The Utopian Enclave

Bai’s father kept a large aquarium at home for many years. Artificial rocks, vegetation, waterwheels, bridges, and miniature buildings formed an environment designed by people for fish. While reading Thomas More’s Utopia, Bai began to reconsider this childhood scene as an ideal world constructed from outside: the fish do not determine their surroundings; the complete landscape is selected and assembled by someone beyond it.

The ornaments are mass-produced, purchasable modules designed for quick combination. Bai rearranges and photographs them, allowing inexpensive artificial nature to become unfamiliar when enlarged. Seen retrospectively, this way of rapidly assembling a complete environment from standardized components also resonates with the modular and assembly-based technological experience that shaped him in Shenzhen.

The six photographic lightboxes sit within computer-cut stainless-steel symbolic structures developed alongside the images and hang above the viewer. The symbols are not later decorative frames but part of the work’s construction. Looking upward at these illuminated, enclosed worlds introduces another relation into the work: who constructs an environment, and who is positioned to observe it.