STALKER
2021
Action, site-specific installation
STALKER was initially a situational response to a power-asymmetric affair between a group of artists and the host who offered his private basement as an exhibition space. The colossal room was completely in chaos and had to be cleaned up before use. As one of the artist groups, Shaotong He decided to radicalize the chaos as much as possible in a rational manner to create a new order for the space and the exhibition itself (i.e., distributing all movable objects as homogeneously as possible according to their categories).
In STALKER, which clearly references the famous film by filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky from 1979, Shaoting He confronts the viewer with an initially incomprehensible state of chaos: a mysterious basement that resembles the original concept of the "Zone" in which the artist interacts and stays for 6 days.
Driven by the question of "order" and "chaos," the artist has created a constructive chaos in the basement through meticulous analysis and calculation, while becoming a part of the entropy of the "zone" themselves. The process is depicted through the video installation in both subjective and observational perspectives.
The situation that led to the initiation of the action was instigated by the artist Andrea Marcellier, who also showcased the final state of the space as an on-site installation in Himmelgeist near Düsseldorf.