Zheng Yuan: Dam the Fool

Dam the Fool
2024
Single-channel video, color, sound
34 min 14 sec
Commissioned by MACA
 

Dam the Fool portrays a post-apocalyptic world where the principles and understandings that once formed the foundation have been completely transformed. Survivors are redefining and repairing their perceptions of unfamiliar landscapes and bodies, piecing together fragments of memory. The original landscape is preserved beneath the water's surface, while events and history are rewritten into their opposites above it.

 

About the Artist

Zheng Yuan (b. 1988, Lanzhou) lives and works in Beijing. He received his master's degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Working primarily in time-based media, Zheng often operates at the intersection of fiction, documentary, and investigative research. His work focuses on the relationships between identity and value systems within different historical, social, and political conditions.

MACA Art Center is a non-profit art institution located in the 798 Art District of Beijing and officially inaugurated its space on January 15, 2022. Occupying a two-story building with a total area of 900 square meters, MACA unites artists, curators, and other art and cultural practitioners from around the world. Through its diverse, ongoing, and collaborative approaches, the Center establishes a new site on the contemporary art scene. Guided by the “work of artists” and backed by interdisciplinary research, the Center aims to bring together a community passionate about art and devoted to the “contemporary” moment so as to respond proactively to our rapidly evolving times.