Furthermore, Saha World Music Group has created a medley, titled “Phantasmapolis,” for the Biennial, interweaving music and melodies to present the diversely cultural vision represented by Taiwan and demonstrating a fresh music style that surpasses national borders and time in world music. Betty Apple’s performance combines sound art and performance art to convey a free attitude of the future and a uniquely undefinable presence. Through splendidly diverse world music and a future party that surpasses imagination, the 2021 Asian Art Biennial opens the gate to Phantasmapolis and invites all citizens to enter this city state and step into the future.

Asian Art Biennale 2021 exhibition view

Highlights of Phantasmapolis: The Transnational Curatorial Team X New Visions of Asian Contemporary Art Creation X Multiple Forms of Extended Projects

This edition of the Biennial is curated by a multinational, interdisciplinary curatorial team headed by Takamori Nobuo with Hou Yu-Kuan, Filipino curator Tessa Maria Guazon, Indian curator Anushka Rajendran, and Thai curator Thanavi Chotpradit. Through the transnational collaboration of emerging Asian curators and with 38 artists and art groups from a total of 15 countries, the Biennial unveils a diverse range of creative perspectives and viewpoints that collectively construct an imaginative city state closest to the future.

Exhibition view, 2021 Asian Art Biennale

The exhibition of this year’s Biennial draws inspiration from Taiwanese architect Wang Dahong’s sci-fi novel, Phantasmagoria, based on which the curatorial team proposes the theme of “Phantasmapolis” and utilizes “Asian futurism” and “Asian sci-fi culture” as the main concepts to explore the importance of sci-fi in the Asian context. The exhibition showcases a total of 417 works, among which 28 are newly created and envelopes an interdisciplinary range of creative diversity that crosses various media, including two-dimensional painting, video art, large-scale installation, architectural project and literature.

To respond to this curatorial theme, the exhibition team has specially designed an imagery of “spacecraft gates,” using light, color and arrangement of traffic route to craft a serene, futuristic atmosphere. As every visitor entering the city state walks through the gates of different exhibition gallery rooms, they become the protagonist of Phantasmagoria by Wang Dahong – Prince Dino in his space drift in the year of 3069 – and tour this unknown city state interwoven with reality and fiction.

Taiwanese artist Joyce Ho brings her new project, entitled DOTS, for the Biennial and creates a distinctive landscape in the city state. Observing the pandemic, the artist re-designs the temporary body temperature check point and the real name registration facility in the museum lobby. By converting them into an entry gateway that resembles a “quarantine lobby,” which not only continues the artist’s creative context but also responds to a future world that has seemingly arrived, the artist provides the audience with a unique pseudo experience of traveling abroad and “arriving” in a future city.

Exhibition view, 2021 Asian Art Biennale

Bakudapan is a food study group from Indonesia with members from different fields and disciplines. Their project, The Hunger Tales, explores political relations involving food crises and re-examines social situations from the production to the distribution of food. Bakudapan transforms the process of studying and thinking about resource shortage into a table game, in which players can play roles like farmers, wholesalers or the mayor. By experiencing the process of circulating and plundering food, players are encouraged to further reflect on the suppression and exploitation of food providers in the overall food supply chain. Using “game-based learning,” the project extends the depth of related issues. Players of all ages are welcome to experience this limited edition of a table game from the future world.

In addition to numerous new works from Taiwanese and foreign artists, audiences will also have a chance to see the classic works of established Taiwanese artists, such as Yuyu Yang, Liu Kuo-sung, Wang Dahong and Cheng Mei while glimpsing into the context of sci-fi text in Taiwanese art history through the works of Shu Lea Cheang, Wang Jun-Jieh, Hung Tung-Lu and many more artists.

Exhibition view, 2021 Asian Art Biennale

In addition, the curatorial team also transcends the form of one single exhibition to extend the exhibition concept to various projects, including the “Archive and Research Project,” the “Video Art Project” and the “Forum and Reader Project,” attempting to reflect on the possibility of Asian futurism based on varied specimens of architecture, archives, texts and videos from different Asian regions. Filipino curator Tessa Maria Guazon and Taiwanese researcher I Chun (Nicole) WANG are also invited to respectively tease out and present the archives from the Philippines and Asian sci-fi queer archives. The video art project, “Phantasmapolis: Looking Back into the Future,” is curated by Indian curator Anushka Rajendran and features 15 important video artists from 13 countries in Asia and North America, utilizing video works of divergent style to showcase the future look of Asian contemporary video art.

The “Archive and Research Project” comprises the first-wave event, the “Songs from the Moon Rabbit—The 2021 Asian Art Biennial Forum,” which will run from October 30 to 31 and the bilingual essay collection, entitled The Midnight Sun and the Owl—Reader of 2021 Asian Art Biennial, supported by Winsing Art Foundation to engage visitors in unfolding unlimited imagination of the future through reading. Curated by Thai curator Thanavi Chotpradit, the forum and the essay collection invite the curatorial team, Taiwanese and foreign scholars as well as the participating artists to explore together issues of various aspects, ranging from sci-fi space, ecology and architectural environment, natural phenomena and so on to expand the cultural horizon of Asian diversity.

Connecting with Phantasmapolis: A Satellite Exhibition X A Satellite Event X Promotional Activities to Release the Biennial’s Fresh Energy

To expand the exhibition site of the NTMoFA and cultivate the public’s attention to and vision of the Asian region, the Biennial especially co-organizes a satellite exhibition with the Ministry of Culture’s Mongolian and Tibetan Cultural Center and co-organizes a satellite event with the Digital Art Center, Taipei (DAC). As a special topic of the 2021 Asian Art Biennial, both events further extend the discourses about Asia to Mongolia and Central Asia while broadening the aspects of gender and digital technology issues to render the interdisciplinary perspective of the exhibition richer and fuller. The brilliant exhibition and event will be staged in the spring of 2022. During the length of the Biennial, a series of activities will be presented, including film screenings, guided tours, educational outreach programs for parents and children and for cultural accessibility, to expand public participation and demonstrate the new energy of pluralistic inclusiveness and the interdisciplinary practice of this future city state.

Opening of the 2021 Asian Art Biennale

The NTMoFA director Liang Yung-Fei states that, “through the transnational, interdisciplinary curatorial team, the Biennial successfully displays a new curatorial mode based on transnational connection and collaboration. In the post-pandemic era, the Biennial offers audiences new possibilities of imagining the future and unfolds multifaceted thinking of Asian sci-fi and future through its theme, the diversified curatorial perspectives and the participation of artists from different parts of the Asian region. The NTMoFA will continue to organize the Asian Art Biennial to expand the multilayered and interdisciplinary dialogue of culture and art with contemporary art.”

Phantasmapolis—2021 Asian Art Biennial will run from October 30, 2021 to March 6, 2022. For more information about the activities and events in Phantasmapolis, please follow the updates announced on the official websites and Facebook pages of the NTMoFA and the Asian Art Biennial.

Exhibition view, 2021 Asian Art Biennale

Phantasmapolis – Exhibition Video Online Platform:

The NTMoFA YouTube: https://reurl.cc/NZQYnq
The Asian Art Biennial Facebook Page: https://fb.watch/8vFuY_ybHE/

National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA)

Web: https://www.ntmofa.gov.tw/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ntmofa
Asian Art Biennial Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aabntmofa

Exhibition Coordinators: Lin Hsiao-Yu, Liao Chia-Cheng  Tel: (04)23723552 #304、701

Media Contact: Yan Bi-Mei  Tel: (04)23723552 #123

Dates

Dates: 2021.10.30 to 2022.03.06

Opening Hours

To cope with the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the museum opening hours have been adjusted to Tuesdays to Sundays, from 09:00 to 17:00 (closed on Mondays).

Since August 24 (Tues.), 2021 onward, visitors with reservations will be prioritized for admission (the maximum for group reservation is 80 people). A system of entry times with limited number of visitors is implemented. Each entry time for visitors with reservations is 2 hours. Flexible admission of visitors without reservations will depend on the number of visitors in the museum.

Full list of the 38 participating artists/artist groups

(listed according to alphabetical order of last name)

Catalina Africa (The Philippines)

Bakudapan Food Study Group (Indonesia)

Bang & Lee (South Korea)

Shu Lea Cheang (Taiwan)

CHEN Chen Yu (Taiwan)

CHEN Chun Yu (Taiwan)

Genevieve CHUA (Singapore)

Sharbendu De (India)

Mattie Do (Laos)

GAN Siong King (Malaysia)

HE Kunlin (China)

HIRATA Minoru (Japan)

Joyce HO (Taiwan)

HUNG Tung Lu (Taiwan)

ISOMURA Dan + UNNO Rintaro (Japan)

KIM Ayoung (South Korea)

KIMURA Tsunehisa (Japan)

LÊ Giang (Vietnam)

LEE Yung Chih (Taiwan)

LI Yi Fan (Taiwan)

LIN Shu Kai (Taiwan)

LIU Kuo-sung (Taiwan)

LIU Yu + WU Sih Chin (Taiwan)

Yuko MOHRI (Japan)

Hootikor (Lama Motis & Cheku Chelagu, Taiwan)

UuDam Tran NGUYEN (Vietnam)

office aaa (Taiwan)

OGINO Shigeji (Japan)

Pad.ma (CAMP & 0×2620, India / Germany)

Monira Al Qadiri (Kuwait)

Mark Salvatus (The Philippines)

Chulayarnnon Siriphol (Thailand)

Lim Sokchanlina (Cambodia)

TAN Zi Hao (Malaysia)

WANG Jun-Jieh (Taiwan)

Yuyu YANG (Taiwan)

Tuguldur Yondonjamts (Mongolia)

Alvin Zafra (The Philippines)

Special projects

Prospecting: Archival documents from the Philippines

Curator: Tessa Maria Guazon

Beyond Time and Sex: An Opsis of Queer Sci-Fi in Asia

Researcher: I Chun (Nicole) WANG

Participating artists:

Shu Lea Cheang, KU Kuang Yi, LIN An Chi (Ciwas Tahos), Thunska Pansittivorakul,

Very Theatre & ActNow Theatre, WU Tzu Ning

This project is co-organized by the Cultural Taiwan Foundation and in partnership with SEA plateaus.

Video Art Project

Phantasmapolis: Looking back to the future

Curator: Anushka Rajendran

Artists:

Abdul Halik Azeez / Sri Lanka

Vibha Galhotra / India

Ayham Jabr / Syria

LI Kuei Pi / Taiwan

Mariah Lookman / Pakistan / UK

Umber Majeed / USA

Tuan Andrew Nguyen / Vietnam

Afrah Shafiq / India

Karan Shrestha / Nepal

Sikarnt Skoolisariyaporn / Thailand

Angela SU / Hong Kong

Natasha Tontey / Indonesia

UTAMURA Hanae / Japan

Paul WONG / Canada

ZHANG XU Zhan / Taiwan

Satelite Events

“Life in-betweens: Mongolia and Central Asia through the Perspective of Contemporary Art” Exhibition

Exhibition Dates: 2022.02.19 (Sat.)~2022.07. 23 (Sat.)

Venue: 1F & 2F, Mongolian and Tibetan Cultural Gallery (No.3, Ln.8, Qingtian St., Da’ an Dist., Taipei City

Curators: Takamori Nobuo, Chen, Hsiang-wen

DAC – “JELLY BABIES feat. Asian Art Biennial Day”

Date: 2022.02.25 (Fri.)~03.06 (Sun.)

Venue: Digital Art Center, Taipei (https://dac.tw/)

Guided Tours

Curator Talks

Speaker: TAKAMORI Nobuo, HO Yu Kuan

Time: 2021.11.06 (Sat.)

2021.12.12 (Sun.)

2022.02.20 (Sun.)

Expert Guided Tours

Speaker: WU Cheng Hsuan, WEI Tze Chun, I Chun (Nicole) WANG, CHEN Hsiang Wen

Sign Language Guided Tour

Time: 2021.11.07 (Sun.)

Audio Description Tours

Time: 2021.11.25 (Thur.)

Learning Programmes

Special Education Resource Program

Time: 2021.11.11 (Thur.)

2021.11.18 (Thur.)

“Creating Future Metropolis” – Parent-Child Creative Activities

Time: 2022.01 ~ 2022.02

* For dates and information of activities and events, please see subsequent announcements on the NTMoFA website.

