Jonathan Jones on Sondra Perry and Ian Cheng at the Serpentine Gallery

Serpentine Gallery, London
Two exhibitions at the London gallery both use technology, with startlingly different results
★★★★☆ /★☆☆☆☆

The sea churns and swirls around me, vast, foam-flecked, lurid. It is not made of water but paint. As I move along the video walls that cover three sides of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, the colours of this mighty ocean – yellow, red, greasy brown, forming a thick, warping surface that bubbles with unhealthy blobs like nodules of hard bacon fat – it is abundantly clear that Sondra Perry’s installation has something to do with the art of JMW Turner.

For her first solo exhibition this side of the Atlantic, this young African American artist has reinvented Britain’s greatest painter for the digital age, transforming one of his most powerful paintings into an apocalyptic, seething video spectacle of stormlight and doom-laden waters. Yet there is more to it than that. This is not merely any Turner seascape she has animated. Her installation is called Typhoon Coming On, and is an uneasy 21st-century remake of Turner’s 1840 masterpiece, often known simply as Slave Ship, but called by him Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On.

Related: Pirates, explorers, empire-makers, slavers: how great works of art tell story of Britain’s past

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