This public screening event showcases video artworks by six artists from mainland China as part of “WeArt们艺术大集结”, a culture and arts festival at the Sea World Cultural and Arts Centre, Shenzhen. The SWCAC is a purpose-built sea facing venue designed by the celebrated Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki and situated in one of China’s largest, and most culturally and economically dynamic cities. The event grew out of an extended research journey across mainland China during June and July 2025 by the curators and relates to a major survey exhibition of contemporary video art from the Sinosphere to be staged at the SOAS Gallery, University of London in 2026 led by Paul Gladston (UNSW), Lynne Howarth-Gladston, Yique, Lin Zi and Frank Vigneron (Chinese University of Hong Kong). An earlier related screening event ‘Absent Participation–Moving Images as Art’ was staged in closed session at the Creativity and Innovation Center, Longgang District, Shenzhen City, China, 29-31 Aug 2025 organized by Yique in association with the UNSW JNCCA, WeArt and the Longcheng Creativity Community.

As all these events show, contemporary video art in mainland China combines techniques typical of international postmodernist and contemporary art with localized Chinese culture. That combination not only imputes specifically ‘Chinese’ identities to the work but also culturally differing parallactic critical significances. While the defamiliarizing techniques inherent to video art can be understood to oppose or deconstruct supposedly authoritative meanings there are also tendencies toward harmonizing reciprocity and oblique resistance characteristic of classical non-/rationalist Chinese Literati culture and a wider Chinese/Sinophone cultural habitus – including with respect to unbalanced relationships between humanity and nature and the imposition of overweening (disruptive) authority on society. While in China for the SWCAC screening event, Paul Gladston gave invited lectures on the parallactic critical significances of Chinese contemporary art at Shenzhen University – one of China’s top public universities (22 November) and Beijing Language and Culture University – the world’s largest Chinese language and culture education centre (27 November).

Public screening events of this sort are relatively rare in mainland China due to an ingrained local cultural conservatism, an ever-growing emphasis on the commercialization of art (like elsewhere, in mainland China video art rarely sells) and significant government restrictions on the public showing of non-conformist art. The staging of ‘In-/Visible Spectrums’ at the SWCAC is a testament to its curators’ lasting commitment to culturally specific and critically progressive Chinese contemporary art at a tangent to locally prevailing cultural, socioeconomic and political circumstances in and outside China.

This event is supported by the Sea World Culture and Arts Centre (SWCAC) and the UNSW Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art (JNCCA).