If we say that art styles and artistic trends are often used to identify the characteristics of a generation, the method and morphological appearances of the exhibited works by the participating artists reflect how an artist evolves to a better person through changes in the method which culture has no boundaries and professions has no exclusiveness. As the curator, Cui Cancan stated: “A new way of working inspires artists to explore new identi-ties and new artistic directions. These novel directions redefine and create a new life for the artists themselves. New identities and possibilities are the core of methods of the new generation.”

The formation of such a new generation comes from their sensibility to the society they are currently in. The latest creation of Chen Tianzhuo (born in 1985, now lives and works between Beijing and Shanghai) responds to the well-received concept of NFT in the digital art market, while retains the medium of fine art in the forms of installation, performance, video, painting, and photography. “I do whatever I am interested in, whether it is my main or side job,” Chen Tianzhuo explained. The works of artist Ni Youyu who currently lives in Shanghai include acrylic on canvas, woodcuts, installations, sculptures, and photographic collages. His method is to break through the limits that he perceived. Works such as “Domino of Space” and “Trio” construct multiple spaces that are deeply inward in antique frames, and “Pagoda” uses wood and stainless steel to implicate the idea of scale.

“To Be A Better Man” and “Six Pack”, created by Li Liao (born in 1982, now lives and works in Shenzhen), embody the changes in the city and the environment with the most intuitive approach by using his body. The artist concluded that his semi-fictional autobiographical works principally record his day-to-day life and the method resembles polishing or waiting in consumption. Tong Wenmin (born in1989, now lives and works in Chongqing), who makes good use of the body as a creative element, believes that she has no fixed methods. Her works often focus on stimulating visual poetry and inspiring action through behaviors that at first seem counter-intuitive. Through often simplified or regulated movements, her work hints at the allegorical character of the body and action within a semantically rich context. In “Breeze”, paint-stained branches leave a mark upon her back and the canvas like a breeze. In “Wave”, her body moves with the waves on the beach.

From the “Cola Project” and the “Palate Project”, to the “Lemon Project”, the art practice of He Xiangyu (based in Beijing and Berlin) often begins with his observation of a particu-lar object, event, or phenomenon, working towards the unique and relatively frenetic core. In this exhibition, he creatively combines his introspection and observation of the others in the form of games. Mei Shuzhi founded 702design in Beijing in 2010 and serves as its art director. He is constantly seeking novelty from life, to discover more possibilities of design in everyday life. He demonstrates that through his work of “like a bug which slowly moves with its perception.” Mei Shuzhi’s work “Typography Exit 2” allows the exploratory “watching” experience to break through the limitations of text as a conventional reading media.

Ge Yulu (born in Wuhan, Hubei Province in 1990, and now works and lives in the area around Beijing) uses art as an excuse to apply for approval of day-off for the museum staff in the work “Holiday Times” presented in this exhibition. The price is that he needs to cover for the staff during their day-off to complete the work originally arranged for them. In his opinion, the new generation consists of the ones who do not agree with any of the existing orders. In his work “Michelangelo’s Gift”, Zhou Yilun, an artist currently living in Hangzhou, extended the possibilities of everyday materials through multiple techniques such as splitting, reorganization, and simulation. In his view, the way of working is a life-style—he is someone who cooks every night, but also someone who often drinks in clubs until dawn.

The work “Shop Window” presented by Zhao Zhao, who lives and works between Beijing and Los Angeles, is similar to an autobiographical film. His exhibited cabinet shows the reference of his creative ideas. He claimed that his working method is mixed with multiple concerns, and there is no division of time. Architect Wang Zigeng (born in 1984) once served as the architectural history consultant for the director team of the film “Hidden Man” by Jiang Wen. In his work, he uses art to release out his superfluous mental energy. “1994” is a theatrical installation expounding a personal narrative, in which the artist turns the display of stylized architectural projects into an exploration of places and memories. Liang Chen (born in 1987) describes the series of “Spatial Hypnosis” as “the method of discovering and intervening in the spatial subconscious with space as the main body”. Applying the universe to be the new spatial-temporal coordinate, Liang’s analysis spans the Big Bang from the formation of the earth, to the geology of his hometown Dandong, the constitution of its landscapes, neighborhoods, and streets, and finally ends in the residential building where he grew up, manifested in its three interior decorations from three different periods. Through a sub-conscious recapitulation of childhood city and architectural space, Liang Chen intends to depict a sub-consciousness of substance and space.

Zhu Sha (born in1988), a graphic designer and curator who works and lives in Beijing, has begun to intervene in the contemporary art field through curatorial practice in recent years. For him, he aims to establish more links through designing, and the video “Talk and Design” displayed in the exhibition shows how Zhu Sha as an artist completes his “work diary” in a casual and personal way. Drawing Architecture Studio (DAS) (founded in Beijing in 2013 by architect Li Han, born in 1978, and designer Hu Yan, born in 1978, dedicated to architectural drawing, architectural design, and urban study) believes that “honesty” brings along with more practical and hands-on experience. “The Complete Map of Capital Beijing” presented in the form of an architectural diorama serves as a con-temporary copy of its original version from the Qing Dynasty. In the scope of 700 x 700 meters, some of most iconic Beijing architecture are collaged, mixed, and blended: from the Yonghe Temple of the Qing Dynasty to the Chinese Anglican Church built in China’s Republican Era; and from the socialist mansion An Hua Lou around the founding period of PRC to the residential areas developed in the 1980s and 1990s. Through a personal reinterpretation, the architectural models are presented in a distant yet familiar form.

In recent years, these most active and representative artists from the new generation have presented a pluralization seen in their diversified identities and works. Cross-cultural, cross-media, and cross-field practice have amplified their uniqueness. In this re-gard, Cui Cancan stated: “This phenomenon is unfolding with changes in the work pro-cess of the new generation. They are redefining the scope of professions—artists no longer simply make art, architects no longer only build houses, and designers no longer work merely graphically. They have a wide range of interests and more diverse occupa-tions that barely show hierarchy and distinction among each other. Their mindset is not just liberal but also ambiguous, and they are always vigorous, imaginative, versatile, and inventive. The style of ‘there is no single style’ has become their style.”

The features of the new generation truly denote the development of a certain era. When we take a closer look at the eclectic methods of these artists, the styles are the manifestation of the domestic development of cities and cultural life in this epoch of globalization. This new generation has also turned out to be a trace of changes that took place in our times. These revolutionary changes are exactly what Wind H Art Center is pursuing to capture in its practice. As a young art institution, since its establishment in 2020, Wind H Art Center has held numerous exhibitions and public education activities that cover multiple disciplines including contemporary art, architecture, and design. Not complying with the inherent value judgments, Wind H Art Center aims to serve as a platform for diversified cultural exchanges and discussions. Through different projects, the art center presents a wider, more connected, and more inspiring art world to the public to enrich the booming contemporary art today in China.

About The Curator

Cui Cancan is an independent curator and writer active in various fields. He has curated nearly 100 exhibitions and events since 2012. His group exhibitions include Walking the Dark Bridge at Night, Country Coiffure, FUCKOFF II, Not Acting in Images, The Sixth ring is One Ring More Than the Fifth, Ten Nights, and High-Rise from the Ground, 2015-2019 New Year’s special project series, Curatorial Classes, Nine-Story Tower, etc. The solo exhibitions he curated include Ai Weiwei, Bao Xiaowei, Chen Danqing, Chen Yufan, Chen Yujun, Feng Lin, Han Dong, He Yunchang, Huang Yishan, Jiang Bo, Li Binyuan, Liu Wei, Liu Gangshun, Liu Jianhua, Li Qing, Li Ji, Li Zhanyang, Mu Er, Ma Ke, Mao Yan, Qin Ga, Qin Qi, Sui Jianguo, Shijiezi Art Museum, Shi Jinsong, Shen Shaomin, Tan Ping, Wang Qingsong, Xie Nanxing, Xia Xiaowan, Xia Xing, Xiao Yu, Xu Zhongmin, Xu Xiaoguo, Zong Ning, Zheng Chunban, Zhang Yue, Zhao Zhao, etc.

About Wind H Art Center

Wind H Art Center is located at the south gate of Beijing’s contemporary art landmark, 798 Art District. It was designed by the renowned architect Dong Yugan. In the interior space, the architect utilized gardening to create contemporary imagery of Mountain-and-Water landscapes.

The Wind H Art Center integrates ideas of incubation, academic research, art exhibitions, collaborative innovation, humanities education, and cultural creativity. The goal is to establish a diversified research-oriented art institution and to create an academic platform for international art exchanges.

The Exhibition Center is committed to discovering and presenting artists and creators’ art practice that explores the academic frontier and the contemporary context. It emphasizes experimentality to demonstrate Chinese contemporary art’s new vectorial development. Simultaneously, the Art Center emphasizes the integration and exchange of different disciplines to build a bridge between art and life, revealing, exploring, and developing the creative potential of human beings.

See+ Gallery, Beijing, China

December 05, 2015–January 30, 2016

Organizer: Hua’er, Director of See+ Gallery

Moderator: Antonie Angerer

Translator (Chinese): Zwei Fan

Date: December 04, 2015

Q (aka Kyoo Lee, hereafter Q): Thanks, everybody, for being here. Special thanks to Hua’er for organizing this event, Antonie and Zwei for moderating and translating, and Gabriela for creating this beautiful work so that we can all come here talk photography and philosophy! We will have a general conversation first and then open the space up for you all to participate later.

When I first saw Vanishing Deconstructions, I asked Hua’er: “How did you get to meet Gabriela, how did this encounter happen?” Hua’er told me this micro-story of their first meeting—she walked into a photo exhibition in Paris, saw this wonderful work, and spoke with the artist, who ended up saying, “we don’t need words because images connect us.” Indeed, images somehow travel in such a way that we become connected by what we see before or without what we say.

In this show, we encounter so many images. In particular, what we encounter photographically is not only intersubjective in itself but perhaps the inter-subjective itself, as in an inter-view. A communication happens in such an interim space, between the viewers, that is, through this work: now then, how? I will ask this first question, against that background.

As the title of our conversation today indicates, we begin by reflecting on the philosophical and poetic aspect of photography, a kind of philophotopoetics, on a photograph that makes itself or herself: what does this photographic scene see and show? Gabriela, as a photographer, you take or create a photographic image, you create something you saw or something you see, and you make the work show that seeing. How is this act of photographic seeing different from the usual seeing? What is a photographic vision?

Gabriela (Morawetz, hereafter G): That is a great question. I think that the first important thing for me is to get pictures which are not perfect because in that case there is a new field, an open space. I don’t consider myself a photographer in the usual way photographers define themselves but it’s important to note that indeed my point of departure is photography. While I am working with my camera, my negatives, and my chemicals in my darkroom in a very usual way, the approach is still paradoxical because I would like to get out of this photographic kitchen, to cross its boundaries. For me, the point is how to see what I want to see.

We can also start from that paradoxical affirmation of the moment we see (something) we don’t see. This is because we mostly see what we know already but we don’t understand it even when we can see it. My approach would be like to get close to some kind of feelings or thoughts, and following the path like it is Ariadne’s thread. So the question, the challenge, is how to get this thread to get to the place you want to get in. I always try to do this by observing elements from nature, the sphere of being, along with material particularities there.

Q: A great way in. Now then, we have this cliché, our usual metaphor, almost dead, that a photograph “captures a moment.” This phrase is very intentional—almost like animal hunting—and it’s a fairly universal concept, or at least universalized. What Gabriela is saying is countering that notion of intentional framing, right? Intentional in the sense of getting at what you want to see or have already seen in the form of knowing. The point Gabriela is highlighting is rather to let the images appear in such a way that we will be able to see what is left to see instead of what we intend to see. Such elements of contexts and accidents, those otherwise invisible or visible, become very important, “elementarily” significant.

I like to link this counterpoint on “envisioning the invisible” to the very concept of the “photographic.” Photographia or photography, in its Latinic sense, is light-inscribed, something via or with light. Photo-graphy uses light to have or keep an image appear … almost like the command “let there be light.” Just a while ago, Zwei and chatted about the Chinese notion of photography, which is more like “shadow-tracing (摄影shè-yǐng, trace-shadow).” These two aspects complement each other—light and shadow. Curiously, we use different faculties to approach the same thing: the “photo-graphia” looks at the light while “shadow-tracing” turns to the shadow.

