Curatorial Thinking and Writing, offered by ICCI, is designed to develop students’ critical writing skills in the professional context of art curation and animate contemporary art discourse through the medium of writing. The course is taught by Professor Travis Jeppesen. This is the first interview in a series of artist interviews conducted by ICCI MFA students of Class 2021.

In Conversation with Payne Zhu:

Deconstructing and Reinventing Matching Under COVID-19

The latest solo exhibition by the artist Payne Zhu, MATCHPOOL, was on view at OCAT Shanghai until 8 May. Named after his latest work, the exhibition intends to explore the tensions that exist between socially shaped and primitive desires, the mind and the body, the past and the future. In a continuation of his usual style, the artist discusses the conflicting relationship between economics and art. Is the economy catalyzing the workings of society or is it dissolving its initiative? In March, the COVID-19 spread in Shanghai and the offline exhibition space was suspended. Matching such as grabbing groceries and seeking medical attention resurfaces. Before the interview began and as it proceeded, Payne underwent two nucleic acid tests. In this interview, he discusses his thinking about "matching" while creating and in the present.

Eleanor: The exhibition deals with the integration and competition of people in a commercial capital. It is more of an economic meaning that is present in all aspects of people's daily lives and work. For example, we need to go to work in order to get paid, and after work we choose to let loose on the dance floor. Is there a specific meaning to the choice of a scene such as a dance floor?

Payne: The space I started with was a black dance hall. After paying the entrance fee, you enter a larger public space where there will be many dancers. You can choose which dancer you like to dance with and pay after the dance. I chose this space because I think it is very much like a platform. The dancers are not affiliated with the club, they are there on a self-employed basis to fulfill their needs. When I entered the dancehall, I had the feeling that I had arrived at a place similar to the offline version of Tiktok, and also guessed that the person who invented the matching algorithm had probably been here before. This is why this work is based on the dance hall as its most basic prototype.

Eleanor: Does the act of being inside this space also involve matching?

Payne: Yes. This work discusses the three stages of matching with three songs played on the dance floor. The first song tried to express that the match was actually based on the oppression of raw natural resources in ancient times. In modern times, with the development of industries and the relative ease of transport, the speed of matching became rapid. It became a more efficient form. With the development of the Internet, big data, algorithms and other technologies, matching has moved to the third stage. It takes the form of a platform. The constant injection of capital and the addition of algorithms made matching faster. When people use Didi, a pop-up window will tell us how you and the passenger are matched together. These matches like this are everywhere in our daily lives, for example when you play games.

Exhibition View, Payne Zhu: "MATCHPOOL", OCAT Shanghai, 2022

Eleanor: So, do you think this kind of matching, both in the past and now, has an active nature to it? Or is it actually a result of being modified by the environment because of the intake of capital?

Payne: I think initiative is an illusion, more likely because the external environment has shaped it so that people have to make matching choices. The whole exhibition is called MATCHPOOL, which is the expression that is put at the forefront of the exhibition. However, what I ultimately want to discuss is mismatching. Like the three stages I just described the speed of matching is changing. If you extrapolate backwards or forwards you will find that - there is no matching, only distribution. We now understand very well in Shanghai that when a match is made. The essence that is obscured by the match is in fact the distribution. Such a match ultimately gives you the illusion that your needs are being met, that you are in a state of balance between supply and demand.

Image still frame, Payne Zhu: "MATCHPOOL",2021, four-channel video, 16'50''

Eleanor: From capital and people, to competition and cooperation, how do you think the concept of matching in the exhibition space relates to real life? For example, the scenes of Didi or playing games that we talked about before, they are perhaps generalised through the exhibition?

Payne: They don't correspond very specifically to one another. I will incorporate all the feelings from my life into the work. The whole piece is showing a young, newly-entered person who needs to start working financially and getting paid under a matching algorithm. In particular, I tried to create a work from the point of view of a dancer. This character can bring to the fore in a straightforward way some of the problems that are normally covered up. If you bring a dancer's usual work scene into your body, you will find that she is not included in the system of the matching algorithm and is a more primitive state of matching. For it is not a Didi driver, a restaurant owner, or a character that exists in a platform. However, the dancer's body foreshadows how the match will develop afterwards. So, we can use her body to get a sense of the state of young people's lives now, a sense of being governed by an efficient matching environment.

Eleanor: The matches revealed in your work MATCHPOOL seem to be filled with intense emotion and longing. What are you trying to express or resort to?

Payne: I was trying to take a basic emotion as a base, trying to foreshadow how I could make it visible when you don't feel it's a situation. We can now perceive that if something goes wrong with this efficient system, we abandon many opportunities to be evenly distributed. The MATCHPOOL also chooses a perspective that is less likely to be heard by others. In other words, I am consuming my own body, my young and vibrant strength, to feed the whole system under this efficient system. Most people feel that the system is able to function very efficiently, still peering from the top down, from the surface.

Eleanor: How do you think COVID-19 has deconstructed and reshaped the match in people's lives, and would you consider incorporating this disorder in creating for the future?

Payne: Actually, the last two or three years experienced a simultaneous emergence of those three speeds that were talked about before. Because of the change of speed, it must be uncomfortable for people to switch back and forth between different means of transport, such as buses, trains and planes, at different speeds. All subjects in this environment want to return to a state of uniformity, hiding some of the speeds underneath. This is also a more acceptable state for most people. For me and for creation, before this it was a conceptual projection or a state of being in someone else's space and thinking. And now it is a real experience. It confirms that what I was feeling before was right, and it will move my work forward from there.

Payne Zhu, b.1990, lives and works in Shanghai, graduated from Shanghai University of International Business and Economics. He takes people as working material, creates a trial space by fake or transferred identities. His works are the on-site critique of the rights of identities, which invade and break the nature of the social systems hiding behind individual identity.