Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true, Real becomes unreal when the unreal’s real,’ wrote Cao Xueqin in his classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber. With excruciating detail, the author constructs fantastical worlds of illusion through mundane realism, blurring the definitions of fact and fiction. Three centuries on, the boundaries between what is real and unreal remain ever more pertinent. The expansion of digital technologies coupled with the forces of globalisation has posed challenge to all predetermined knowledge, including the notion of ‘truth’ itself.
'Adventures in Fact' brings together sculpture, augmented reality / video game, and a publication to explore the interplay between ideology and reality, the material and the virtual. From instant cities to private paradises, how is the built environment constructed to reflect idealised representations of dominant value systems? And what kind of worlds are produced by the subsequent processes of imaging and imagining?
Meitao Qu lives and works between London and Beijing. From costume to architecture, she is interested in how forms of visualisation operate as ‘props’ to stimulate imaginations. Taking scrapbooking as method, her practice sutures contradictory perspectives to draw out the misunderstandings that inform their conflict.