Now, to turn to the very idea of inscription or re-presentation too: there is a subtle yet significant difference between representation and re-presentation, about which Vanishing Deconstructions says a lot. If you think about all the tracks, like animal tracks and things left behind, the artistic animals like us—many in this room—also tend to track them again.

So here is my second question. One of the things that captured my imagination and attention in the first place was the very title of the show, Vanishing Deconstructions. As a scholar of contemporary French philosophy where the word “deconstruction” is one of the key terms, I have my own sense of what de-construction usually means or has come to mean in more “academic” senses. In this context of a photographic gallery aptly named “See+,” some other lively meanings of “deconstruction” do appear too, and yet, to remind ourselves, it is about and performing Vanishing deconstructions. So now, it’s your turn, Gabriela, to explain what it could mean.

G: I understand your question on the dichotomy between vanishing and deconstruction. When we use the concept of deconstruction we should be conscious of Derrida’s theory. But what I want to explore is just more of the idea of vanishing, disappearing. I use no words, but instead images. To make images, there is a combination of elements, some well-known objects, sometimes human bodies or nature. They compose an environment which eventually can be interpreted by each of us in a different way. That construction of the world, which is individual, is vanishing through the perception from each one of us. When I do “deconstruction” I am trying to construct my own system of understanding.

“Deconstruction” sounds a bit like “destroying,” but also like constructing something else through the elements of what was “destroyed.” In that flurry of words, there are many meanings of “deconstruction.”

From my point of view, that title is based on the construction of something like spaces which would contain a possibility of metaphor—something that complements. I start with a very minimal material, almost nothing. If you put only one point in an empty space, it is something very important. If you contextualize it through other elements, some kind of narration emerges.

Framed images in my work look very rational because of the geometrical forms, but, at the same time, they are absolutely intuitive and the inner structure is reflected outward.

Q: Again, your description vividly points to this paradox you talked about: the ability of the photographic surface to indexicalize this co-existence of moment and movement. The moment becoming movement and vice versa—such a layered imposition and exposition, each time, becomes Gabriela’s signature “move” or “moment.” Each time, we see what we might call a kinetic photograph, always moving. Something is becoming almost nothing and nothing is becoming something. We have a fairly clear and distinct, semi-Cartesian “rational” moment of focus, and then it goes out of focus at the same time. Such a layered vision in and of space and time is also richly explored in the 20^th century contemporary French philosophy, phenomenology in particular, where this dialectic crossing of the visible and the invisible—I am also thinking of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in particular—produces a constant and productive tension.

And before we invite questions and comments from the audience on what is “photographic seeing” or work, I want to ask you, Gabriela, if you could talk a little about how you would contextualize this exhibition in relation to your works in the past and something you will do in the future. Where do you think you are with your work, the one we see in the gallery today?

So my question is about the philopoetic “spatiotemporality” of your work, your meta-and or intra-photographic focus, so to speak. Martin Heidegger says that everybody has one thought they try to figure out all their life, just like one body, one body of thought. What is that one thought you have, if there is one, any “one”? That one, of course, doesn’t have to be strictly “one,” which has many meanings, itself richly layered and resonant. So what I mean by “one,” especially in your case, would be something like Adriane’s thread of yours we talked earlier: where is that thread, where does it come from, where does it leave, what is its trajectory?

G: I am searching for the way to get into the very inner space which we cannot describe just with words. It is about a desire to enrich the essence of what is impossible to get. The concept of Das Ding is probably something to define and be defined constantly.

Let’s say that I am interested in the mental sphere and in the energy of the unknown.

Q: What or where could be that core that keeps unfolding?

G: I think the creative process is like a destiny. You must continue and search for all kinds of possibilities but it is not a linear process. Once you get into the work, the material character of the things will suggest other dimensions and it is important to be sensitive to those signs. It is like trying to listen to some shimmering voices.

Q: This is a perfect moment to let some other waves to intervene.

P1 (a person, an unidentified interlocutor from the audience): You mentioned the idea of light and shadow, which is obviously the main matter in photography. There is a comparable pair of concepts: emptiness and play. It’s coming to me because just before our meeting we were talking with a group of students of photography. It appeared as a concept because I was talking about the idea of emptiness and its generosity as mirrored in this series of work.

Does the generosity of emptiness mean that emptiness is producing more emptiness, like feeling emptier? Or does emptiness generate plenitude, a plane?—the idea being that, in your culture and art, emptiness is an essential part of the image. I would say that from the occidental point of view emptiness is a kind of fear and we have a fear of emptiness, so we deal with that.

Q: It’s like we want to avoid the void. If I may add, the “cultural” or intercultural point aside, what you’re talking about touches on the absolutely essential, irreducible space in and of art. There is a space for art that cannot be filled in but must be kept empty. A space of freedom. For instance, modern mathematicians and physicists including the “foundational” philosopher Descartes, they debated on the existence of a vacuum. Our ability to imagine the world beyond the visible frame of space is reflected in our avoidance or fear of emptiness. In some sense, then, the photographic reproduction of worldly materials in the form of images, along with its differential constancy, is a fascinating counter-example of this plenitude, the fullness of this life.

G: I think about the image, what it should tell us about the emptiness or fullness. Should it show emptiness as a physical space or rather as a mental state of mind? Should it suggest something like the idea of emptiness? But how? Should that be like a white page? Why white instead of black? It’s obviously not about representation but rather a metaphor of the void. Creating emptiness is creating a possibility of filling it with something which has never been before and is not, either. Then, in order to find that “nothing” we must see through the screen of reality, which is hiding all kind of other spaces.

Q: Through the physical do we access something like the metaphysical. For the sake of comparison, in traditional Chinese paintings the empty space is not simply vacant. The empty space is part of the composition. To give space to that empty space is part of the artistic imaginary. We must bear that point in mind when discussing the importance of the empty in a photographic reproduction of the present. One example from mythology is Pandora’s Box, where the first evil woman was condemned. There is an interesting group of theorists writing about how the camera is like that box. It captures everything, anything (Pan-dora); if you unlock it, everything comes out. It’s a reproduction machine into which emptiness is built, as a condition for the possibility of reproduction. In other words, it itself has to be empty—or to empty itself (or herself) out.

G: It’s a very nice metaphor for the ancient type of Camera Obscura. But does it work for the digital type?

Q: So, has Pandora now gone digital too!

That is about machines, about how they capture the present and how they affect the way we think about photographic materials too. There is a very interesting book by Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, looking at photographic reproduction from “maternal” viewpoints. It’s a mother-metaphor, a mother’s womb, for instance. It itself, its “self,” is empty, through which figures get reproduced. This is a classical model of the camera. What is the mother in the age of mechanical reproduction? And how does she “figure”? That’s another, endless line of philosophical debate that touches on not only aesthetics but philosophy of and around the “sexes.” We have to pay attention to the material and maternal metaphor because literally this is how the mother’s body is employed and deployed as a camera. It itself should remain empty, pregnant with emptiness—also meaning potentiality.

Another point of interest, even the word, concept, suggests that: to conceive is to get pregnant. So light-writing and shadow.

P2: What I like about this conversation is that it concerns the negative. It is not about making a beautiful image but trying to show the background, an opening that sets your emotion, a certain condition of attentiveness toward something beyond any pre-conceived ideas; these days we are constantly bombarded with pictures. So instead, I wanted to stress the practice of setting yourself into an emotional stage, into a certain mood, through staging the thing. Or even just getting up brings you into a position of being able to be empty without feeling empty.

G: The idea is how to make emptiness radiate in a positive way. Usually its meaning is associated with some kind of negative feeling. While we are talking, I also sense how the process and series of work, so rich with all kinds of elements, maybe even too many, also illustrate my own fear of emptiness. There are two opposite states: emptiness and fullness. But the question could be the “emptiness or fullness” of what? What is the vessel which contains them?

There is poetry by Gherasim Luca who wonderfully developed that concept.

But the process I am interested in is the transition between the state of emptiness and the moment of taking a creative action.

Q: And not just what this emptiness means but how emptiness functions.

G: It’s very important, probably for everybody, but especially for the artist to arrive at that moment of “floating states.” Take on those eternal questions such as: Where are we? Who am I? What am I doing? Where is the sense of the existence? All of those questions are essential and they are coming from the anxiety in front of the emptiness of the universe.

Q: Running with this theme of paradox, this show offers an intriguing example of how remembering and forgetting are paired. In order for us to remember anything, we should almost be able to forget, so to speak. To re-member is to be able to make it a member of something. The human beings are those animals who keep promising because we have a sense of future and of failure. I will meet you tomorrow at 2 o’clock! I promise! I owe you $5, I will pay you back! I will do this and that—a promising animal. But that requires us to be able to forget, to get beforehand. Nietzsche, too, saw that jagged paradox coming: if we do not forget, we cannot remember. The process you relate to resonates with that. An example of this emptiness in a more performative sense would be: you reset yourself through a happy new year, or shall we say, “empty” new year. Likewise, there is a kind of existential dynamic in a photographic vision: something else gets freed when an image freezes (the moment)—in a sort of serial syncopations.

P2: I like the concept of the camera as the mother’s womb. But then, what is the image? In the end, the image is not a reality. The image is also flattening things. The three dimensionality of a certain body is described by the shadow that is moving, so the kinetic aspect is very important. When Gabriela’s images offer a view, they perform the viewing in an objective way.

This is a motherly emptiness, the actual ritual of taking the camera, putting it in position where you could get into those in-between moments. What are the different aspects among the camera, the body, the image, and the woman? What are the parallels in these metaphors?

Q: Precisely! What you’re pointing to is the mystery of photographic transition, transposition, transference, anything that moves. Something is on a plane of consciousness, carried along and over (also as in meta-phor). Like a mother’s womb, we think about the metaphor, we think about generosity in the gene, genre, gender … as Derrida also points out. It is what it is, what we cannot see.

P2: And its potential.

Q: Yes, so that’s why there’s a constant repetition of that which re-appears and re-presents. It’s a series of mediations at the heart of which is the mother’s body. I joke to my students in my gender philosophy class or dis-seminar that the word “reproduction” should be banned! It’s not re-production, it’s production.

G: That’s why I want to defend the idea of uniqueness even while using a technology of reproduction. A unique piece in photography means that it returns to its materiality. It becomes also an object—the image’s own materiality. There is only one “product” related to the mother’s body as a unique child.

Q: The mother’s body is not a Xerox machine! But somehow patriarchal politics treats the woman’s body as if it were or could be just that. The idea here is to honor and value the uniqueness of each being, in the sense of and with respect to its potentials.

P4: I believe the standard of the arts is measured by their philosophical quality. I just came to see the exhibition and I also see how the highest standard of the arts is met by these philosophical questions!

I hear wonderful metaphors, especially the photographic kitchen. In the kitchen it’s always a lady, that’s always the one reproducing also as in “social reproduction.” I see the connection you mention between the mother’s womb, the reproduction and the kitchen—it’s a lady that links.

In Chinese, we have a clear sense of an artistic birth, the birth of a work. Even a male artist, we do not tell if it is female or male. In Chinese even when we talk about a male artist, if the talk is about a creative moment, we would say that the baby is “stuck” at the moment or in the process of birthing, something to be “pulled out of the womb.” All artwork is like giving birth to a baby.

I see this connection across different cultures. In terms of that emptiness, in the Chinese context, the “hundreds” of everything coming together as a unity is also in a state of emptiness. Everything comes together and gets integrated. This state of emptiness is also Wu—there is something and nothing. Emptiness is related to nothing as in Wuwei (non-striving, inactive activity), so in the time-space, it has an original time and also the end of time. Emptiness is a background to consciousness; beginning of time, end of time, through lines.

G: I was also interested in the idea of the term, “in illo tempore.” It’s a Latin term which can be translated as “in that time” and Myrcea Iliade develops that idea of archetypes. That time means time without any time. It could be in the beginning of time, throughout, or in the end. It’s about the vision of the receptacle which contains emptiness but is not really empty. It’s filled with concepts, symbols, metaphors…from the beginning of time.

Q: It’s also about a bodily immersion, as we say in the middle of.  Of doing things, of being, so the ego has to be evacuated. I’m thinking of the Chinese notion, Zhong (middle), which for me also means something like a quietly orchestrated con-temporaneity of the concurrent.

