Newcomer Society

'Newcomers'

In <Newcomer Society>, four designers from the Far East situate themselves as alien novices that offer new and local readings on the consumption of cultural value. Exhibiting four projects in varied digital and material mediums, the collective maps a socio-cultural landscape of consumer behaviour through their nomadic perspective in the Netherlands.

A Fluid Locality

"Newcomer Society" layers senses of locality, reproducibility, and tradition through their cross-cultural understandings. In a new locality, they reflect on the fluidity of cultural values and how these values transition across the different contexts of cultural consumption that the members encounter in their lives: be it the Chinese stone appreciation culture in a contemporary digital context, the preservation of Eindhoven's touristic imaginary and folkloric techniques, the aesthetic after-life of discarded industrial parts of the city, or the European commodification of Buddha images.

Imagining Interdependency from Local Remains

As the collective traces in the exhibition how these values move quickly across temporal and geographical boundaries, they realign the fluid perspectives conserved in our cultural awareness. From local remains, they layer the possible interdependency across different contexts. Newcomer Society resituates the influence of familiarity on the prevalent cultural attitude of consumption.