Rindon Johnson's Odyssey Across the Pacific

SHANGHAI — In late September 2024, an avatar of Rindon Johnson plunged into the Pacific Ocean — a digital body in a virtual sea. It was the beginning of a seven-month journey from San Francisco to Shanghai, as well as an exhibition timed down to the second to reflect this crossing. Unfolding this oceanscape’s varied horizons across the multiple floors of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, Best Synthetic Answer charts the fluid potentials of contemporary Black subjectivity as it collides with the fluid life-worlds of a dynamic sea.

Our understanding of the ocean is shaped by our subjectivity, and Johnson maps the Pacific in varied ways throughout the exhibition. A large, stained-glass vista of swirling islands and currents stretches across the large open space on the floor of the upstairs gallery, making up the ceiling of the gallery below. “Language is a virus…” (all works 2024) is pieced together from marble-like Tiffany glass, a quintessentially American material. The map’s Gilded Age grandeur highlights the ravenous imperial gaze that orients many an act of cartography, and foregrounds the biases that inevitably infuse aspects of the American artist’s avatar and their journey. 

Slipping through this glass, sunlight softly illuminates “Best Synthetic Answer #1: Crossing… ” a floor below. Though bolstered by video essays and audio accompaniments that explore the overlapping histories of colonialism and resistance in the Pacific, the Artificial Intelligence animation, which takes up a wall of this gallery, is the crux of the exhibition. The camera follows Johnson’s avatar at all times as they swim. In the corner of the screen is another map, linking sites of United States imperialism and marking the fraught and jagged route that Johnson’s avatar will follow. Yet American extractivism is only one of the violent forces set to steer and buffet them as they drag themselves through the water. Using data on weather and pollution in the Pacific, painfully up-to-date with our climate in crisis, Johnson’s algorithm will determine how the waves churn around them, the amount of garbage battering their body at any given moment. 

What effect will this avatar’s navigation of this maelstrom of late capitalism have? Katherine McKittrick attests in a publication accompanying the show that Blackness is an experience fundamentally shaped by geography — forced transport and segregation, to name just two forces. However, this dynamic is reciprocal — Black experience creates a ripple that shifts the surface of the space around it, sends currents through the depths. Johnson’s journey is an audacious undertaking, invested in the ever-expansive fluidity of Black identity, curious about what it might make of one of our planet’s most varied geographies.

Yet while Johnson’s avatar may forge their own path, there’s nowhere that virtual representations of Black bodies don’t already circulate, trafficked as memes, ads, and icons of pop culture. As Johnson’s avatar swims away from America, they swim into conversation with this expanded world of representation. In a tender nod to this reality, Johnson grounds the Black figure at the heart of the exhibition in his own family. On the exhibition’s lowest, darkest floor, a slide projector clicks through snapshots of the artist’s early vacations to Hawaii: His mother beaming in a bathing suit, his father caught with a golf club mid-swing. They are images that capture both the particularities of Black childhood in the ’90s, as well as the aspirations typical to American life. Installed alongside a vitrine of glowing marine algae cultivated for the exhibition, the photos are a reminder of the immensity of the interior world of Blackness, an ecosystem of experience and feeling as vast and varied as the Pacific. And as Johnson’s avatar swims between two superpowers — centers of their own ideological universes — the artist allows us to shift focus away from these monoliths towards an abundant and dynamic sea. 

Editor’s Note: The author’s travel and accommodations were provided by the Rockbund Art Museum. 

Rindon Johnson: Best Synthetic Answer continues at the Rockbund Art Museum (Huqiu Road No. 20, Shanghai, China) through April 6, 2025. The exhibition was organized by the museum.