Now, I want to loop back to the beginning of your talk, how you say you are trying not to frame things in advance. To let things be in the middle. That’s the magical, soft “catch” we are looking for. This emptiness and nothingness or middling. Middling without meddling. It has ancient resonances, both Greek and Chinese. “Middle Voice’ is like that in ancient philosophy—it is neither this nor that. In your work, I see it happening as a quiet, photographic pitch in the middle (of nowhere). You pay closer attention to where the baby’s head is stuck. A labor of meta-or intra-photographic midwifery, this kind of visual poetry, philosophy, artistic creation, that’s really helpful. The emptiness there also enables an inner shift of focus from the negative to the positive, trans-generating a sphere of creativity. That requires a certain resignation of agency, literally the agent, the “one” doing this or that or rather dying this way and that…you have to let the work work.

P5: The first word that comes to mind is an egoless perspective. All the past, present, future, design—they all start dissolving. I would see it as quite positive, similar to chemicals that lots of members from British art world take to gain emptiness, to gain exploration and space. Complete emptiness, an extreme state from which to create a new art of painting or music. So that’s another perspective on emptiness. Emptiness could be quite abstract, so I’m wondering: from your experience, how do you visualize that part of the visual layers of emptiness?

G: If I understand, you would like me to tell you the process, how this work of mine happens that way. I could answer like this: At the beginning of all, there is nothing, then some small element appears, which becomes a central point of the construction of the space. At that point, the empty space is not empty any more. It is already constructed, designed with lines, squares or circles. The objects can be really very ordinary, but at the same time I care about and take care of the emptiness of their own. Their shape should also express emptiness.

Such a constructed space at that initial stage is a kind of envelope for the other, an inner-theater. So talking about materials, there is still a symbolism of emptiness because of the in-betweeness of both layers. The idea is to convince the space to become symbolic at that point. Earlier we were just talking about it, comparing it to the fruit or an object from which you are taking out its mass. Then, the container is getting empty and gets filled again with new images, new realities. I don’t like to use the word “image” because it is flat. Rather, reality has all kinds of forms.

P5: Your remark illuminates how you construct layers, which is quite hard, and it is why, I think, your work creates distortions, using different tools to strike a new reality, an image’s own reality.

Q: So the procedural dynamism of emptiness is also quite literal, right? Such kinetic connections between pictorial spacing and photographic timing we have been exploring also help us move onto the next and final phase of our discussion, which is to look at some specific examples of Gabriela’s work. Let us see how those themes we discussed materialize, how they matter there.

Following on that question of emptiness, the life itinerary, your biography, exhibitions and locations where you worked, if we look at your work, so far it involves a lot of travels, moving around. You have various experiences in different locations. There are also artists who literally never leave their nest, but as you lived and passed through various spaces, I am interested to hear your thoughts on the role of memories, experiences and travels in your art. I imagine that these series of forms of life would force you to empty yourself out of your comfort zone. How does that “produce” your mind? Well, to experience is to live OUT OF the limit, to ex-perience.

It means you have to trust that emptiness, that space you are jumping through and sometimes into. It’s a fascinating image. You have to allow space in your lifeboat. For those of you who travel a lot, every time you travel, you must pack the absolute minimum and then you have to empty it out. Or at least that’s how I try to travel. When you leave for a new place, you must also leave some room in your luggage. If your suitcase is full, you won’t be able to add anything else when moving to a new place. Again, the wisdom of leaving some space is about underdetermination. From the way I experience your work, that kinetic, convex mirroring, that space works like a slightly empty suitcase. So the photographic kitchen itself is on the move. It enables a constant mirroring so that you won’t lose that inner eye, that inner core space, as you’re going on a space-trip, too.

So how does this literalized movement of ex-periencing impact the way you produce work? I ask this question because the work you produce is almost ritually layered and materially evocative in ways that seem to reflect and even stress various traces of time and space. There is an allegory.

G: I really agree: you have to trust that emptiness, that space we are jumping through. It is an essential feeling in every displacement and a real experience as in crisscrossing the sky. It means also: don’t be afraid, go ahead.

I don’t feel that I belong to some particular space. Although I have been living in France for a long time, enough to feel home there, it doesn’t mean that it produces something like lightness. Yet, not being attached to some particular space or community in a very tight way doesn’t produce strength, either. Still, my main working studio is in Paris where I live, and I must say that that is the material space where my ideas are taking shapes.

When traveling, being somewhere else, on the move, open to understanding others as well as others’ understanding of you … such is always a huge invasion of your own comfort zone. But this is exactly that idea of emptiness. You become the vacuum space in order to receive all kinds of new experiences—you must make space for that. Coming back to my own space, I see there is an issue of how to classify all those experiences and how to absorb all of that space, of emptiness-fullness.

Q: From what we’ve heard so far, along with many wonderful images and ideas, I feel like I am beginning to have a photographic memory of what you have been describing on that space of emptiness and that emptiness is an envelope of the other.

P3: An envelope is a space, so actually it offers a particular space and fold.

G: Something I think about is the concept of not knowing. There are moments in life and particularly in every artist’s practice of getting to the point of doing something without knowing why and what it is. How can you understand it? You probably become very afraid of that unknown object created by yourself, and you just need to follow that work. The idea of getting deeply inside this unknowledge is very interesting.

P4: Your idea of unknowing is about self-consciousness or lack thereof?

G: No, it’s really about not knowing. Something appears in front of you because you are going forward but you don’t understand why, what its real content is, what the real meaning of that object is. There is a paradoxical situation in that because if you are doing that it means you know but you don’t know why. It seems like the two sides of the brain get disconnected at that point. It is important to consider that space-time of not-knowing as a fully valuable process. It is probably something related also to emptiness as a condition of creation.

P3: I have a friend who immerses herself in a room or a strong force gives her an inspiration, so she is somewhere just writing, and unconsciously producing, whether it’s writing or not, in a state where she create something because she us possessed or emptied, I’m not sure.

G: There is something like a third thing, a third space, which is AVIDIA, something to study more about. It’s about space, this particular space in between where you can see the shape of things but you don’t know what’s inside and what it means.

Q: I think it is linked to the question of the exteriority of the envelope, the difference between bribery and the present, for instance. Consider the notion of gifting: when you give someone a gift and also when you are “gifted.” You don’t know what it is you’re given when gifted, and what you’re gifted in. It’s a kind of pure thanking, and, as with Heidegger, Danken, to think is to thank. The difference between bribery and a gift is this: I give you ten yuan so you do something nice to me, you know what you’ve given and are receiving in return; but, I give you a gift in an envelope, you just take it, just receive it, don’t question it, and you don’t actually or fully know what could be inside, metaphorically and literally or both, even after you’ve opened it or think you have. It could be a bomb, too, including a time bomb you don’t see now; Derrida talks about this in the classical Greek, “pharmakonic” parable of writing as a gift given and to be disseminated as such, as both a medicine and a poison. That’s the limit and risk of it. That’s the aporia of gift-giving. It’s also an artistic notion, an artistic “gift” inseparable from the notion of freedom. An artist as one who responds to a call, you just follow it but you don’t know what it is.

That ties back into beginning of our discussion of not trying to do this or that, but the question then comes down to framing. All the frames in these photographs, as you say, are not very intentional. It’s there to leave the space of not knowing, leaving it active and let it speak. That seems to be the ethos, character and the momentum of your work of “shadow-tracing.”

This notion of passively powerful “gift” is very important especially today. What is the space for the arts in this hypercapitalized world of micro-transactional calculations? We talked about reproduction, some people will produce something with the preexisting model of what is acceptable, what is popular, what “sells,” what is “catchy,” etc. There is something about unknowing as a value of and vehicle for irreducible freedom no one can take away from us, which is really real. This also reflects, it must be said, a discursive tension as well as reciprocal tie between the critic and the artist, where the critic wants to know everything about a piece, taking it apart, wanting to know every move, every sign, while rendering it more visible.

G: The idea of freedom and space tied to unknowing is very intriguing. There is a great freedom for all the interpretations when there are no any instructions for understanding but it becomes also a source of anxiety because you cannot access the essential and hidden meanings.

Q: Oh, don’t worry, I will sign and seal your envelope! I can sell it for you! (Laughter) So, leave that envelope sort of half-open so that it can interact with this otherness you also describe through your own experiences.

Speaking of such deconstructive “framing,” I’m also intrigued by the geometrical figures in your work, the free-floating, naked bodies, and the very mathematical, superimposed work. It’s also your own body. Are we seeing images of your body sort of naked or semi-naked? If you are interested, would you mind talking a bit about what you have given us in that regard?

G: Maybe I am thinking about this particular idea of geometry; or maybe I am thinking against the geometry? Once again, I am in the opposite side of what it looks like! Explored here is a sensitive approach to geometrical shapes which are by definition rule-bound. But how to construct such a space with minimum elements and without mathematical calculations: my approach is a bit random without any particularly sophisticated structures and necessary systems, and it is also an autobiographical process because all those elements used here belong to my familiar environments, as they also become part of other works or part of collected objects. Why do I collect things? I am like a magician always surrounded by some artifacts to play with. Sometimes human beings take sensual approaches to the question of existence, which are important to them. And there are shadows of all those elements, another space inside the image. We have been talking about deconstruction and its meanings, all those elements penetrating one another and all those things even include something that does not exist in fact since it is an illusion or ephemeral effect, basically light and shadow.

About the process: it’s very important for me to be emotionally creative and to be able to arrive at the synthesis of everything at such emotional moments.

Q: Listening to you, I realize your work is also about the unframeable richness of framed ambiguities. We all carry our coffees or cages around, which could also be a window that frames and frees you, all sort of portals into another world within a world, both portable in themselves. In that connection, something about the rectangular, the surface of life that annexes itself, is really interesting, its inherent metaphoricity: I mean, it is and carries its own frames. That self-reflexive or self-referential tension is what remains so arresting, what forces us to look. Look! And shadows are this photographic work … another layer of ambiguity.

G: Maybe the next exhibition could be the installation of emptiness and its shadows!

P6: I want to ask about the glass you have, also the mirror. Did you deliberately choose your own materials?

G: Yes, the materials are important—it’s all about my approach to photography. It’s not only the matter of image. The image is absolutely connected with the surface because each material is producing a perception of what we can see, each time differently. It can be cold, warm, soft, pleasant, or unpleasant to touch, and so on.

P6: I notice you use a mirror a lot. Can you speak about that?

G: You are right and there are other reflecting materials like water or the black surface of shining glass, etc. There is something about something (else) being reflected inside but it’s mostly about creating another possibility of perceiving the real. Also there is certainly something from the myth of Narcissus, which always appears when we talk about the mirror. When you are reflected in something, you still see the surrounding world, so you are included in the whole image and sometimes it is much stronger to show that through a mirror than to show it frontally. It’s kind of turning everything upside-down and inside-out.

P7: I have one final question and then we can go for dinner! It is about the perception and moment of illusion or irritation. I remember the first time I saw your works on the wall and thinking: is it a shadow, is it not a shadow? We talked a lot about how the works are expressions of your inner emptiness and how your creative unknowing of what you see creates a kind of original moment that is this emptiness where you, without thinking, constantly get and get out of such images. So, I wonder how much of this is part of your working process.

G: I’m always searching for the magic moment. An important thing in general is the emotion of being close to some new, unknown point where the habitual perception reaches another level. The motion between the matter and the psyche generates those emotions, the main elements in my creative process. So such a material emotional translation has a big influence on the image that results, along with the clear and confused perception of it. This moment is crucial.

Q: Most importantly then, this is the moment for us to say: thank you! 

Kyoo Lee, a member of AICA-USA,the author of Reading Descartes Otherwise (Fordham University Press) and a forthcoming book on visual culture (The MIT Press), is a transdisciplinary philosopher, writer and critic, who currently teaches at the City University of New York where she is Professor of Philosophy. A recipient of fellowships and visiting appointments from Cambridge University, CUNY Graduate Center, KIAS, the Mellon Foundation, the NEH, Seoul National University and Yanbian University among others, her philopoetic texts have appeared in AICA-USA Magazine, Asian American Literary Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, PN Review, Randian, The Volta and the White Review as well as various standard academic venues.

An editor active in various fields, she is the chief co-editor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism, and serves on the editorial boards of Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics, Derrida Today,Open Humanities Press, Simon de Beauvoir Studies and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is also on the board of directors at Litmus Press. Her Mellon-funded anthology, Queenzenglish.mp3: poetry | philosophy | performativity, with contributions from 50+ poets, musicians, theorists and performance artists from across the globe, has recently been published (2020).

