Jinkun Zhu, LazyBackHome, Zhang Ting: TechDiumMory

TANK Shanghai presents TechDiumMory, a Threefold Exhibition featuring works by Jinkun Zhu, LazyBackHome, and Zhang Ting. Opening on 24 July 2026, the exhibition will be on view until 25 October 2026.

“Shu (术)” originally referred to a method of making and transforming the world. Today, this “Shu” has expanded into a mechanism for producing reality itself, operating between technological systems, media circulation, and cultural memory. As Technology, Medium, and Memory become increasingly intertwined, human experience can no longer be separated into independent parts. Together, they form a new structure through which reality is continuously produced.

Fire@Data Center 2026 is Zhu Jinkun’s delayed response to his first solo exhibition five years ago. Over the past five years, technological development has continuously reshaped the way reality operates. Artificial intelligence, algorithms, computational networks, and automated infrastructures have gradually become the underlying structures that organize the world. Reality is increasingly transformed into data, models, and systems. Geopolitics, economic structures, natural environments, and individual experiences are all converted into computable and reorganizable units of information, constantly circulating and updating within global networks. Fire@Data Center 2026 traces this ongoing transformation: reality is no longer an object reflected by technology, but something continuously generated through computation, transmission, and algorithms — an open structure that remains in constant evolution.

LazyBackHome presents an “image war” after the loss of textual authority, unfolding through the fictional public event “T-DOS (The Day of Strikes)”. The work explores how a bird-strike accident gradually detaches from the original event through the combined forces of news media, social platforms, and popular circulation. It transforms into an endlessly reproducible symbol without fixed meaning, eventually gaining new social value through continuous replication like a meme. “Freshly Chopped Reality” serves as the central metaphor, comparing reality to a salad that is constantly chopped, mixed, and reconstructed. Alchemy is borrowed as a methodology of image production — revealing how authoritative images are continuously created, circulated, and collapsed within media loops, becoming an endless “dialogue with the underworld” without response.

In this exhibition, Zhang Ting draws on the narrative format of Humor Master, a Chinese comic magazine from the 1980s, to construct a new narrative context for the character “Xiaoming.” As a recurring figure in China's compulsory education textbooks, workbooks, and reading materials, Xiaoming does not represent any specific child but functions instead as a standardized educational symbol reproduced through repetition. Using the motifs of the “house” and “adventure” as narrative threads, Zhang Ting relocates this long-standing textbook character into a series of constructed spatial situations, transforming him from a model of prescribed educational behavior into the protagonist of the exhibition's narrative. At the same time, Zhang Ting incorporates pirated toys, cartoon characters, and everyday objects from his childhood, reorganizing them within Xiaoming's reconstructed environment into a shared yet complex generational experience. Throughout the exhibition, Xiaoming is repeatedly placed in situations of danger and disorder. This departure from the standardized narrative reveals the distance between individual lived experience and educational norms, while reflecting the profound ways in which pirated visual culture, existing beyond the framework of formal education, has shaped the lived experience of an entire generation.

As Friedrich Kittler emphasized, media is not merely a carrier of information, but the condition that determines how information can exist in the first place. From this perspective, reality itself can be understood as an operational system sustained by different media technologies.

Therefore, “TechDiumMory ” does not refer to a single narrative, but rather to a continuously operating system of reality production. The bedroom, the ruins, the cabin, and the exhibition space are not separate locations, but manifestations of the same narrative structure entering and unfolding within everyday life.