Jason Bozhi Zhao
ooh-waa-waa & ooh-gaa-gaa
Found text from Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, Artforum, Art Education (not in image order). This sculpture is currently under production and represented here by digital renderings.
Jason Zhao’s practice interrogates commodification and labor under the global advent of the gig and sharing economy. The propagation of the Uber model to ever-growing sectors to the global economy, considered as the intensification of capitalism, brings new forms of digital labor and new demands for commodities.
His practice complicates the relationship between art and this new economic context. By considering art, especially activist art, as a form of ideological commodity, one can ask what might generate economic demand for such products, to its function in the broader economy, and what are the habits of its consumption.
Concurrently by interrogating the social changes wrought by the increasing prevalence of the gig/sharing economy and with it, conceptions of labor, his practice examines how capitalism appropriates activism for its own ends and the role of activist art in sustaining the continued development and prosperity of capitalism.
His practice complicates the relationship between art and this new economic context. By considering art, especially activist art, as a form of ideological commodity, one can ask what might generate economic demand for such products, to its function in the broader economy, and what are the habits of its consumption.
Concurrently by interrogating the social changes wrought by the increasing prevalence of the gig/sharing economy and with it, conceptions of labor, his practice examines how capitalism appropriates activism for its own ends and the role of activist art in sustaining the continued development and prosperity of capitalism.