Throughout her site-specific cogitographical practices and collaborative projects, Q Professor Lee explores co-generative links and zones between critical theory and creative prose.

Gabrieal Morawetz, born in Rzeszów, Poland, is a photographer and visual artist based in Paris, France, who also works in painting, graphic design, sculpture, installation, and video. A graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and the Instituto Nacional de la Cultura in Caracas, Venezuela, her works that are richly liminal, metaphorical, and dynamically intercultural, have been exhibited internationally at prominent art institutions such as Chicago Cultural Center, San Antonio Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Art Center, Rubin Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas (MACSI), Fotomuseo in Bogota, Te Papa Museum, and Art Museum in Kathmandu, as well as art fairs such as Art Paris, ARCO Madrid, Art Bologna, Paris Photo, Photo Shanghai, Aipad, and Photo London. In 2011, Descartes Et Cie published Gabriela Morawetz: Ne faire qu’un (PUBLICITÉ) as part of its celebrated AREA series, documenting her pieces from 1992-2011, with text by Anne Tronche, Marek Bartelik, Serge Fauchereau, Edward Glissant and Joanna Sitkowska-Bayle.

THINH  - Đào Châu Hải
Manzi Art Space (14 Phan Huy Ích, Nguyễn Trung Trực, Ba Đình, Hà Nội) January 2021

Translated by Tran Ngan Ha

Publication was made possible with the support of the Nguyen Art Foundation

Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus. (The only true paradise is paradise lost’) – Marcel Proust

As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, Vietnamese sculpture seems to be gradually losing its place in the living spaces and the flow of creative thinking. Just over 10 years ago (2010s), sculpture, then full of inspiration and often present in art news, was introducing a generation of new faces which promised a novel visual language.However today, it seems to have turned into disappointment when, apart from being heavy physical shapes, sculpture works often do not create any significant concepts or aesthetic perceptions. From a high-level perspective, from being an art form with a normative theory system of three-dimensional shaping, of specific technique and language, sculpture has gradually become a merely form of expression, a material and a ‘medium’ rather than a distinct sensory and aesthetic world. It slips out (or is pushed to the borders) of the flow of thinking – as sculptors no longer come up with their own aesthetic philosophy about how they form the shapes, equip them with a capacity to interact with different spaces, diverse contexts, and respond to living spaces that appear and disappear every day. When the present life is no longer isolated islands or kingdoms with standard models of distinct social and physical forms, sculpture requires changes in the artistic philosophy to interpret different aesthetic approaches, or should even guide human perception, but it seems to stand still or go in the opposite direction. Increasingly exhausted and no longer able to find life-engaging concepts, a visual language that is increasingly poor, unable to connect or lacking the ability to occupy real spaces, gradually losing its audiences, sculpture has become either “salonized” in furniture, or a superficial decoration of an outdoor space with a rigid and pragmatic spirit outside the aesthetic.

Dao Chau Hai (b. 1956) belongs to the last generation of sculptors pursuing a pure sculptural language and conception and who have the desire to change humanity – idealizing living spaces  through art. Starting with his ’Cubist’ sculptures in the 1990s, since the 2000s there have been many changes in his perception and spirit regardingsculpture where he was searching for and incorporating his art objects into a variety of topographic and spatial contexts, from smaller to larger scales. The move from natural materials to metals around 2009-2010 continues to give his sculpture new forms and languages, not only within the context in which they are created, with the spaces to which they are directed, but also in their efforts to capture and shape the spirit of the era into a specific visual form. The ideology of the industrial age mixed with memories of the past, the sensitivity to the mechanical, the metallic with the non-metallic crafts, the pursuit of a three-dimensional oppressive body language through monumental art shapes, searching for ideal forms in the ideal space, radicalizing the language of shapes and engineering within the constraints of technology, et cetera, such complex and contradictory thoughts appear in the sculptures of Dao Chau Hai, and which are both a driving force and a hindrance to the artist himself.

THINH, the latest series of work, starts out as an independent sculpture but then opens up Dao Chau Hai’s complex and diverse onsite interconnections. He starts with a simplified figure of a bird drawn on a flat metal surface. The shape is then hollows out using laser cutting techniques, and duplicated on the metal sheet vertically and horizontally. Splitting that flat surface into vertical rectangles and arranging on a square ground, then inserting small squares into larger square cylinders, Dao Chau Hai  builds up a series of standing cylinders with multiple layers, alternating hollow and solid. Fragments cut from flat metal surfaces are also used, radially laminated and stacked to form a solid pylon – solid cube of hollow cylinders. The metal plates of the hollow sections are also not discarded; they are considered other components of the work, intended to be incorporated into specific spaces or terrain. The idea of using both solid-hollow cubes, the cold sharpness of metal and mechanical precision are fully exploited in this sculpture, creating a multidirectional visual reception and opportunities to enter various spatial structures which can be combined in different ways with architecture.

When a three-dimensional sculpture is flattened, it almost approaches the visual language of graphic art and requires comprehensively different directions of ‘behavior’ in terms of concepts, techniques, and aesthetics. The artist did not really make a sudden change in artistic style, but had experimented previously, such as his installation in the exhibition “Uninvolved & East Sea Ballad” at Viet Art Center, Hanoi, at the end of 2010 (a dualexhibition with painter Ly Truc Son). Dao used thin jagged steel plates to form the shapes of ocean waves, laying them on the floor and standing against the wall to create a fierce space filled with of the sensation of violence. Although they are dissipated in a large space without a coherent connection between single parts, and lean too much towards ‘description/narration’ and have no specialized way of processing the blocks’ interior, this is still an experiment and also a transformation in the perception of his structure of sculpture by decomposing the solid block into layered flat metal plates with space left in between. This technical process becomes an artistic approach when it comes to solving the ‘solidity-heaviness’ of the shape, emptying and reducing its weight, making it look more elegant. At the same time, the visually heavy effect of the metal material is retained, the layers stacking up one on another, creating a weight for the forms and a visual impression of the work.

With THINH, Dai reuses this approach with a greater degree of control in both artistic conception and technical precision. Plates of metal are either flat or laminated or separated into independent sheets. Hollow shapes created by chiseling on flat surfaces become the main driver of vision and determine aesthetic effectiveness. At this point, the void/empty space becomes organic and the main subject of the sculpture. Not only do they ‘take away’ the heavy feel of the material and the coldness of the metal, they also solve the overall visual riddle and detail of the work. They guide the viewer’s gaze to weave in and out of the block, exposing the structure and the physical depth of the block’s interior. At the same time, they are the doorways to connect the sculptural body with the architectural interior-exterior landscape and the environment. The work integrates more into the physical context and evokes a lot of interest in viewers because of that ‘openness’.

One advantage of choosing a reflective metal for this sculptural series (aluminum alloy) lies in the properties of that material. Not only is it responsive to light, the surface also reflects many passive and indirect light beams, without an external light source. This sculpture can be placed in a variety of architectural and lighting contexts, from outside to the typical white-cube gallery, in an artificial light hall, or even in a dim lighting spaces. In a dark space, the light on the contours of sculpture makes up the visual form of the subject and that’s where aesthetics reveal itself. The shape becomes fragile, even ‘invisible ‘, and the empty/void spaces become the solid block/subject of the work. When the light changes through time, from day to night, or by the movement of things in front of the work, by the surrounding natural and man-made environment, the visual aesthetic changes accordingly and is not constrained by traditional art disciplines. Diverse adaptations to the environment and scenery, time and weather help the work have a more ‘sustainable’ aesthetic, quickly catching up with the movements of thoughts and habits that always want to renew and accelerate the movement of contemporary life.

Explaining the concept through the title is seldom a strength of artists in general, but with the title ‘THINH’, it seems that Dao Chau Hai has had a satisfactory choice. THINH is part of the word ‘thinh khong’, which designates an empty, silent, nothingness state. Thinh in Vietnamese is pronounced close to the word ‘thing’ in English which means object, or ‘think’ which means thinking, reflecting. During domestic and international trips, the artist has had many opportunities to witness or listen to stories of people drifting, in exile or disappearing following the changes in history, the disintegration of communities and cultures, the rotation of natural and social status. From thinking about the existences of individuals and groups through the transformation of time, Dao Chau Hai approaches the topic with a complex sculpture series of various parts, layers, fragmentations and concentrations, in order to express different states that exist in endless emptiness. Perhaps this idea is more or less influenced by the Eastern Buddhist spirit ‘all things are empty of intrinsic existence and nature’ when it comes to seeing that all matters come from nothing and will return to nothing.

The change in the visual language of sculpture reveals the development of Dai’s thinking process and his researching/reflecting/experimenting capacity, and his artistic philosophy. In his early-staged Cubist forms, Dao Chau Hai was interested in the distortion of the sculpture in three-dimensional aspects, creating an internal ‘force’ inside the rotating cube, thereby affecting the viewers’ vision and emotions. At the same time, he explored the hollowness of sculpture when studying bamboo weaving techniques, inspired by the craftsmanship and the appearance of traditionalhandicraft with their own lyrical and aesthetic characteristics. Then he raised questions about the meaning of the shape in relation to the material and where the connections with the past in matter and identity lie. The next turn was employing the theatrical impression of the massiveness of the monumental art in three-dimensional space, its connection to specific space and context, a sense of industrial life, which certainly was influenced by the time when the artist undertook commissions of monumental statues forcommon architecture and public sculptures. The post-2000 works and showcases were constantly changing and experiencing a variety of scene modifications, demonstrating his artistic styles in dialogue with the space [site] at the physical, environmental or historical layer, following practices of Land art or Environmental art. Influence by industrial life, his excitement using the metal material, together with its technical system and visual language, a distinct aesthetic philosophy attracted the artist and has been his main object for more than 10 years. Working with metal requires more rational thinking, and sculpture will then either tend to structuralize, or will tend towards working in a conceptual sense more than in a technical one, and gradually become a medium for new artistic forms such as Installation. Dao Chau Hai’s later works show that he tends towards structures in the connotation of sculpture but is still interested in how the works interact and control the space in particular exhibitions. Going from Cubism (distorting or analyzing ‘cubes’ [of space]) to Abstraction –– structuralizing and bringing visual structures into space, rotating and colliding with the news, behavior and cultural sensitivities, Dao Chau Hai’s art follows the gradual development of global sculpture, and partly touches on the common perceptions of contemporary aesthetics.

When modern life needs more various expressions in forms, or more diverse exploration at deep emotional levels, or engaging with social and community issues generally, art needs to respond. In the context of sculpture getting further from reality, this artistic practice of Dao Chau Hai has been consistent, demonstrating the limitations of and distance between the creative ideal and reality, when the artistic idea slips from the existing technical and technological infrastructure, the social context and the existing psychology of enjoyment. As a perfectionist, perhaps he is still seeking to build a pure spiritual space, where art defines the values ​​of the physical and spiritual form of that place. But that paradise has never been and will not be for anyone, because the world we live in today is constantly divided and broken, where ideals and beliefs become illusions and delusions. Đào Châu Hải  is a solitary wanderer in the endless exile of the mind, searching for a paradise that does not exist, something that mankind has lost since the dawn of time even though art cannot help being a salvation of the soul in a chaotic and devastated reality.

Nguyen Anh Tuan

Hanoi, Jan 2021

Translated by Tran Ngan Ha

All images courtesy the artist and Manzi Art Space

The upcoming exhibition of Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts (TMoFA) will be featuring the works of 17 finalists of the “Taoyuan International Art Award,” the very first international award from the city that eyes on promoting artistic creations from around the globe and to build up an exchange platform for the participating artists.

TMoFA is the foremost and the long anticipated art institution of the growing city of Taoyuan. With the city being part of the 6 special municipalities in Taiwan, the importance of the award is undeniable, and it will only be the first step among the museum’s future programs to connect with the international art scene. The opening ceremony of the exhibit will take place on 13 March 2021 with the announcement of the grand prize winners. The “Taoyuan International Art Award” exhibition is scheduled to open to the public from 13 March to 18 April 2021, at Taoyuan Arts Center.

CHIEN Yu Jen (Taiwan), Workers Holding Placards – a Portrait Project No.6
簡佑任 (臺灣), 舉牌工人肖像計劃#6

“Taoyuan International Art Award is in the foreground of the development of the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts, and even more so, that of the vision of Taoyuan city toward the international art scene. We look forward to building a new dynamic art hub to nurture contemporary art creations. At the same time, we also aim at providing artists with another professional exhibiting platform, in the hope of opening up the possibility for dialogues and cooperation through the holding of the award.” says the Director of Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts, LIU Chun Lan.

