Lot 294 R α

Turandot 2070 considers the contemporary problematics of China’s threat to the West, the #MeToo movement, cancel culture, and authoritarian use of technology through the prism of Turandot’s story. It departs from the narrative in the opera’s libretto, extracting only its overarching theme of female vengeance as the most pervasive irrational fear of the global patriarchy. Translucent robots with forms resembling both the phallic and the feminine systematically torture and execute men with their many appendages, in revenge for the harassment and rape of princess Turandot’s ancestors. Turandot herself appears to the masses in the form of her many chimeric avatars that emerge from a Dragon Palace sailing above the city. Her constituency is a confused and repressed people whose displays of affection for the princess border on hysteria and mass hallucination. The landscape in the video depicts a sprawling city composed of colorful yet homogeneous biomorphic architecture, with all the properties of a futuristic metropolis one might expect to see in the year 2070.

The work highlights a myriad of today’s most pressing issues by exploring a possible future dominated by a grotesque totalitarian social system, whose rise is attributed directly to contemporary events, and which in itself constitutes an analysis of Western society’s fear for the rapid advance and expanding influence of China. The final scene in the video, titled “Paradise,” depicts a utopian and equally hyperbolized transformation of this futuristic society where everyone, stripped to nothing but pastel-colored underwear, cannot but engage in acts of tenderness toward one another with no regard for physical differences. (Source: aesf.art)