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Joe Zhe Ren is a multimedia artist, designer, and educator. He is an assistant professor teaching Digital Media and Design at California State University Bakersfield. He is also a co-founder / chief designer at Expose Art Magazine and a rotating-term vice-chair of the Executive Committee at the Association of Chinese Artists in American Academia (ACAAA). For the past few years, he has exhibited his works nationally and internationally in America, Sweden, Finland, South Korea, and China. His research and articles have been published in China, England, and America such as, Fusion + Evolution – Teaching and Learning of Design, New Media Art, International Academic Forum on Individualized Education of Art and Design in International Field of Vision, Chinese Literature Today, etc.

Statement

My work is about investigating the relationship between reality and representation found in the tension in our environment and modern society. I discover the contradiction between appearance and substance by exposing the chaos in our surrounding environment. Thus redistributing the realization of environmental concerns. I create contemporary fictional urban, natural locations, containing scenes and patterns that create a sense of familiarity through the use of some small found objects or images. I build the duality through beauty and repulsion. My works emphasize notions of alienation, arrogance, greed, and desire inherent in modern life. Miscommunication and fantasy are excuses invented to obscure reality, which is accompanied by an undeniably fictitious scene, message, and constructed landscape. In my work, I build conflict between the surface and background, between harmony and oddity to overturn one’s understanding of reality.

I work predominantly in digital print, animation, video, drawing, mixed reality, and virtual interaction. I appropriate and reassemble imagery from social media, news, garbage, advertising junk, abandoned landscapes, and products to create a fantastical world, where all actual realities are concealed beneath the surface of beauty; where something has been hiding. A Chinese philosophy says, seeing mountain is mountain, river is river. However, Mountain is not mountain; river is not river. Look again, Mountain is still mountain; river is still river.

I question the relationship between reality and representation, between what we see and what we want to believe, truth and fault, faith and self-doubt, and between what is and what we create for ourselves. I want to bring out those questions and incite investigative thought concerning the world we live in and the postmodern cultural experience about duality, uncertainty, and doubt of reality itself.