Mizanur Rahman CHOWDHURY (Bangladesh), LAND
Mizanur Rahman CHOWDHURY (孟加拉), 土地

The 1st international award from the city to promote the power of contemporary art creations

Taoyuan International Art Award, organised by TMoFA, is an award that aims at encouraging a diversified development of art practices and cultivating talents in contemporary art. With an expectation to strengthen international exchanges and to provide full freedom of expression, the award accepts application worldwide. The entry to the competition is not limited to material, category, or size as long as the submission would be a new work that has yet been exhibited nor recognized by other awards. As a result, the open call has successfully drawn the attention of more than 600 artists from 46 countries to submit their applications. The number of submissions received has set a new record for the award, and also, an important milestone for the vision of TMoFA and its subsidiary art centres to come.

The organizer will cover the finalists’ expenses for the basic exhibit build-up and transportation. Their selected entries will be exhibited in Taoyuan Arts Center for one month while going through an on-site review to decide one winner for the “Grand Prize,” three winners for the “Honorable Mentions” and one winner for the “Sojourn Award”. With the announcement of the winners on the opening day of the exhibition, the medallist is entitled to a prize of NTD$500,000. Honorable Mention artists will receive a prize of NTD$ 120,000 each, and  Sojourn Award artist will receive a prize of NTD$ 150,000.

TING Chaong Wen (Taiwan), Going Home
丁昶文 (台湾), 魂归故里

A creative dialogue: 17 artists to showcase together in Taoyuan and to reflect on the issues of our time

17 selected artists from across the continents will be showcasing together. Their works come in different practices includes paintings, installations and new media artworks. They invite the audiences to re-discover and reflect on the various issues from cultural identity, community, history, global politics, the notion of time, and to re-experience how the artists express their thoughts and feelings through different materials and methods of creation.

The finalists of the Taoyuan International Art Award are: LEE Tek Khean(Malaysia), WANG Yi Wei (Taiwan), KOO Bon A (Korea), Ray KIANG (U.S.A), CHUANG Li Hao (Taiwan), Ana MENDES (Portugal), LIN Yan Xiang (Taiwan), CHANG Chih Chung (Taiwan), Lewis COLBURN (U.S.A), Takahiko SUZUKI (Japan), Liva DUDAREVA (Lativia), Sara WU (Taiwan), Maria VARELA (Greece), CHIANG Chun Yi (Taiwan), TING Chaong Wen (Taiwan), Mizanur Rahman CHOWDHURY (Bangladesh), CHIEN Yu Jen (Taiwan). Further details of the artists and their submitted works can be found in the Appendix.

The awarding ceremony will take place on 13 March 2021 following the opening of the exhibition. The event will be livestreaming at the Facebook and Youtube page of TMoFA at 14:30 (GMT+8). During the period of exhibition, the museums will also be launching a series of onsite events to invite the audience to have further engagement with the artists and artworks.

The Taoyuan International Art Award is organized biannually, and the upcoming open call is scheduled to be in June 2022. For more information on the exhibition and future open call, please visit here.

Ray KIANG (U.S.A), The Invisible
Ray KIANG (美国), 不可见之物

About Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts

The Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts (TMoFA), an upcoming cultural marker, is an institution with multiple venues consisting of one main museum and three subsidiary art centers. The main art museum is located in the Qingpu area of Zhongli District, and the three subsidiary art centers are the Taoyuan Children’s Art Center, the Hengshan Calligraphy Art Center, and the Chunglu Art Center.

The architectural design and landscaping of the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts combines aquatic views and green zones, with history and culture integrated. The design echoes with the regional features of Taoyuan, a city that is known as the Land of a Thousand Ponds. Applying its diverse functions, the museum is going to link the heart of the city with its communities and form local and international ties. With Taoyuan as its foundation and together with an international outlook and a vision for the future, TMoFA is going to serve as a driving force for the promotion of art and become a dynamic base for innovative experimentation and cultural development. For more information on the museum, please visit this link.

CHIANG Chun Yi (Taiwan), Holobiont Project: Ji-mi
张致中 (台湾), 作鸳鸯

Maria VARELA (Greece), Rugs of Life
Maria VARELA (希腊), 生命织毯

Sara WU (Taiwan), Lived Absence of Objects
吳依宣(台湾), 事物不在场

Liva DUDAREVA (Lativia), V_br ⃤ nt* m ⃤ tt3r*
Liva DUDAREVA (拉脱维亚), 活跃的物质

Takahiko SUZUKI (Japan), Global-store.info : Taoyuan 2021

Lewis COLBURN (U.S.A.), Disposable Monument II (After the Boys Who Wore Gray)
Lewis COLBURN (美国), 抛弃式纪念碑II（仿照”穿灰衣的男孩们”

CHANG Chih Chung (Taiwan), Fabricating Mandarin Duck
张致中 (台湾), 作鸳鸯

LIN Yan Xiang (Taiwan), If Mountain Has Deities
林彥翔 (台湾 ), 山若有神

Ana MENDES (Portugal), The People’s Collection
Ana MENDES (葡萄牙), 人民的收藏

KOO Bon A (Korea), Teeth of Time.
具本妸 (韩国), 时间的牙齿

WANG Yi Wei (Taiwan), Running Fast and Slow
王译薇 (台湾 ), 快慢奔跑

Credits: all images courtesy the artist and by TMoFA

Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dewdrop
Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, Australia) Oct. 2 2020– Feb. 28, 2021

Replicas, postmodernism and ‘bad copies’

I vividly remember seeing Lindy Lee’s early works when they were first exhibited in Sydney in 1985 in ‘Australian Perspecta’ and 1986 in the ‘6^th Biennale of Sydney’. Grainy, velvety black photocopies of famous faces – portraits by Jan Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Ingres, Artemisia Gentileschi and others from the western art historical canon – were arranged in rows or grids.  They gazed out from behind layers of acrylic paint, or wax that had been partially scraped back. Hints of darkened visages emerged through cobalt blue or deepest crimson pigment, unfamiliar and mysterious, their characters both concealed and revealed by the artist’s manipulations.

These shadowy works powerfully conveyed a sense common to artists and writers of my generation (and Lee’s): we were far from the action, on the other side of the world. The cultural centres, the ‘real’ art hubs, or so we thought then, were London, Paris, Florence, New York. We Australians were exiled to the periphery, inhabiting a postcolonial shadow world, a simulacrum – a pale photocopy, faded by the tyranny of distance. The art history we studied was almost entirely European and American; we feasted on images in reproduction, leafing through books with color plates of Renaissance masters, and queued for the (very occasional) blockbuster exhibition of works loaned from overseas collections at the state galleries. In that 1980s heyday of postmodern theory Lee’s works were discussed by critics and academics invoking Walter Benjamin and Baudrillard, but for me their interest lay in the connection forged between the artist and the mechanical reproduction. They suggested the angst of someone searching for a relationship across differences of time and culture.

Untitled (After Jan van Eyck), 1985, Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore

Lindy Lee, The Silence of Painters, 1989, Museum of Contemporary Art, gift of Loti Smorgon AO and Victor Smorgon AC, 1995

Lindy Lee, Book of Kuan-yin, 2002, Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

But there was more to Lee’s search than the general Australian awareness of the colonial ‘fatal shore’. Lindy Lee was born in Brisbane in 1954 to parents who had immigrated from China. She grew up in the (then) stultifyingly parochial suburbs of Brisbane during the era of the racist White Australia Policy; just a few years earlier, in 1947, Labor politician Arthur Calwell had notoriously ‘joked’ in parliament that ‘Two Wongs don’t make a white’. This immigrant upbringing, and her experience of being the only Chinese child in her school, left Lee uncertain of her identity. Like other children of Australia’s post-war migrants, she felt she was somehow inauthentic – not quite Australian, nor quite Chinese. Her early, experimental work with photocopies examined her own sense of being a ‘bad copy’, an altered, faded reproduction of the ‘real thing’.(1)

Lee loved the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of primitive 1980s photocopiers, with their frequent accidental spillages and smears of carbon, and the increasingly pale images they produced when the toner was running out. The seductive blackness and loss of detail intrigued her. Even in those early experiments she was, quite unintentionally, exploring the same materiality as Chinese ink painters. The chemistry of carbon and the aesthetic impact of blackness appealed to the Literati whose carbon-based ink created subtle gradations of tone, from deepest black to the palest hint of wash, just as the sooty black replicas of Old Master paintings held infinite expressive possibilities for Lee.

In the next phase of her work Lee turned from appropriating European paintings to digitising and manipulating family photographs and images borrowed from Chinese rather than Western art history. These became her earliest representations of her Chinese heritage. She began with a photograph of her mother, a strong matriarch who had escaped the post-1949 persecution aimed at those from the hated ‘landlord class’ to join her husband in Australia. It was a long and arduous journey via Hong Kong, with two small children and a suitcase with a false bottom hiding the family’s gold. The courage of a woman who was forced to spend years apart from her husband, who had arrived in Queensland years earlier, is repeated in the daughter’s journey to rediscover her Chinese ancestral roots, developing a transdisciplinary and transcultural practice that celebrates her hybrid identity.

Buddhism and the Ten Thousand Things

It was only after many trips to China exploring her family heritage, and a deep immersion in the practices of Zen (Chan) Buddhism and Daoism, that Lee felt secure enough in her Chinese/Australian identity to produce her mature body of work grounded in East Asian philosophy and aesthetics.(2) A comprehensive survey exhibition of her work at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, ‘Moon in a Dewdrop’ (the title is a reference to the writing of 13th century Japanese Zen master, Dōgen) sourced from private and public collections, and the artist’s own archives, covers the full gamut of her practice. The more than 70 works brought together in the MCA demonstrate Lee’s versatility, from her earliest explorations of the photographic replica to recent experiments in ‘flung bronze’ developed from the Zen painting tradition of ‘flung ink’.

Lindy Lee, Listening to the Moon, 2018, stainless steel, image courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore, © the artist, photograph: Ng Wu Gang

At the entrance to the concrete monolith that is the new wing of the MCA, the first work we encounter is ‘Secret World of a Starlight Ember’ (2020), a curved ovoid form of stainless steel pierced with thousands of tiny holes. Reflecting the harbour with its passing ferries, the blue of the sky, and the faces of passers-by, its minimalist beauty is intended to reference the Buddhist belief that human beings and the universe are one. Lit from within at night it recalls a map of constellations. The void at its centre, while an irresistible lure for the Instagram selfie and the narcissistic gaze into its reflective surface, reminds us that Buddhism and Daoism are replete with paradox; simultaneously symbolising materiality and immateriality, it represents tian xia – everything under heaven – as interconnected.

Lee told Elizabeth Ann MacGregor, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the curator of ‘Moon in a Dewdrop’, that a work created in 1995 (and recreated for the exhibition) marks her self-discovery. ‘No Up, No Down, I am the Ten Thousand Things’ was made when Lee had returned from China and was ‘released from the imprisonment of being either Chinese or Anglo or this or that’.(3) The installation of approximately 1200 small works made with ink ‘flung’ over photocopies covers the walls, floor and ceiling with blue, red and black rectangles. The Chinese and Japanese technique of ‘flung ink’ was practised by Zen monk painters following meditation. The apparent paradox of finding purpose and meaning in what at first appears spontaneous and random is a metaphor for seeing patterns in the universe and recognising the connection between the self and the natural world.

Without question there is a trace here of Lee’s early interest in the pure abstraction of Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, seen also in the modernist grid presentation and strong reds and blues of her earlier photocopy works. More importantly, though, this was the first work Lee made with the explicit intention of exploring her relationship to Buddhist philosophy and practice.

