'Best Synthetic Answer' at Rockbund Art Museum

"Best Synthetic Answer," a solo exhibition by US artist and poet Rindon Johnson, is showing at the Rockbund Art Museum through April 6, 2025.

Marking the artist's most comprehensive museum presentation and his first in the Asia Pacific, this experimental seven-month project explores the vast fluid expanses of the Pacific Ocean that connect the United States and China.

Initiated from a series of discussions between Johnson and RAM artistic director X Zhu-Nowell, the exhibition navigates the complex geographies of the Pacific, interrogating traditional notions of borders, fixed territory, states, and ecocide.

This exhibition invites viewers to focus on how art objects interact with the experience of being in the space of the real world and in real-time. In a place where competition for land, redrawing borders, and occupations persists, Johnson proposes a divergent way of thinking about time as a layered depth – overlaid yet constantly eroding.

The spotlight of the exhibition is a newly commissioned video installation, "Best Synthetic Answer #1: Crossing…," that simulates a real-time journey from Johnson's birthplace – the unceded territories of the Ohlone native peoples in San Francisco – to Shanghai. Spanning seven months, Johnson's avatar – the "main character" of this work – swims in real time across the Pacific Ocean, offering an immersive experience that attempts and ultimately fails to describe the immensity and multidimensionality of the Pacific, specifically by following in the wake of destructive US interventions.

The exhibition and its central work's title, "Best Synthetic Answer," references the outputs of large language models – like ChatGPT – which are designed to generate the optimal response to any query. Their responses are termed synthetic because, at least in their technological definition, they are not considered real. In this work, the artist asks, what is real, and why does it become so?

As a "language-based" artist and poet, Johnson also makes paintings, speculative animations, sculptures, livestreams, videos, and stained-glass installations. The exhibition also includes 18 new works showing the full range of Johnson's practice across five museum floors.

Exhibition info:

Dates: Through April 6, 2025 (closed on Mondays), 10am-6pm

Venue: Rockbund Art Museum

Address: 20 Huqiu Road

Admission: 100 yuan