"Welcome >_< Take a Seat Wherever"
(cringevibing on a downward spiral)
curated by Angela Liu at Tomorrow Maybe, Eaton HK
August 13 – September 3, 2023
Miri & Jenn, Noura Tafeche, Janice Kei, Ringo Lo, Brandon Bandy, Rachel Jackson, E8mkboy, Cas Wong
You are standing at the doorway of a trashed-piled room. An anime girl smiles and gestures your way to “take a seat wherever” among the scattered takeout boxes, yellowed peeling walls, and ominous thrifty objects. Her “welcome >_<” is inviting but discomforting. She tells you she is a girlboss building her ecological techno-socialist-futurist AI web3 empire, while you are struggling to fathom if she really lives like this.
—a textual re-adaptation of “Welcome >_< Take a Seat Wherever”, an image macro first posted in 2020
A rhetorical delusion or heartfelt self-affirmation, “Welcome >_< Take a Seat Wherever (cringevibing on a downward spiral)” explores the emotive language of Gen Z as well as implications of being terminally online in a confusing, almost pathologized, schizophrenic state. In the era of post-truth and continuous crises, ironic expression is nearly indistinguishable from sincere belief. Nothing means what it says. Everything is interpretive evasion.
Vibe shifts. Splintering data. Relentless cycles of microtrends. We are in a generation raised entirely on the exponent: schooled by the internet, fuelled by Adderall and stimulants, gathered through server platforms, texting in hyper-referentiality. Yet, we shoulder spectres of late-capitalism, fallen idealisms, and carry the load of an ecological malaise. When the cloud has become the new infinite resource, when data capitalism encroaches upon emotionality; our feelings mined, extracted, commodified. In a manic attempt to cope, we embrace irony to shelter ourselves from a demoralising reality. We gaslight ourselves into contentment with disingenuous, dissociative modes of consumption. We try to disavow meaning, or feign meaning out of the absurd. Because somehow it is still easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism. The memetically referential title lends the show its contextual chaos. While cringevibing, an oxymoron composite of two neologisms, signals an action to embrace the absurd and our disgust.
Taking humour as a point of departure, the exhibition looks into the why’s and how’s of memetic irony: why do these devices kindle a shared affinity among Gen Z, and how are these memes—in Dawkins’ terms and in a contemporary vernacular sense—disseminated? Irony is the medium of now. Though, irony has also been complicated. The sort of ironic disposition of the late 2000s – early 2010s hipster is now passé, because the notion of enjoying something ironically has now been so diffused within our culture, sincere appreciation almost always comes with ironic enjoyment. We are left with statements, hyperboles, situations that feel at once ironic and sincere, evasive of interpretation and truth. We term this ‘meta-ironic’.Meme makers conflate based with cringe, readers take comedic scripts as half-truths. The virtual versus actual has become obsolete. So have art and memes that slowly morph into one another. “Welcome >_< Take a Seat Wherever (cringevibing on a downward spiral)” interpolates Deleuze’s notion of play and invites nine anticipative artists to play with ellipses and clashes in meaning, langage, visual cultures, and clichés. The nine artists loosely come together by a shared ironic sensibility of the generation, each with their own niche or scope of research.
Inventing a hyper-citational room of exe file, data-traces, and cross-spatial twitch stream, data modeller Miri and technical and 3D artist Jenn guard the Dolly codex and hold space for Dolly’s melon soda, pink agar agar, compressed citations, and melodic-insomniac devotion {9x-7i>3 (3x-7u)? }. As we engage in the duo’s interactive gameplay, we descend into these computational rabbit holes of phase transitions, echo-state networks, and twin primes. On a Twisters-like playmat, visual artist Noura Tafeche imagines the kawaii-fication of warfare propaganda and ideological crisis to create a political compass, presenting the unthinkable possibilities realities of UWU war crimes, lewd militarism, Onlyfans queendom, Hello Kitty self-justice, and other pastel-coated violences. Deep dives from Telegram channels to private servers are at arm’s length as are the dakimakuras (pillows) sitting invitingly on the carpet.
