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Music

GogoJ's Minimalist Visuals Are More Subversive Than They Seem

Perceptively driven usage of both low- and hi-fi techniques.

Sheng Jie aka GogoJ’s artistic style owes much to her background in the “traditional” fields of classical music and painting. Having been brought up playing violin and wielding a paintbrush, this Chinese artist naturally developed her artistic practice to incorporate the digital arts in both the musical and visual realms.

While studying in France, she was introduced to video art for the first time. Her first investigations into this medium led her to create beautiful video art pieces, but even then, sound already played an important role in the manifestation and perception of her video work. Later on, by merging her musical interests with the video form, she entered the world of audiovisual performance. GogoJ developed a singular visual style where psychedelia is obtained through a minimal use of geometry, simple shapes and lines, a color palette of black and white, and repetition—an approach that reminds us of the Op Art works of Bridget Riley.

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Besides performing as a solo audiovisual artist, she also collaborates widely as a VJ with artists like: B6, VAVABOND, Li Jianhong, and Li Zenghui, among others. She’s also the founder of the established Shan Studio, a multimedia digital art and communication platform in Beijing that holds weekly lectures and workshops to support the local digital arts scene.

As a musician, GogoJ is strongly influenced by jazz, new wave, electronica, doom and industrial noise. In L’OS, an experimental minstrel poetry/spoken word duo she formed with the French musician Olivier Heux, she creates a self-centered language designed to explain the fluid statuses of the different layers of reality. This results in a dark ambience, with minimal sound signals, noise, and unstable chanting.

Li Zenghui (vocals) and GogoJ (visuals and laptop): “TelevisionMan”

This stunning performance was a collaboration between GogoJ and a breathtaking new star in the Chinese experimental music scene—Li Zenghui. The stage simulates a black and white television screen and simple graphics react to computer-generated high and low frequencies. Li added his voice to the performance, overlapping it with the electronic waves and making them more dynamic. GogoJ underscores the visual experience of the entire show with nothing more than a laptop, an analog synth, and iPhone app. She claims that while she re-thinks and explores lo-fi and hi-fi tendencies, she avoids following the trends, instead using each tool with a specific purpose in mind.

Push (2006), video installation

Animations like this one demonstrate how the simplicity of GogoJ’s designs masks the often provocative and critical themes underpinning her work. Here we see A and B standing face-to-face. A pushes B to produce another B, and every push by A produces a new B. This goes on until all of the Bs push A off the screen. The animation is a subtle critique of what GogoJ sees as the current state of artistic affairs in China, where creativity is taking a back seat to mere copying.

Images courtesy of Sheng Jia.