The summer has finally arrived and we present living landscapes, four artistic positions and attitudes between Asia and Europe.
Echo Ho (*1973 Beijing) has studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, stayed there and lives and works in the cathedral city. In 1697 the Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden was published in China, an introduction to Chinese ink wash painting showing images of plants, stones or clouds meant as templates for painting students. The Chinese artist uses these images in the work Weather Report from 2012. Echo Ho cuts printing stamps and uses them in a modular way, without attaching any artistic value to them. Rather, she encourages us to transform the old and the new and by so doing, turn our gaze to urban and contemporary landscapes as well as to socio-historical events.
The guqin is an approximately three-thousand-year-old Chinese instrument which the artist has transformed into an electronic Slow Qin, a plastic object with seven strings. Installed by Ho on the balcony of the salon and in the old trees in front of it, microphones will transmit in real time outside sounds, the song of birds and the noise of cars passing by into the interior; these sounds will serve as cues for the artist´s improvisations.
Just as the music played on the guqin is grounded in the Chinese tradition, the Japanese tea ceremony is steeped in a seven-hundred-year-old history.
The Zen master Musō Soseki established the ritual; in the 13th century, the Buddhist abbot Eisai laid down the rules concerning place and time as well as the preparation of tea and the exact sequence of the ceremony. Berlin-based artist Megumi Fukuda (*1976 in Hiroshima) studied at the University of the Arts Berlin and will perform together with Echo Ho the Klingon Tea Ceremony, a contemporary adaptation in an “ephemeral garden” made up of light, sounds, objects and the Slow Qin tones.
Zhang Hui (*1979 Jurong, Jiangsu) studied painting in Hangzhou and completed her post-graduate studies in 2009 at the University of the Arts Berlin. Chinese landscape painting also has a tradition spanning the millennia, its central subject has always been natural scenery as a majestic whole from which humans and their activities are left out. Zhang Hui´s concentrated abstract picture-making represents pure feeling, the color is an essential element of the impression. The Chinese artist was represented in the exhibition Berlin.Status II by Christoph Tannert und Sven Drühl at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 2013; now the two artists are to meet again. Sven Drühl (*1968 in Nassau) will exhibit Japanese color woodcuts from the 1940s from his own collection and two images that deal with the abstraction of the Japanese color woodcut. The book Shin-Hanga – Japanese Landscapes, published on the occasion of three exhibitions of Drühl´s work in 2015 and 2016, will be presented as part of our event. We would also like to draw your attention to the artist´s new pictures whose lacquered surfaces radically expand his previous repertoire and which will be shown in Berlin for the first time.
That landscape does not necessarily mean a view of natural scenery is demonstrated by the installation Man with Balls in a Landscape by the Chinese artist Wang Shugang (*1960 Peking), five miniatures cast in bronze, serially conceived and fabricated, which will be on view in all of the rooms at Schillerstraße.
