Erica Zhan
Every four summers, the Olympic Games appear on multiple screens like a lengthy large-scale television commercial. We unconsciously have developed a set of imagery of the Olympics: the real-time update of medal rankings, the sound of the starting gun as it breaks into the sky, the ebb and flow of the commentators’ voices, and the athletes’ triumphant poses for the camera…
They make up a stationary summer package that is distributed across a wide variety of videos, photographs, news reports, and real-time broadcasts.
For this project, I transcoded the Olympic “prosthetics” into a commercial catalog you’ve tirelessly received in your mailbox. I mimic the visual design and descriptive tone of the advertising catalogs to reorganize the scenarios, tools, technologies, and everything else that is utilized in the Olympics. Here, the components of the Olympics are reduced to commodities with a clear price tag, and all the dramatic broadcasting strategies and increasingly sophisticated sporting technologies are not without the involvement of national interests and commercial metrics.
What would the function and price tag of an item look like if it were removed from the context of a much-anticipated event, and appeared on the promotional list you pull from when you head to the supermarket? Shielded from authoritative rules and cutting-edge broadcast experiences, how do Olympic objects relate to your everyday life? This is an ongoing, dynamic and open archival catalog, and the list of Olympic items will be updated as the vocabulary expands and the technological tools of sport evolve.
Erica Zhan is an interdisciplinary artist and writer born in the southeastern hills of China, currently based in Chicago, USA. They employ performance, moving image, installation, and writing to explore games, sports, competitions and playfulness in the context of late capitalism. Zhan graduated from the MA program in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have exhibited and performed at various venues, including the International Museum of Surgical Science, Women Made Gallery, ACRE Projects Gallery, Gene Siskel Film Center, Comfort Station, No Nation Art Lab and others. Additionally, Zhan writes poetry, fiction, and art criticism, with art reviews published primarily in The Art Newspaper China (rebranded as The Art Journal in 2024).
