Chun Shao

Chun Shao is a multimedia artist who is living in Seattle. Currently, Shao is pursuing her Ph.D. degree in Art and Technology major at DXARTS, University of Washington. In 2013, she received an MFA degree in Performance Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2010, she received her BFA in New Media Arts from China Academy of Art. Shao is interested in experimenting with the paradox of intimacy and loneliness in the digital world, especially from the communicational aspect. Shao has been making participatory performances, which integrated with wearable technology, for the past few years. She constructs performances by asking audience to hear, touch, and immerse themselves in the work. Her work insinuates a weak-willed mental state of perpetuating the relationships with the world and others.

Continuing Shao’s interest of the paradox of digital communication, she currently is exploring a skin-based mode of telecommunication. Eliminating the verbal language, written text, images on a screen, Shao is working with different kinds of biological signals (brainwave, breath, muscle tension etc.) and translating them into a wide range of somatic experience such as warmth, humidity, pain pressure etc.  On the one side, Shao intents to open up a flesh involved way of “talking” and “listening” in order to reconstruct an intimate relationship in the digital word. On the other side, the digitalized biological signals and the artificial human physiological reactions likely are thickening the barriers between people, and create a more alienated feeling of being and being together. Shao’s work often questions the certainty and euphoria of telecommunication by contrasting the extreme conditions of togetherness and separation though the Internet.