>> Form & Agency Microsite
>> Form & Agency Lore Wiki

The next artwork that is encountered within the exhibition is Model D: 黑科技. The work takes on the form of an open sided black box with stray teeths and thorns outlining its top surface. The addition of parts and organs familiar to animals or the human, was for the artist a way to retain the sculptures in the domain of entities with agency, and not merely inanimate materials. When I was first introduced to this work, my mind made an immediate connection to the black boxes of aeroplanes: data recorders often used to extract flight information on the occasion of vehicle failures. However, Brandon’s provincial lore notes seem to suggest a deeper reference to the orientalist tensions of the notion of a Chinese box, “[representative] of a dark mirror to a form of Chinoiserie, in which Western views of the inscrutability of Chinese thought, culture and technology are reflected in harsh and uncanny aggressiveness.” The artist had also shared with me that the idea of a Chinese black box had come to him later on in the process, and that initially, he was inspired by the formal quality of the infamous Kowloon Walled City. Brandon’s first touchpoint to the city was through William Gibson’s imagined version of it in his literary works as a virtual environment. In Gibson’s imaginations, the virtual city is a clandestine space, accessible only via a glitch at the central core that hides the space away from government regulations and mega-corporations. In that sense, Brandon’s black box is a reversal of that imagination, where the secret is contained at the core. Whether the secret is the formula to future technological prowess, or early civilization and ancient wisdom, is left for us to speculate.
Full text by Rafi Abdullah