American artist Tony Oursler breathes life into inanimate objects by projecting video loops onto installations.

One of Oursler's "dolls," as seen pining away in a suitcase. Photos: courtesy of Faurshou Beijing

By Robert Powers

Entering the Tony Oursler's recently opened exhibition, Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, at the Faurshou gallery in the 798 Art District is akin to setting foot in a haunted house or a museum of oddities.

The American artist's "Doll"—nothing more than a small rag doll held up by a long and thin pole—greets visitors as they walk in. A looped video of a tortured and sullen man's face, lamenting a string of seemingly random thoughts, that is projected onto the doll's face immediately establishes Oursler's novel style: imbuing sculpted and ready-made inanimate objects with a kind of artificial life.

A thick quilted curtain door separates the lobby from the rest of the works on display, and once through, patrons are virtually assaulted by harrowing of sounds coming from each corner of the gallery.

The first to greet visitors on the other side is a panoply of videos projecting differently branded cigarettes burning and automatically reconstituting themselves onto tall white tubes. Oursler's "Cigarettes" is accompanied by visceral sounds of unseen people smoking and lighting cigarettes and tobacco embers sizzling and being inhaled.

Oursler's depictions of humanoid forms, however, have a kind of preternatural power to elicit a considerable amount of empathy. And it should be said that still photos of the works on display don't do Oursler's creation justice.

"FX," a special effects-laden video of a flaming face, angry at everything and everyone, and projected onto a potato-like installation hanging from the ceiling, calls to mind a suicide bomber caught in a state of suspended animation.

"Something that would take place in a fraction of a second," reads a release from the gallery, "is stretched out in time, and the viewer can enter into a dialogue with an inferno."

Other highlights of the exhibition include "Eyes," a series of floating eye-orbs that bear an uncanny resemblance to planets, and a work comprising the disembodied heads of a male and female actor wearing purple makeup, which act as if they belonged in a Beckett play about relationships.

Oursler's aims seems to be to portray people as trapped in the form they were given, as evidenced by Oursler's one work of a very odd (though strangely feminine) creature that mutters to itself as if it were a kind of hard AI gone terribly wrong.

Of particular note to Chinese visitors is Oursler's talking 100-yuan bill. Projected on a flat and plain surface, Mao's lips have been animated to speak a series of seemingly random and banal phrases in Chinese, all of which have been helpfully printed out on the wall to be read.

Most surprising about a talking Mao—other than the words coming out of his mouth being alternatingly cryptic, weird, banal and inoffensive—is the easygoing and pleasantly baritone quality of his voice.

Where: Faurshou Beijing, 798 Art District

When: Until May 30, gallery open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 6 pm

Contact: 5978-9316

www.faurschou.com