Standing on a platform, Shen Di put her palms on a plate with a heart-rate sensor. She then saw her heartbeats turn into small stones thrown into the water, creating beautiful, rhythmic ripples in a "pond" on the ground.
"It's an amazing experience! Hearing the slapping sound and seeing the ripples made me feel more than alive and calm. Interestingly, I felt connected with my inner self," said Shen, a visitor who interacted with Chinese artist Zhang Muchen's Heart Beats, a digital art installation on show at the Beijing Times Art Museum.
Zhang's work is one of the 12 installations, spanning photography, GIF, video, and interactive media, featured at Empathy & Connection, a contemporary art exhibit, inspired by the status quo of human society because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
"After a year-long social distancing and isolation around the world, it's never been so clear how much we crave connection and understanding as social beings," said a staff member of the museum's curatorial department.
Slated to run until March 7, the show, free to the public, invites visitors to explore how empathy helps connect one with themselves, others, and even technology, organizers said.
Aside from connecting with themselves in a meditative manner through interacting with Zhang's work, visitors can take a walk down memory lane to connect with their family through Memento No.2, a monument-shaped installation consisted of all the furniture a Chinese family used between the 1980s and the early 2000s.
"The tables and chairs in my work were commonly seen in Chinese homes during that period," said the artist Niu Wenbo, hoping his art "can help audiences feel connected with their family and past in this fast-changing era".
Next to Niu's work is The Secrets from Strangers, a wall-bound installation comprising thousands of stamps and postcards that conjure up the galaxy.
An ongoing project started by artist Jiang Xiaran in 2016 when he was in an artist-in-residence program in Europe, the work captures the power of empathy in helping the artist form connections with strangers he would otherwise have never known.
While traveling around Europe, Jiang sent out nearly 2,000 blank, stamped postcards, to each attached a printed letter in which he revealed his identity and a deeply personal secret before asking the receiver to reciprocate with a secret of their own if they were interested. Almost half wrote back and some even sent Jiang long letters in which they bore their soul to the artist, sharing secrets that they'd never told anybody else.
"It felt incredible that my letter got those strangers to open up to me and reading their secrets made me feel we, whatever our backgrounds are, are like stars shining together in the vast galaxy," Jiang said.
As heartwarming as Jiang's work, Witness – You Are the One I Care About Most, a photo installation shining spotlight on doctors' empathy for and bond with their patients, pulled at the heartstrings of many audiences.
Featuring a number of portraits of medical workers who hold up their phones to show a photo taken with their patients, the installation is a work by Li Ge, a veteran photojournalist who spent 66 days in Wuhan, the city hit hardest by COVID-19 in China, documenting the city's battle against the epidemic.
Li and his team took more than 40,000 such portraits of the medical workers sent to Wuhan to aid the fight against the virus. During the shooting, Li was deeply touched by how much those doctors and nurses cared about their patients.
Another showpiece that strikes a chord with the audience is The Name of Gold, a two-channel video installation that sculptor Geng Xue created to empathize with the entire humanity.
Originally featured at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the main part of the work is a 9-minute black-and-white animation in which crude clay figures, beckoned by a colossus that radiates gold, silently toil away.
The other part of Geng's work, four gold-rimmed sculptural ponds containing screens showing gold figures glitter in midair, is displayed on the ground.
"The clay figures in the filmlet refer to our humans while the colossus, indefinite in form and meaning, represents a goal that all of us crave to reach. To pursue the goal, everyone has to suffer in their own way," said Geng, who dedicated the work to her two babies.
"I was four months pregnant when I started this project, and I wanted to tell my kids what the world is like essentially," she added.
Interesting World, Installation 2, another work that represented China at the 2019 Venice Biennale, is also featured at the show.
Created by artist Fei Jun, the work is an AI-driven interactive installation that promises each audience a unique virtual earth roaming experience.
The moment an audience appears in front of the screen, a webcam captures their appearance, expression, and clothing color, based on which the algorithm gives them an "identity" such as dancer, tourist, and songwriter.
With that new identity, despite being a bit far-fetched, the audience is then taken on a virtual tour to an unspecific place somewhere in the world to see what life is like there.
"Simply put, what my work does is recognize the atmosphere you convey and then bring you to someplace in the world where the atmosphere is similar to yours," Fei explained.
Seeing his creation as a hyperlink, Fei said that he has been exploring whether the combination of art and technology could better connect people with the rest of the world.
Other works that tackle the connection between man and technology such as Does AI Really Understand You?, an interactive sound and visual installation co-created by Hu Xiaochen, Qi Mengjie and Chen Tianyi, are also featured at the exhibition.
If you go:
In light of the epidemic prevention and control, the museum has a daily cap of 1,000 visitors. To make a visit, a reservation through its official WeChat account (timesartmusuem) is needed.
Free, 10: 00 am-10:00 pm, Monday to Sunday, Huaxi Live, No. 69, Fuxing Road, Haidian district, Beijing