default reaction is to modify it by restarting the machine – to resuscitate the functionality of the object in order to extend the lifespan of its usage. The course of time s is split into two paralleled routes: a subject-based chronology that is reset to zero on one hand, as well as a forward-moving natural time that is uncontrolled by humans on the other. The curator, Chen Bofan, juxtaposes these artworks which represent closeness, error, awakening and resurrection, reorganizing and integrating the two paralleled timelines, thus proposing new possibilities to the writing of art history.

Grand narratives are abandoned. By focusing on the materiality, the thematic meaning,and the inherent aesthetic logics of the work, these artists have freed their works from the cultural-historical contexts from which they were created and presented, so that their artistic legitimacy is no longer tied to the obligation to reflect truth and reality. Errors are irreversible, yet the innate vitality of artworks can be restarted.

The participating artists include Angela Dalinger, Jack Moore, Joachim Weischer, Jordan Sullivan, Hou Jianan, Liu Weiyi, Marcus Nelson, Nicolás Romero Escalada, Pedro Troncoso, Samuel Richardson, Stijn Bastianen, Yang Guang, and Zhang Lin.