This one glows. The so-called “pixel woodland” is made up of three,000 LED lighting fixtures, suspended by way of plastic cables that twist like vines, blinking pink, blue, inexperienced, yellow and red, in tandem with the song. The glossy black surface bureaucracy a glassy lake that displays each and every tough, twinkling crystal, growing one of those infinity.

Rist examines the interior chaos of our virtual global via what she known as a “tough, uncooked digital fact” that audience can contact and discover. Walking via her pixel woodland, it is onerous to not image your self status inside of a telephone or computer display screen — or, to peer one of those good looks on this damaged down and blown-up model of our virtual global. The revel in would possibly assist guests acknowledge how simple it’s to turn out to be misplaced in generation.

“It’s every now and then an phantasm. People suppose, ‘Oh, we are completely in touch,’ however in reality, being in combination (in individual) is one thing completely other,” Rist mentioned.

“I attempt to deliver the digital in entrance, or out, of the display screen — to deliver it extra into the room,” mentioned Rist.

Light from not going puts

Born in Grabs, Switzerland, in 1962, Rist has been a fixture at the visible arts scene because the Eighties. But she hastily entered mainstream awareness in 2016, when it used to be advised that Beyoncé’s song video “Hold Up” had taken inspiration from the set up “Ever is Over All.”

Beyoncé by no means officially credited the artist’s 1997 paintings — which depicts a carefree Rist in pink heels and a blue get dressed, skipping down a side road swinging a long-stemmed pink flower — as an inspiration. The scene used to be immediately recognizable, even though: a lady skipping nonchalantly down a car-lined side road smashing home windows, baseball bat in hand.

Rist, who creates her paintings collaboratively with a workforce of audio, mild and video technicians, used to be flattered by way of the obvious nod. “I assumed it used to be cool that individuals who would possibly by no means pass to artwork exhibitions abruptly were given the connection with a video artist,” she mentioned. “Maybe they did not even know that (‘Ever is Over All’) exists.”

The baseball bat introduced a “positive aggression” to the scene, mentioned Rist — while her personal flower-turned-weapon used to be a extra playful touch upon feminine energy and autonomy, a key theme in Rist’s paintings. Rist even speculated that she used to be interested in her selected medium, video artwork, as a result of “it wasn’t taken by way of males.”

While each men and women characteristic in her movies, the previous dominate. Yet, she takes exception to the concept that she has a choice for profiling girls: “The energy construction is such that we take (girls) as an exception. For me, I all the time attempted to mention, ‘No, that is the human.'”

In her Hong Kong exhibition, depictions of feminine torsos hold suspended from the ceiling, a Pop-Art twist on Greek and Roman sculptures. One is a stiff yellow suit, with a small ’90s-style tv balanced within the hollowed-out crotch, whilst some other has mild emanating from the place the legs must be.

Rist’s video installation “Digesting Impressions” (1993/2013) features a looping video played on a television inside a swimsuit. Credit: Rebecca Cairns / CNN

Light projecting from pelvises is a commonplace motif in Rist’s artwork. (“It’s the place we noticed the sunshine once we got here out from our moms,” she defined.) And her humor could also be showcased in her chandelier of underpants, which performs with the double entendre of “mild” that means each to polish and be light-weight.

“(The pelvis) is debatable for us, between disgrace and keenness and stinking and pleasure,” Rist mentioned, pointing to the idiom, “not to air one’s grimy laundry” and what it says about protecting our darkness, our issues, and our struggles, a secret. “I needed to make it mild.”

Peeling again layers

Across the three-floor exhibition, Rist showcases her implausible vary: Decades-old works sit down along new, site-specific installations, whilst whole immersive rooms are adopted by way of unmarried displays. In one example, a tiny display screen the dimensions of a ping-pong ball is embedded within the surface, appearing the 1994 six-minute looping video “Selbstlos im Lavabad” (Selfless in The Bath Of Lava), that includes a screaming lady trapped in a fiery purgatory.

Many of the items had been created a long time in the past, but Rist’s artwork is by hook or by crook “all the time tailored to the most recent generation,” mentioned exhibition curator Tobias Berger. He highlights the 1996 paintings, “Sip My Ocean,” a two-channel video that, in its unique shape, would have proven on a way smaller projector. Now the paintings fills two partitions, from surface to ceiling, on a theater-size display screen. Improvements in audio generation additionally upload some other size to the works, Berger added, “so even the previous works in each and every exhibition are virtually site-specific new works.”

The “Central Hong Kong Chandelier” (2021) sits alongside “Big Skin” (2022), blurring the mundane and fantastical. Credit: Rebecca Cairns / CNN

Rist created two solely new works for the exhibition. Outside, a large projection transforms the previous jail backyard wherein the gallery is positioned right into a “glade within the town,” the place Rist hopes folks will acquire and fix in individual.

And inside of, the brand new “Big Skin” intallation ties in combination the exhibition’s central metaphor: membranes. Semi-translucent white “skins” are suspended from the ceiling, whilst video projections depicting galaxies and herbal landscapes — a mix of actual photos and animations — play throughout their surfaces. Like floating clouds, they take in and emit mild, growing eerie shadows whilst they display soothing scenes of autumnal leaves.

For Berger, the authenticity of Rist’s artwork is a part of the appeal — as a result of, in spite of its surrealism, none of it’s computer-generated. “I believe that is what the fascination is, why individuals are so drawn to her paintings: There’s not anything faux, the entirety is actual,” he mentioned.

“Water Tiger Colour Balm” (2022) is an outside video set up, created for the distance out of doors the JC Contemporary Gallery in Tai Kwun, Hong Kong. Credit: Tai Kwun

The ultimate room, “The Apartment,” offers a former lady’s jail mobile the semblance of a house: A eating desk and chairs, a settee and sideboard, and an afternoon mattress, are surrounded by way of the litter of homey trinkets, a lot of that are from Hong Kong, and a portray by way of a neighborhood artist. But projections transfer around the area like ghosts, a setup extra uncanny than acquainted.

As within the pixel woodland, Rist immerses the viewer in a dreamlike aggregate of lighting fixtures, colours and sound that foil the on a regular basis. She offers weight to feelings and concepts — and in doing so, offers frame to the invisible traces that attach us.

“We are so a lot more equivalent than we’re other,” she mentioned.