Welcome >_< Take a Seat Wherever (cringevibing on a downward spiral) Opening Reception

A rhetorical delusion or heartfelt self-affirmation, “Welcome >_< Take a Seat Wherever (cringevibing on a downward spiral)” explores the emotive language of Gen Z as well as implications of being terminally online in a confusing, almost pathologized, schizophrenic state. 

Taking humour as a point of departure, the exhibition looks into the why’s and how’s of memetic irony: why do these devices share an affinity among Gen Z, and how are these memes—in Dawkins’ terms and in a contemporary vernacular—disseminated? In an era where ironic expression is indistinguishable from sincere belief, meme makers conflate ‘based’ with ‘cringe’, readers take comedic scripts as half-truths. The virtual versus actual has become obsolete. So have art and memes that slowly morph into one another.

In true Derridean fashion, the exhibition plays with ellipses and clashes in meaning, langage, visual cultures, and clichés. As savvy gurus and prophets of microtrend cycles, cores and lores, the artists draw inspiration from their mediated realities. They make sense of their subjectivity—in the age of deepfakes, meta-irony, memes as cultural artefacts, hyper-referentiality—through video, sculpture, painting, installation, exe file, and appropriated design image-objects.