uqbar presents a selection of video works by the Chinese artist Gao Shiqiang from 2007 to 2010. Born in 1971, he belongs to the generation of artists who experiences the legacy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution as the background of recent Chinese reality – with all its contradictions and discrepancy. “For my generation, history has transformed into a trance and the real world into a joke”, he says. Unfortunately not a good joke, as he reveals in his works, which he describes as a “quartet of history, life, language and mind” and which contain metaphorical and political fault lines signifying states of alienation, apathy and stagnation of the post-revolutionary life in China.