Hot Air and Robot Dogs — meng donglai 孟东来

Hot Air and Robot Dogs was completed in the summer of 2026, during a three-month residency at Kennaxu Gallery in Shenzhen. The series continues my long-standing exploration of immersive daydreaming.

In my earlier series, Nobody Cares, I would randomly drop a pin somewhere on Google Maps Street View and use the blurred, fragmented images of that location as the starting point for a painting. Each work was titled with the corresponding coordinates. This time, I brought the process to a specific city, Shenzhen, but instead of going out to experience it firsthand, I gathered fragments of everyday life through social media and turned these abstract, detached observations into images. I am not painting Shenzhen itself, but the Shenzhen I see through a screen.

“Hot air” is both a metaphor for daydreams—rising, dispersing, and never quite taking shape—and a reference to the hot, humid season I spent in Shenzhen. The city felt like a giant steamer, where the thick, sticky air blurred my vision and distorted the world around me, making reality appear strangely unreal.

Shenzhen is a city driven by technology and speed, where the ways people access information, perceive the world, and experience everyday life are constantly changing. More and more experiences are mediated through screens and digital platforms, where direct encounters and indirectly acquired information become intertwined. This is also transforming the way people imagine the world. Daydreams are no longer shaped solely by personal experiences or imaginings of the unknown, but increasingly emerge from the images, information, and fragments of everyday life encountered through social media. The ways people daydream may also reflect how they perceive, understand, and respond to the reality around them.

The images in the paintings emerged from this atmosphere: the artificial halo of a livestreaming ring light; urban villages standing in contrast with towering skyscrapers; bodies lifted into the air by drones; and robot dogs moving with mechanical precision, calm and tireless.

Hairy-Legs People have appeared throughout my previous series. In the vast, highly modernised city of Shenzhen, their individual identities—their faces, genders, and other identifying features—seem to fall away. They become more universal human figures, existing beyond the boundaries of any particular individual. They do not tell anyone’s story, but carry a kind of collective consciousness, sensing the present through the body and wandering through a world where the virtual and the real are difficult to distinguish.

In one large-scale painting, a commercial street unfolds through covered walkways, glass facades, roadside trees, afternoon light, and electric scooter riders. Within this otherwise ordinary scene, one of the Hairy-Legs People walks an alligator; a brown robot walks a Bernese Mountain Dog; another Hairy-Legs walks a black robot dog; and yet another leads a second Hairy-Legs on all fours. A human walks a robot dog, a robot walks a real dog, a human walks another human. The distribution of power between the two ends of each leash remains uncertain. The boundaries between master and subordinate, above and below, begin to blur.

At a street corner, three silver-grey robots dance in perfect unison around a ring light. It is not difficult to guess who might be standing behind the camera.

I am interested in placing traces of the uncanny within otherwise ordinary scenes, making familiar reality seem somehow suspicious. The dreams in these paintings do not follow predetermined plots. They take place somewhere between the virtual and the real, unfolding through time. What the viewer encounters is not a story, but a state of being.

《热空气与机器狗》完成于2026年夏天，创作于深圳Kennaxu画廊为期三个月的驻留期间。这个系列延续了我长期以来对“沉浸式白日梦”的探索。

在之前的《无人问津》系列中，我会通过 Google Maps 街景随机落下一个坐标，以那个地点模糊、碎片化的街景图像作为绘画的起点，并用对应的经纬度为作品命名。这一次，我将这个方法落在了深圳这座具体的城市里，但没有出门实地体验，而是通过社交媒体收集深圳日常生活的碎片，再将这些抽象、疏离的观察转化为画面。我画的不是深圳，而是我在屏幕里看到的深圳。

“热空气”既是白日梦的隐喻——升腾、弥散，却始终无法真正落地，也是我在深圳驻留期间所经历的酷热潮湿的季节。城市像一座巨大的蒸笼，黏稠的气流模糊了视线，也扭曲了周围的世界，让现实显得有些失真。

深圳是一座被科技和速度推动的城市，人们获取信息、认识世界和体验日常生活的方式也在不断变化。越来越多的经验通过屏幕和数字媒介发生，现实经历与间接获取的信息相互交织，也在悄然改变人们想象世界的方式。白日梦不再仅仅来自个人的亲身经历或对未知的想象，也开始由社交媒体中的图像、信息和碎片化的日常经验共同塑造。人们如何幻想，或许也折射出他们如何感知、理解和回应所处的现实环境。

画面中的意象从这样的氛围中浮现：直播补光灯营造出的虚幻光环，城中村与摩天大楼之间的对峙，被无人机牵引着腾空的肉身，以及那些精确、冷静、不知疲倦地行动着的机器狗。

毛腿人贯穿了我此前的所有系列。在深圳这座庞大而高度现代化的城市中，它的个体身份——面容、性别以及其他身份特征——似乎逐渐褪去，成为一个超越具体个体的、更为普遍的“人”的形象。它不承担谁的故事，只承载一种集体意识，通过肉身感知当下，游荡在一个虚实难辨的世界里。

在一幅大尺幅作品中，商业街的场景逐渐展开：连廊、玻璃幕墙、行道树、午后的光线，以及电动车骑手。在这个看似平常的场景里，一个毛腿人牵着鳄鱼散步；一个棕色机器人牵着伯恩山犬；另一个毛腿人牵着黑色机器狗；还有一个毛腿人牵着另一个四肢着地的毛腿人。活人牵机器狗，机器人牵活狗，活人牵活人。牵引绳两端的权力分配变得不确定，主从关系、上下位置也开始模糊。街角，三个银灰色的机器人围绕着一个环形补光灯整齐地起舞。镜头后面站着谁，似乎并不难猜。

我试图在平凡的场景中埋下异化的线索，让熟悉的现实变得可疑。这些画中的梦并没有预设的情节，而是发生在虚拟与现实之间，并在时间中展开。观众面对的不是一段故事，而是一种状态。