Shen Xin’s latest video installation, Grounds of Coherence #1, but this is the language we met in, is premiered at the 14th Shanghai Biennale “Cosmos Cinema”.

Protests in regional Mandarin, words for a story in Arabic, and a couple telling myth felt in English, three dominant languages map their movements through relations. What is heard, and what is then given meaning in these connectedness of migratory and loving nature, is paired to forms, and transmitted through possible sounds.

But this is the language we met in is the first film in the series of films entitled “Grounds of Coherence”, which engages with ways of coming to knowing, and the ecosystems of languages, hence its Chinese title《天雨粟》: the sky rains grains, which was used to describe the creation of characters by Cangjie in 200BC, as recorded in Huainanzi.

Commissioned by the 14th Shanghai Biennale, Payne Zhu’s large-scale installation Potlatch of Derivatives reflects on financialized capitalism’s commitment to endless growth. Imagine a cosmos of financial derivatives: a fragment of jade—the food of Daoist immortals, symbol of perpetual growth—held in the mouth of a dead derivatives trader. The corpse makes a ratting sound; the jade continues to be traded through risk-free quantitative arbitrage.

Comprising two lake-shaped and one cicada-shaped tables — like those for dining and gambling — and twelve dishes perched on twelve sluices, Potlatch of Derivatives invites the audience to follow the whirling currents (of time, history, and money) through the universe of financial derivatives. It proposes that the capitalist cosmos is one of “derivatology”: whenever the system is at risk of collapse, it tries to avoid the consequences by deriving a new cosmos of financial opportunity, filled by the promise of future growth.