THE ARTIST
Slime Engine was founded in 2017, operated and curated by Li Hanwei, Liu Shuzhen, Fang Yang, and Shan Liang. Slime Engine is dedicated to the development of unprecedented art creation, exhibition curating and experience. Through communication and cooperation with artists, the use of virtual worlds that are not limited by time and space, presents a profuse contemporary art form.
Since 2017, Slime Engine organizes online exhibition continuously, including: “Ding Li x Slime Engine”, 2020; “Headlines”, 2020; “Territory”, 2020; “Ocean”, 2019; “Bysanz x 33EMYBW x Fang Yang Three-Person Project”, 2018; “Li Jingxiong & ChillChill Double Solo Show”, 2018; “Remote Sensing”, 2018; “Jurassic”, 2018; “Hole”, 2018; “Your World”, 2018; “James Turrell’s Meditation Space”, 2018; “Nostromo Landing”, 2017; “Space Station”, 2017; “Baychimo”, 2017; “Nuclear Magnetic Resonance”, 2017.
Slime Engine has also participated in numerous exhibitions as an artist collective, including: “Shanghai Plaza”, Shanghai Plaza, Shanghai, 2020; “Wild Cinema”, TX Huaihai, Shanghai, 2020; “We=Link: Ten Easy Pieces”, Chronus Art Center (CAC), 2020; “Coordinates: Theatre”, Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture, Shenzhen, 2019; “The Process of Art: TOOLS AT WORK”, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2019; “Advent: Inventing Landscape, Producing the Earth” , Qianshao Contemporary Art Center, Shanghai, 2019; “Copernicus”, E.M.Bannister Gallery of Rhode Island College, U.S., 2019; “Extreme Mix”, Guangzhou Airport Biennale, Guangzhou, 2019; “Infinite Games”, How Art Museum, Wenzhou, 2019; “Ocean,” MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, 2019.
THE WORK
Headlines (2020), the contribution from art collective Slime Engine, is a compilation of doctored newspaper content, ranging from political headlines and op-ed accounts, to lifestyle articles and advertisements.
Playfully renaming coronavirus as “hookvirus,” tongue-in-cheek statements, such as “the epidemic could cause more stimulus impacts on the global economy than the US-China trade war,” turn the circulation of fake news on its head by pushing political conspiracies to the extreme. Replete with ludicrous imagery that explores our collective repulsion for the alien and the infectious, the site establishes a bizarre aesthetic that collapses the boundary between the fantastic and the real. The most striking of these is a 3D-rendered food show depicting a crowd of zombies waiting in line for savory Chinese crepes.