Featuring Barcode People, Guangli Liu, Can Fan
Curatored by Gin
Exhibition Duration: 30 April – 22 May 2026
Opening celebration: Thursday 30 April, 5–7pm

The Correct Way to Open a Can: Strike with the Spine is a curatorial intervention created by Gingercan, exploring the total encapsulation of contemporary digital existence and Asian diasporic identity. Moving beyond traditional cinematic boundaries, the exhibition at George Paton Gallery features works by Barcode People (Qihao Liang and Tong Shu), Can Fan, Guangli Liu.

The project frames the digital archive as a “can” hermetically sealed by industrial standards—promising eternal freshness while masking a slow, internal denaturation of memory and self. By deploying a "percussive" curatorial logic, the exhibition strikes the rim of this digital black box to reveal the cracks within. While Barcode People construct hyper surreal, immersive environments that interrogate the alienation of digital labor and the origins of inequality, Guangli Liu’s practice functions as a digital archaeology, scavenging 3D debris to expose the tension between collective labelling and individual truth. Interwoven with these is Can Fan’s re-examination of the photographic gesture, where memory is peeled and transferred, leaving behind only the "receipts" of time.

Through a spatial landscape composed of tactile digital residues and heterogeneous media, Gingercan positions the gallery as a site of physical decryption. Here, diasporic narratives are no longer passive archives of record; instead, through a ritual of percussion, they are shaken, shattered, and re-animated.

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Gingercan is a visual culture platform led by Gin, dedicated to interrogating the encapsulation of Sinophone independent film and Asian diasporic identity. Operating at the intersection of cinematic aesthetics, critical theory, and physical intervention, Gingercan produces a sustained series of curatorial projects, immersive screenings, thematic forums, and collaborative workshops. The platform is anchored in a radical interest in how cultural identities are packaged and preserved under the conditions of global migration. Drawing on the metaphor of preserved food,the platform reflects on how identities are suspended, distorted, and denatured across time and place. Through a continuous program of expanded cinema and installation-making, Gingercan transforms film into a relational form, where meaning is not merely viewed but struck and re-animated across multiple sites of encounter, from white cubes to public participatory formats.

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Barcode People is a creative duo based in Naarm/Melbourne, syncing hyper-surrealism with immersive digital expression. Their practice instantiates uncanny presence through post-internet aesthetics, rendered through performance, installation, gaming simulation, and video works. Their recent works have been developed or presented at Bus Projects, Goethe-Institut Beijing,HAU Hebbel-am-Ufer(HAU4), Berlin Art Week 2025, The 7th Wrong Biennale, Footscray Community Arts, Next Wave, Melbourne Fringe, LOOKLIVE, La Mama, Darebin Arts Centre, and SCOPE BLN.

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Can Fan is a Melbourne-based artist born in Chongqing, China. His practice spans photography, installation, and mixed media, treating spatial construction and image-making as interconnected research methodologies. Grounded in a structuralist inquiry, can examines the tension between surface and depth, interrogating how systemic forces are absorbed into the visual logic of the spectacle. Through acts of displacement and physical reframing, his work seeks to reactivate the structural moments that precede digital concealment. His methodology, underpinned by a background in Interior Design at RMIT University, investigates the image as a tactile, spatial presence with its own conditions of visibility and disappearance.

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LIU Guangli 刘广隶 was born in 1990 in Lengshuijiang, China. He currently lives and works in Paris. He graduated from Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains in 2020. Guangli's works often emerge from the intersection of different approaches to depicting history and events, and ultimately find their own places in installations, videos, documentaries, and paintings that suggest our understanding of the present is often shaped by pre-existing languages, social norms, and media formats through which pieces of information are transmitted. He won the Golden Nica and Honorary Mention in the Computer Animation category at Ars Electronica (2021, 2022), as well as the Golden Key for Best Short Film at Kassel Dokfest (2021), Special mention price at Jimei Arles Discovery Award (2023), Outstanding Art Exploration Award at Beijing International Short Film Festival (2023).

Image: Guangli Liu, 'Very, Very, Tremendously' 2021 , Single-channel video, colour, sound, found footage, 3D animation FHD 1920×1080, 24fps 12’12’’