The early 2010s marked a significant inflection in the history of the internet, harkening back to the beginning of trend cycles perpetuated through the internet. Titling her mixed media sculpture “God from the machine” in Latin, multimedia artist Janice Kei laments the halcyon days of the Tumblr era, where indie sleaze reigned and sincere dorkiness was celebrated, where “free size, fit for all” clothes were the undisputed truth. A tactile capsule of #corecore relics: galaxy print leggings, plastic wristbands, moustache necklaces, kitschy collages, and a video memoir surrenders us to the birth of a new machine. Reflecting on the cultural schizophrenia of the last decade, art, design, and publishing duo Brandon Bandy and Rachel Jackson borrow from postmodern design to vessel contemporary themes of trend analysis, hyper-stitions (self-fulfilling prophecy), as well as to de-virtualize image-objects of clout or internet vocabulary (re-introducing, the Political Compass..!). 2D bootlegs of Ettore Sottsass’ design objects, Superstudio’s Quaderna series, the infamous Pony Cum Jar, see the artists mediating art through photography such as in 60-70’s conceptual works, the pictures generation, and the post-internet movement.
Contemplating the cringe vs based matrix, low and high-end culture, Ringo Lo observes in a game of Taiko no Tatsujin (太鼓の達人) the exhilarating beats and flat lyricism in EDM songs. The storytelling devotee iterates an unpredicted sentimentality, a sensual flow within the chaos of his stimulants-coded, wall-hammered text—but that is yet to be undermined by the theatrics of the mannequin that shares its space. When distractions overwhelm, the artist is determined to decipher. A lover of love, the idyllic, and alternative modes of care and intimacy, E8mkboy channels its fantasies—fairy tales often featuring leathered-up dominatrixes and its doe-eyed, bondaged, submissive and breedable self—online and in paintings. The little pet takes comfort in domestication as part of everyday rituals: in a mural painting detailing house rules of subordination, in a self-portrait of its docile self being fed on a gaming chair. It does not claim to be a femboy nor catboy, contrary to popular assumptions, and whether or not their stories are authentic is of unimportance.
In the age of extreme spectacle, the self predicates on its brand. The self is a harvester of likes and fender of trolls. Cas Wong continues girlie’s (妹豬) Hair Trilogy of visiting local salon icon house Li Choi Ling (李采玲包生髮屋), hair loss neurosis, and Greta Thunberg adoration. The latest of lore narrates a young adult girlie bound in a swamp salon. Girlie loves the belief that she can shop her way through social change, she loves it even more when she can combat climate crises one virtue signalling at a time. But when having a political viewpoint is as easy as embodying a new hairstyle, sometimes we just can’t trust a mullet! In a libidinal economy, seizing the platform is to capture what holds our impulses. A research video bibliography by the curator indulges our lizard, smooth brains. When a gameplay of Minecraft parkour, Subway Surfers, or an NPC (non-playable character) Tiktok stream is required to foreground any text of length, simply to sustain our nano-attention and dissociate ourselves. When taking Adderall or Ritalin becomes more commonplace than ever, even necessary. When ketamine rises to the ranks as the most consumed pastime substance on the dancefloor.
Like attention-seeking meme page admins, the artists take up discursive territory by invading your lexicon with their buzz-works (buzzword + works). As savvy gurus and prophets of irony, cores, and lores, they draw inspiration from their mediated realities; they make sense of their subjectivity in the age of deepfakes, meta-irony, memes as cultural artefacts, and hyper-referentiality.
More than a hard age bracket, the coming-of-age of Gen Z marks a turn of morality and ever polarising direction(s) in the cultural zeitgeist. Why do we think that’s “literally me” in every wholesome meme? What belies the wealth of aesthetics, ‘cores’, and neologisms that we very much chase after? What fuels our fragmentary, long-tailed mode of cultural consumption, choosing paywalled podcasts, Discord servers, think pieces over mainstream media? At the end of the day, “Welcome >_< Take a Seat Wherever (cringevibing on a downward spiral)” sets out to apprehend art objects and the humour rhetoric as a mirror and mould of the contemporary zeitgeist.
More than just a text emoticon, “>_<” embodies our chaotic state of mind oscillating from exhilarated stimulation to dissociative numbness (as seen in doomscrolling). Evasive of one true interpretation, it is simultaneously a bashful anticipation, a disconcerted squeal, a cringed recoil to our bed-ridden anxieties. But amidst the digital and semiotic frenzy, at least we are vibing while on a downward spiral?..! >_<
Images courtesy of Tsz Long, Tomorrow Maybe, Angela Liu and Martin Li.