Paradox and duality recur in Lindy Lee’s work, and in her life. The art writer Julie Ewington describes Lee as an artist who has had, essentially, two careers, ‘remaking’ herself during the year of her Asialink residency in Beijing in 1995. Intending to study calligraphy, Lee realised that being unable to read Chinese characters she was drawn instead to the sooty materiality of ink itself. Ewington cites a conversation between the artist and Suhanya Raffel: ‘The notion of ‘darkness’ in her work began to take on another meaning altogether: here the dark might begin to signify, in consonance with Buddhist philosophy, “the void that holds everything and nothing”’.(4) The ‘ten thousand things’ (a phrase found many times in the Dao De Jing, attributed to Daoist philosopher Laozi) refers to everything in the universe, to the fluxing, see-sawing, reciprocal relationship between yin and yang that contains this void holding within it ‘everything and nothing’. Polarities of masculine/feminine; light/dark; past/present; eastern/western; Australian/Chinese – the ‘this or that’ that Lee described in recounting her uncertain hybrid identity – are thus no longer binary opposites but, rather, relational aspects of qi (the breath, or the life force).

These ideas are further developed in Lee’s experiments with flinging molten bronze, a breathtakingly physical, difficult, and dangerous process. The ladle containing the liquid metal (at 1200 degrees centigrade) weighs 10 kg and the artist is suited up in heavy protective clothing as she ‘flings’ (slowly, deliberately, and following meditative breaths) the bronze onto the concrete floor of the UAP foundry in Brisbane. A documentary video of the artist at work reminded me of observing groups practising tai chi in Chinese parks. Inevitably, too, there is a faint echo of the film of Jackson Pollock at work shot by Hans Namuth in 1951 – Lee’s actions are similarly performative, but much less self-conscious. Her measured gestures result in ethereally beautiful works such as ‘Seeds of a New Moon’ (2019), a collection of solidified, burnished bronze shapes carefully arranged on the wall.  They suggest a view through a microscope of biomorphic forms, tiny component parts of an enormous universe, moving in unknowable rhythms, quite oblivious to human attempts to control nature. 

Lindy Lee, No Up, No Down, I Am the Ten Thousand Things , 1995/2020, Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Fire, Water, Air, Earth and Metal

Lee’s immersion in her ancestral Chinese culture has influenced numerous public sculpture commissions in Australia and in China. In ‘Moon in a Dewdrop’ this aspect of her practice is represented by ‘scholar rock’ forms from the ‘Flame from the Dragon’s Pearl’ series, in mirror-polished bronze. ‘Unnameable’ (2017), recently acquired along with a suite of 12 large works on paper for the collection of the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), references the traditional appreciation in China for gongshi, or scholar’s rocks. Limestone shaped by elemental geological forces (sometimes assisted by perforating rocks with holes and immersing them in the waters of Lake Tai for hundreds of years) developed into elaborate, fantastical shapes. Large rocks were an integral part of garden design, a metaphor for the mountain homes of the Immortals. Small rocks were highly prized ornaments in the studies of scholar bureaucrats, symbolising the transformational forces of nature.(5) Lee’s scholar rocks are shaped by fire and water when molten bronze is poured and cooled to produce fluid, organic-seeming shapes.

One of the most peaceful rooms in the beautifully designed exhibition spaces contains a series of suspended paper scrolls which have also been altered by exposure to fire and water. The 2011 ‘Conflagrations from the End of Time’ series references the teachings of Buddhist masters who likened the universe to an infinite net. Intricate patterns are created by holes burned in the paper with a soldering iron, casting lacy shadows on the wall behind them. They curl up very slightly at the bottom edge, appearing weightless, shifting very slightly in the slightest movement of the air. They suggest the passage of constellations across night skies. Burnt and stained surfaces reveal the processes of their creation – Lee sometimes left these scrolls of paper outside in the rain and the sun allowing time and natural phenomena to make their marks. They are echoed by more recent works in which mild steel is cut into lacy patterns. These too reflect the teachings of Daoism: they are both material and immaterial, form and void, shadow and substance. 

The Moon in Water

Lindy Lee’s deceptively minimalist works are underpinned by great discipline and knowledge, like the master calligrapher dashing off apparently effortless characters that belie the lifetime of practice. Lee has practised a form of meditation called zazen – sitting meditation – for many years. It was the foundation of Dōgen’s Zen practice; he called it ‘without thinking’, a pathway to freeing oneself from anxiety and confusion.(6) Through her deep immersion in the theory and practice of Zen, following the teachings of this 13th century Japanese monk who brought Zen Buddhism from China to Japan, Lee fused the Australian and Chinese aspects of her identity that had so troubled her when she was young. She is looking both inwards, seeking self-knowledge, and outwards to the natural world – another Zen paradox, perhaps.

The poetic image of the moon reflected in the tiny sphere of a dewdrop was a metaphor for the state of meditation, a kind of effortless/effortful approach to enlightenment through which the individual can perceive the entirety of the universe. Lee’s body of work reveals her search for this desired state of wholeness that she describes as finding ‘one’s true north’.(7)

As Dōgen said of himself watching the moon:

‘Sky above, sky beneath, cloud self, water origin’.(8)

Notes

1. See the text relating to The Silence of Painters (1989) on the website of the Museum of Contemporary Art https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/works/1995.191A-O/ [accessed 10.12.20]
2. Lee began to study Zen Buddhism in 1993, taking Jukai, the formal initiation into Zen Buddhism, in 1994. For more see Jane O’Sullivan, ‘Lindy Lee: The Original and the Copy’, Vault Issue 30, May/July 2020. https://www.sullivanstrumpf.com/assets/Uploads/VAULT-Issue-30-Feature-Lindy-Lee-compressed.pdf [accessed 9.12.20]
3. ‘A Conversation between Elizabeth Ann McGregor and Lindy Lee’, in Lindy Lee Moon in a Dewdrop, exhibition catalogue: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2020. p. 17
4. Julie Ewington, ‘In Praise: Concerning Anne Ferran, Judith Wright and Lindy Lee’, Eyeline 84, 2016, available at https://www.sullivanstrumpf.com/assets/Uploads/Julie-Ferran-Wright-essay-for-Anthology-22-June-2017.pdf
5. For more information see the textual information produced for the exhibition, ‘The World of Scholar’s Rocks: Gardens, Studios and Paintings’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2000/world-of-scholars
6. Yokoi, Yūhō (with Daizen Victoria), Zen Master Dōgen: An Introduction with Selected Writings. New York: Weatherhill Inc., 1976
7. ‘A Conversation between Elizabeth Ann McGregor and Lindy Lee’, in Lindy Lee Moon in a Dewdrop, exhibition catalogue: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2020. p. 21
8. In 1249 Dōgen wrote a poem for his portrait, a painting now known as the ‘Portrait of Dōgen Viewing the Moon’. For more see Kazuaki Tanahashi (ed), Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985. This text has been digitised and is available at https://terebess.hu/zen/dogen/Moon-in-a-dewdrop.pdf

Publication was made possible with the support of the Nguyen Art Foundation

In Ran Dian’s continuing series on going on a walk, we join artist Thinh Nguyen on his current journey across America from Los Angeles to New York, though it involves more driving than walking. We will follow Thinh as he continues on his journey.

all images courtesy the artist

Slab City, California

Moved out of my studio, needing some solitude to work on my addiction, emotional and mental health. Been traveling to see the earthworks that I’ve been wanting to see. So far my journey led me to Slab City Library, an anarchist library with free books for all, founded by the late “Rosalie” now managed by Cornelius Vango – where I came across this insightful book, “Steal Like An Artist” by Austin Kleon. It affirms/confirms my practice, I didn’t know I was/am doing all along…

Michael Heizer, Double Negative, Nevada (near Las Vegas)

Perhaps a Double Negative can make a positive. Such monumental gestures. Yet, this is just one little scratch into the surface of the earth. I feel small and insignificant when I look out into the gandure of the landscape. I am but a single spec of dust in this vastness. I belong to nature, my body belong to nature, nature is nurturing, me. From dust, I will return to dust.

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, Utah

I was lost and couldn’t find them at with the stupid GPS. I just follow my instinct and found it. Was setting up to crash in the Sun Tunnel for the night until I heard coyotes howling, and the freezing howling wind was unbearable. Packed everything and left in pitch dark. Got lost driving around and about in circle. Finally, back to the main highway just in time before the gas ran out…it was magical nevertheless!

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, Utah

I witnessed a miracle today. The sun came out. I asked, I believed, it would come out upon my arrival at my destination and that it’d be shining on my way. It would be a miracle if it does, I said. It did, it did just that. It glowed and glimmered through the stormy sky, brought me warmth and comfort in the snowy landscape.

Approach to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, constructed 1970

“From your end of the table it’s a 6, for others it’s a 9. But when we come to understanding together, it’s a whole new symbol.” Thinh Nguyen, Turning Table, 2020, Acrylic on found dinning table.

Lunar New Year, LA to NYC

I’m yet again on the road. Heading east bound once more, scheming up new projects while pretending everything is normal…nothing is…

Thinh Nguyễn, Dark Moon, 2021

Thinh Nguyen, “Your Glory Days Are Over”, 2021

Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum

I am ever so inspired by Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum. I felt like I am a part of this lineage of art history that uses the everyday, the mundane, to be meaningful (is it art or is it trash? That’s not my job to decide), dating back to ancient Chinese art to Duchamp, Rosenberg [Q. Thinh, do you mean Rauschenberg?], Warhol, Betty Saars (b.1926, Los Angeles), David Hammons (b.1943, Springfield, Illinois), to Danh Võ (b.1975, Vũng Tàu), and numerous more…my choice is not only conceptual but economical ( ‘cus I’m cheap and broke) and environmental (not that I’m saving the environment, there’s just too much stuff already).

Thinh Nguyen

Born in 1984 in Bao An, Vietnam, Thinh Nguyen is an artist, educator, curator, cultural critic, whose works investigate the intersections of cultural values. Utilizing various media, they explores and exposes oppressive sociopolitical power structures within those values. Nguyen has performed and exhibited internationally, most recently at The Mistake Room, The Hammer Museum, REDCAT, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and Contemporary Irish Art Center Los Angeles. Their work has been written about in Artforum, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic and Artillery Magazine.

Thinh Nguyễn

Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’
Galerie Quỳnh (118 Đường Nguyễn Văn Thủ, Đa Kao, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City) Oct. 20­ – Dec.12, 2020

In this fervent age of over-exposure on social media, mystery is a rare commodity. Will Thurman’s solo exhibition presents an intriguing scenario by requesting its visitors to leave their phones sealed and guarded at the reception desk – meaning, no photography is allowed. Prior to arriving at the show, even the name Will Thurman and his work remain an enigma to most. The gallery released zero photos of the artist’s artworks and a casual audience would be hard pressed to find a professional description of his biography anywhere by Googling. Will Thurman is a 31-year-old artist from New York, who has been living in Vietnam’s cities and countryside for 10 years and is fluent in the language. It was his wish that no photography be allowed, ‘to preserve the integrity of the artworks’. This is his first major public exhibition, a culmination of 5 years of intensive painting,

In place of a standard essay, we have this cryptic passage on the gallery’s website:

“Galerie Quynh presents:
An attack on the senses, a spectacular, a word of warning.
A Great Plague
of serene terror
of willed innocence and candied Errors.
Of cows and rats and pigs and pigeons and machines
that fail to gauge us.
and Uncle Huệ.
Things balanced on heads at some given time
but first titles that transmute as poetry or rather erratic
prose
cut-stitched to stifle the glitches of reality
or waking dreams – or live visions?
Whatever crude cacophony
An outside world – the vulgar menace
Plays mental tennis with our inner strength
just for the thrill that weird pleasure
Squandering time (depending on the weather)
Take baby steps since the bridge self-shatters
and the boat self-sinks and the boat self-sinks
And certain drugs don’t require direct administration.
Enter at your peril
And hold fast to stir still.
Through the Door stands a Dream
of the Noon variety.
— (re)arrangement by Thái Hà, words appropriated from Suzanne Brøgger, Adam Gopnik, Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên, Quynh Pham, David Rieff and the artist.”

Installation view (ground floor) of Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’ (image courtesy the artist and Galerie Quynh)

Installation view (ground floor) of Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’ (image courtesy the artist and Galerie Quynh)

Basic questions, naturally, plague one’s mind: who is Will Thurman? Is he (or she) someone famous to have prominent writers such as Adam Gopnik and David Rieff writing about him? I was curious. Truth be told, the ‘no-phone’ request did take me aback for a few seconds – it was the first time Galerie Quỳnh has made such a request in their 17-years in Ho Chi Minh City. My initial bewilderment yielded as a glance through the gallery’s ground floor prompted genuine delight. Stepping through the entrance, occluded by silky grey curtains, one is relieved at the sight – an exhibition of painting, after all! One of the paintings here is titled ‘Through the Door stands a Dream’ (2020).

