Curated by Zhang Ga

Ever since Jiang Zemin’s “Theory of the Three Represents” enshrined the pursuit of “advanced culture” as official dogma back in 2002, Chinese authorities have had a thing for media art. What could be more culturally advanced, after all, than high art made with new machines? In 2008, NAMOC’s “Synthetic Times” exhibition offered a sweeping survey of the genre to accompany the Beijing Olympics; three years on, museum director Fan Di’an and his New York–trained media art guru Zhang Ga are still at it, launching (what else?) a triennial of new-media art whose inaugural installment, titled “Translife,” will present some forty-odd projects. While the exhibtion will no doubt adhere closely to domestic political orthodoxy, its major mandate—to look at “symbiotic life forms” as a way “to interrogate an anthropocentric modernity”—may well defy Western ideas about life and its origins.

— Philip Tinari