There is something strange going on in Hoxton Square. No, not the emergence of actual grass. No, not a badminton tournament. Rather the beer sodden square is playing host to a small cinema screen with strange wailing and chopping noises emanating from speakers. The reason for this interesting intrusion, which follows that of sculptor Marc Quinn for White Cube, is that chinese, multi media artist Yi Zhou is in town. Thanks to 20 Hoxton Square, her unique, witty and haunting films, which blend 3-D amimation, Illustration and film, are being shown both in the gallery and the scrubby environs of the square.
Titled 'I am Your Simulacrum' the show is a puzzling one. Whether the viewer is induced to, or interested in, decoding the enigmatic set of symbols and signifiers that Yi Zhou presents him/her with is up for contention. What certainly make these strange films more watchable is their use of celebrity to hook in the video art wary spectator. In one, entitled "The Ear', Pharrell Williams, better known for N.E.R.D than performance art, chops a mound of vegetables on a table. The camera steadily encroaches on him, whilst the score booms more and more sinisterly. Tension builds, and the beautiful Pharrell - cue occasional lingering shots of lips and skin - reaches to tweak at his ear. Cue more chopping, more heightening, and cor blimey, his ear falls off to rest amongst the chopped courgettes. We are then rudely flung into a mysterious inner ear landscape and seem to be floating down a white staircase. We end back with Pharrell who sits reading a newspaper headlined 'The Ear Bridge in Baku, 2013' - I couldn't tell if he had recovered his ear at this point.
The experience of the show was not an unpleasant one. I am the first to throw up my arms in frustration with a great deal of multi media / video art, but here I felt that I was being allowed to laugh. The surrealism of Yi Zhou's work, amplified by the grandoise scores of award winning Italian composer Ennio Morricone, and the use of such a well known / non-art world figure such as Pharrell, worked to undermine the academicism hinted at by the exhibition title, and the press releases' strangely vague hints at poststructural theory - 'Her work exists in multiple layers as real and unreal, ancient and present collide through a process of construction, deconstruction, recreation and transformation.' In all the grandeur of Yi Zhou's vision is compelling and comedic - but perhaps this was never the intention?
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