Every year, Taobao hosts an award for the best ugly things sold on its platform. The award, ironically named “Taobao Cute Show” (淘宝丑东西大赛), has been bringing shock value and hilarity for the past five years. People are still talking about the 40+ strong nominations from this year’s show in January. Now, Taobao has brought the best of the past five shows offline with an art exhibition titled The Era of Uglies Has Arrived (丑时已到): Taobao’s Treasured Uglies. The title is a play on the hour of Chou (丑, same simplified character as ugly), the traditional Chinese Zodiac time corresponding to 1 to 3 AM.
Between 29 July and 15 August, the free exhibition will be open on the 3rd floor of Building 16 at Tianmuli in Hangzhou. With help from the China Academy of Art, Taobao has brought over 100 ugly items and curated them to explore the power of ugly. To echo the “hour of Chou” theme, a large Chinese Zodiac timepiece was placed front and centre, decorated with award-winning items from the 5th and latest Cute Show: Chinese Zodiac dolls.
For the exhibition, Taobao also collected 150 wonky felt plushies made by users and displayed them in specimen jars. There are interactive touchpoints with printed “ugly” clothing on mirrors for you to take selfies with. Many of the items are curated in humorous ways so the meme generation can relate to the “abstract humour”. Some installations created with “ugly” items push the exhibition into the realm of contemporary art, as Taobao tries to transcend the dichotomy of “beauty” and “ugliness” for expression, artistic, emotional or just comedic and meme-tic.
Taobao also brought its surreal “abstract” humour into the exhibition’s advertising. On the Hangzhou Metro, Taobao featured “abstract” copies and pictures of the ugly displays from the exhibition on the train’s small screens for a lo-fi impact. The offline exhibition brings the “experience economy” to memes and adds an artistic twist to it, firmly establishing Taobao in the zeitgeist.