A viewer looks at Are You Human? by German artist Aram Bartholl at Supermarket of Images, an exhibit held at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, on May 28, 2021. [Photo by Yang Xiaoyu/chinadaily.com.cn]

As social media dominates our time, our lives are inexorably flooded with photos and videos, leaving many of us overwhelmed, jaded, and increasingly impatient.

"Each day more than three billion images are shared on social networks," curator Peter Szendy writes in the foreword of Supermarket of Images, a thematic exhibit underway at the Red Brick Museum in Beijing.

That feeling of being inundated by photos may be exactly what grabs visitors as soon as they enter the museum.

American artist Evan Roth's installation Since You Were Born covers all the walls and the ceiling of the first hall of the Red Brick Art Museum. [Photo by Yang Xiaoyu/chinadaily.com.cn]

All the walls and ceiling of the museum's first hall and even the receptionist desk next to it are covered by images. So thickly arranged are the images that when viewed from afar, they seem like numerous pixels trying to form a larger picture.

Titled Since You Were Born, the giant installation is made of all the images accumulated in the cache memory of artist Evan Roth's computer ever since his second daughter's birth in 2019.

"I feel dizzy and even a bit suffocated," said Yu Bin, a visitor to the show's opening on Friday. "It's a bit shocking to see the photos accumulated by a person in less than three years should take up so much space."

Serie ELA 75/K (Won't Smudge Off) by Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury is on show at Supermarket of Images, an exhibit held at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, on May 28, 2021. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

To the left of the installation, a gilded shopping trolley, created by Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury, shimmers while it rotates on a pedestal, beckoning the audiences to take it to shop for something at the exhibit.

"Welcome to Red Brick Art Museum's 'Supermarket of Images'," said Yan Shijie, the museum's director at the exhibit's opening. "Nowadays everyone is immersed in tons of images pretty much on a daily basis," said Yan, who sees the exhibit as a chance for Chinese audiences to reconsider their relationship with images.

Co-curated by Szendy, Emmanuel Alloa, and Marta Ponsa, the show teams up 39 artists/art groups, including Yves Klein, Robert Bresson,  William Kentridge and Kevin Abosch, an NFT (non-fungible token) artist who has recently shot to fame.

A child interacts with Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan's untitled installation at Supermarket of Images, an exhibit held at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, on May 28, 2021. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

More than 50 artworks, spanning photography, painting, sculpture, video, and installation, are on display.

The exhibit derives from Szendy's 2017 book The Supermarket of the Visible, in which he developed the concept of iconomy, a portmanteau combining "icon" and "economy". The author compared the circulation of money to that of images and argued that images have become a new form of capital.

The exhibit, divided into five sections – stocks, raw materials, work, values, and exchanges, will enable viewers to explore answers to questions such as what images are made of, how they are stored and exchanged, as well as how image over-production has engendered labor exploitation.

A viewer looks at Por Um Fio by Brazilian artist Ana Vitoria Mussi at Supermarket of Images, an exhibit held at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, on May 28, 2021. [Photo by Yang Xiaoyu/chinadaily.com.cn]

In addition, the exhibit touches upon an array of topics including the protection of personal information, internet giants' pervasive influence, digital labor, and crypto-currencies.

Yet, as some museum goers and exhibit reviewers commented, to navigate the exhibit and find out answers in specific artworks may be no easy task. That is largely because the artworks are not displayed in a certain order.

"We didn't want to use the various works as mere examples or illustrations. Of course, they were subsumed under the headings of the five parts of the show, but we were very eager not to let the curatorial discourse engulf their presence and radiance, at the cost of creating some turbulence for visitors," Szendy said in an interview with NECSUS, a European journal of media studies, in last December.

Duty Free Art by German artist Hito Steyerl is on show at Supermarket of Images, an exhibit held at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, on May 28, 2021. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Thus, it would take time and close attention to acquire intellectual delight. But to smoothen the viewing experience, the museum offers free posters from which audiences can read more about each artwork and figure out which section it belongs to.

Part of the Festival Croisements 2021, the exhibit, supported by the French Cultural Center in Beijing, is co-organized by the French embassy in China, and Jeu De Paume, an arts center in Paris dedicated to photography and visual arts where the exhibit debuted in Feb 2020.

The exhibit runs until Aug 1.

If you go:

10:00-18:00, Tuesday to Sunday. Red Brick Art Museum, Hegezhuang, Cuigezhaung village, Chaoyang district, Beijing. 8610-8457-6669-8800