Rindon Johnson, ‘Best Synthetic Answer’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai
‘Best Synthetic Answer’, Rindon Johnson’s exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum, opens with a question written on the floor at the entrance in wavy letters: ‘How does a Black American, raised on the edges of the Pacific, move through the ocean to reach Shanghai?’ Johnson’s answer: by swimming. The show’s centrepiece, the AI-generated video installation Best Synthetic Answer #1: Crossing ... (2024), sees the artist’s avatar virtually swim from his birthplace in San Francisco to Shanghai: a journey simulated using real-time and pre-existing oceanic weather data. (The work’s full title resists transcription by virtue of its length, akin to the titles of the other works on view.) The avatar’s journey follows the historical route of American imperialism: from Hawaii via island groups in the South Pacific. Just as the figure – who, like Johnson, is Black – swims through the ocean, so too the artist and poet navigates his relationship to the complex legacies these waters carry.
The ceiling above the video features a stained-glass map, almost 15 metres long, showing the entire Pacific region. Johnson’s work is broadly language-based, and the title of the large glass, Language is a virus or…(2024), doubles as a poem that explores the relationship between colonialism, standardization and value, as well as the ways in which new laws, languages, fashions and social conventions have accompanied the imperialist expropriation of land. In this light, the work’s coloured glass, typically found in Tiffany lamps, can be understood as a standardized luxury good of American origin.
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