And yet, the Thurman puzzle did not abate. ‘Curiouser and curiouser!’, I think, looking at the Vietnamese words on many of these paintings. Is this Will Thurman actually Vietnamese? For the manner in which the inscriptions are employed betrays the mind of someone who has been raised and/or living in Vietnam for years, to the extent that their messages connote social observations familiarly dear to a native local.

Installation view (second floor) of Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’ (image courtesy the artist and Galerie Quynh)

For one, their vivid colors definitely gladden one’s eyes and heart – Cy Twombly, Philip Guston, R. B. Kitaj, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning are some of the names referenced in the pages penned by the aforementioned writers about Thurman’s paintings. Their flat pictorial, even artless portrayals of animals and men and hybrid creatures, vehicles and buildings and assembly lines, fetuses and soldiers, blenders and boom box and cameras, Pope and Egyptian deities, among myriad others, in a seemingly ad-hoc manner towards which one’s mind is rather stupefied to make any sense of what it all means, prompted me to hastily refer to the exhibition’s map. In it, the works’ titles reveal themselves to be quite forthright, if not wittily earnest. Consider one: ‘There are men who make people kiss their hand. I’d rather take the chair. And somehow deforestation largely goes unnoticed.’ (2017). Or ‘Pain hurts less when the source is obvious’ (2019), and ‘She thinks one thing, he thinks another. But he’s the one who has to walk home alone at night.’ (2015).

The show’s map also reveals that there are, astoundingly, 103 artworks in total. Whereas the gallery’s mezzanine displays nine thematically white, medium-sized paintings, nothing prepared me for the visual onslaught awaiting in the two rooms on the second floor. The one adjacent to a balcony houses large works of 185 x 200-300 cm, mounted very closely together as if we are looking at one continuous Mexican mural and with their resplendent colors depicting rather strange and surreal imageries. The small back room, on the other hand, contains around 50 paintings of various sizes in salon-style hanging which, effectively, leave you rather speechless by the sheer cacophony of it. All the while, more works are placed on the gallery’s vintage lift area, hallways and ledges on the stairway’s landings. The curation of which was completely entrusted to Quyhn Pham, the gallery founder: ‘Regarding this idea of his five-year output, I did not want to install the show chronologically. I wanted it to reflect this sort of non-linear trajectory of Will’s career’, she says.

Installation view (third floor) of Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’ (image courtesy the artist and Galerie Quynh)

Reverse installation view (third floor) of Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’ (image courtesy the artist and Galerie Quynh)

Not unlike a modern take on Aesop’s fables, was my impression. Case in point, we have works with self-explanatory titles such as ‘Pig in guillotine’ (2019), ‘Pigeon in shackles’ (2019), and ‘Cow in noose’ (2019); though as their names infer, the tales of these creatures in Thurman’s depictions are more akin to Giambattista Basile’s fairytales in nature than Disney’s polished omission of grotesque details. Traces and fragments pulled from the chaotic fabric of reality are ever-present in his seemingly benign, deceptively cheerful images that range from the mundane to the absurd. On ‘Rescue’ (2019) and ‘Fall’ (2018), full quotes from Vietnamese news are recited word for word, reporting deadly accidents involving fishermen and a construction worker respectively. Accompanied by the artist’s loose, almost dreamlike drawings, the gravity of those situations is as downplayed as (if not accentuating) the detached diction employed by newsmen and accordingly, our desensitized reaction to reading them.

While Thurman’s cryptic visuals can pose as a challenge to lightning understanding on the viewer’s part, it is his agile incorporation of the written and the painted in many works that to me, yields an inviting gateway into his acute pathos. On ‘Broken record’ (2017), he muses ‘The wisest choice was leaving – [maybe, now beginning seeing the merits of staying] because what is left behind will remain/lifting heavy things can strain the back.’ At this stage, as you can tell, words and images for this artist are inseparably of equal introspection – the drawings are as wildly imagined, and yet also thoughtfully constructed as their titles and scribbles are concise and biting. I was particularly drawn to ‘Savagery’ (2020), belonging to the previously described ‘white room’, in which the directly translated Vietnamese ‘Man rợ’ takes upper-center stage on a spare yet cutting composition: who knows! a singled-out word surrounded with animal figurines and blotted out contours of dominating, shadowy men can suggest confrontation with [the history of] humankind’s dark nature. ‘Would everything change if these works were altogether left ‘Untitled’?’, I asked myself at some point.

Installation view (third) floor) of Will Thurman ‘Life Paintings, Volume 1: 2015-2020’ (image courtesy the artist and Galerie Quynh)

As somewhat (or initially) confusing, complex and even sensorially convoluted these paintings are, in the end, they truly and effectively bespeak what the exhibition’s title connotes: ‘Life Paintings’, which one can also interpret as ‘painting of/about life’. Now, how can anybody possibly capture the stories and meaning of life in its entirety, lucidly, wholly, truthfully – a perennial quest that every writer, filmmaker, artist, philosopher can relate to and has been striving for? It forever remains revealing yet elusive, perceptible yet layered, quotidian yet holding unsuspected (even uncalled-for or shocking) surprises – whose qualities I believe, are abundantly transparent in Thurman’s works as showcased in this show. One is free and welcomed to leave this show feeling perplexed, beckoning the urge for a revisit. As I stepped out onto the gallery’s balcony on the second floor for some fresh air, the sounds coming off the street suddenly took over – of boys and girls from the secondary school opposite pouring out after class, of motorbike honks and engines reverberating loudly, laughter and chatter echoing up and filling this colorful facet of urban Saigonese landscape – I found myself smiling, ‘Such is life.’

Jointly sponsored by China Arts and Entertainment Group (CAEG) and Evergrande Tourism Group, organized by China International Exhibition Agency (CIEA) and Ocean Flower Island Museum, co-sponsored by the Co-Innovation Art Creation and Research Center on Silk Road of Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), and with academic support from CAFA, the media briefing for “The Tides of the Century – 2020 · Ocean Flower Island International Art Exhibition”, was held at the CAFA Art Museum on December 22.

View of the Media Briefing

Fan Di’an, Chairman of the China Artists Association, President of CAFA and Chairman of the Exhibition Academic Committee, Li Baozong, General Manager of CAEG, Li Denghai, Vice President of Evergrande Tourism Group and General Manager of Ocean Flower Island Company, Euthumios Athanasiadis, Press and Public Diplomacy Counselor at the Embassy of Greece in China, Zhang Zikang, Director of CAFA Art Museum, Liang Anna, Curator of Evergrande Ocean Flower Island Museum, Liu Zhenlin, Director of CIEA, Sui Jianguo, Artist and Academic Committee Representative, and curators including Wang Chunchen and Yue Jieqiong were in presence.

Fan Di’an, Chairman of the China Artists Association, President of CAFA, delivered a speech.

Li Baozong, General Manager of CAEG, delivered a speech.

Li Denghai, Vice President of Evergrande Tourism Group and General Manager of Ocean Flower Island Company, delivered a speech.

As a large modern marine museum built by Evergrande Group with huge investment, the Ocean Flower Island Museum covers an area of about 74,000m₂, including about 23,000m₂ for gross building area. The museum is composed of eight modern buildings. The inauguration ceremony “The Tides of the Century – 2020 · Ocean Flower Island International Art Exhibition” will be started on February 8, 2021, and the opening ceremony and academic activities will be held in May 2021.

More than 140 works of diversified cultural backgrounds, made by over 80 artists from 23 countries including Greece, France, South Korea, Cameroon, USA, Japan, Thailand, Venezuela, Singapore, Iran, Italy, India, UK, Vietnam, and China, will be displayed during the exhibition.

Wang Chunchen, Vice Director of CAFAM and the Main Curator of this Exhibition, introduced the exhibition.

At the critical moment of global fight against COVID-19 pandemic, worldwide artists have actively responded to the invitations from China. The premium works from all over the world gather at Hainan Ocean Flower Island, expressing the unanimous efforts and wishes for helping each other and fighting against the pandemic.

Xu Bing, Background Story: Thousand Li of River and Mountain,  450x932x30cm,  2014  Provided by the artist studio.

Sui Jianguo, Cloud Garden, Handprint #3, Photopolymer 3D Printing and steel frame, dimensions: 700×300×600cm, 2019 Provided by the artist studio.

Zhang Xiaogang, The Drawer of Time, composite materials: cement slabs, electronic industrial screen, color printing photos, etc., dimensions: 300 x 868 cm (variable as per site), 2018 Provided by the artist studio.

The prestigious artists, such as Tony Cragg (UK), Marc Quinn (UK), Xu Bing, Tatsuo Miyajima (Japan), Leandro Erlich (Argentina), and Loris Cecchini (Italy) will display their works, while Gabriel Dawe (Mexico) and Kedgar Volta (Cuba) will make their debuts in China. And Gabriel Dawe (Mexico) will display his brand new “rainbow” work specially made for the exhibition.

Gabriel Dawe, Exhibition View of Rainbow, Courtesy of the Artist.

In addition, the installation created by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot with Danzhou Diaosheng, one of China’s national intangible cultural heritages, as core elements, will provide groundbreaking local tactile experience for audiences. The artists, including Wang Jianwei, Song Dong, Choi Jeong-Hwa (South Korea), Sinta Tantra (Indonesia), and Liu Jiayu will display their new works for the exhibition.

For the “Youth Resident Artists”, six artists, namely Cai Yaling, Yue Yanna, Li Linlin, Hu Qingyan, Tian Xiaolei, and Li Yuanchen, will perform resident creations by focusing on the Ocean Flower Island Museum to express their thoughts on marine environmental protection, life, consumerism, natural environment, etc.

Greece is the guest-of-honor and a main part for the exhibition. The part is planned and designed by Katerina Koskina, a well-known curator. Her concept is based on the theory of Socratic dialectics, namely the cognition changes of things are generated through three stages: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This is both the theoretical basis of Greek philosophic thinking and the origin of modern western philosophy, complying with China’s notion of respecting history and the dialectical thought of keeping pace with the times.

Portrait of Katerina Koskina

The Greek guest-of-honor section for the exhibition has obtained substantial support from the Embassy of Greece in China as well as the confirmation from Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People’s Republic of China. Important works, created by over 30 Greek artists from the 1970s to present, will be displayed during the exhibition. Many of them are collected by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece and have participated in numerous international exhibitions such as Venice Biennale and Kassel Documenta on behalf of Greece.

As the miniature of Greek contemporary art, the exhibition displays the works of the late artist TAKIS, George ZONGOLOPOULOS, Costas VAROTSOS, Aemilia PAPAPHILIPPOU, and Theo TRIANTAFYLLIDIS, the backbone forces of Greek art as well as the latest highlights of Athens Digital Art Festival. Besides displaying the contemporary art development achievements of Greece in a distinctive and multidimensional manner, the exhibition responds to the dialogues between China and Greece as two civilizations.

Aemilia PAPAPHILIPPOU, Chess Continuum

Costas VAROTSOS, Horizons

Marianna STRAPATSAKI, Invisible Places- The Vast White, 2008

George ZONGOLOPOULOS, Tel-Neant, 1997

Theo TRIANTAFYLLIDIA, Nike, 2018

THEODOULOS, Aftofota—Eterofota, 1996

Planned by Yue Jieqiong, Vice Director of Co-Innovation Art Creation and Research Center on Silk Road of Central Academy of Fine Arts, “An Azure Rendez-vous” section has invited the artists from Venezuela, USA, and Austria. The artists will jointly make an installation on the basis of the blue “seawater” installation made by Lu Yuanzheng, a Chinese artist, to present the concept of a Community of Shared Future for Mankind connected by the oceans.

The Ocean Flower Island Museum is located in Danzhou, the final workplace of Su Dongpo, a famous poet in China, as well as the origin of Hainan’s culture. For this purpose, Xu Jialing, a curator at CIEA, has invited the famous Arabian poet Adonis and seven Chinese poets and artists, Lyu De’an, Che Qianzi, Dai Guangyu, He Canbo, Tian Wei, Jia Qiuyu, and Fu Xiaotong to display their paintings and installations for the event themed by “Oriental Poetics” and respond to the historical context of Su Dongpo by demonstrating the evolution and development of oriental poetics in contemporary works.

The “2020 · Ocean Flower Island International Art Exhibition”, previously scheduled for the end of 2020, has been postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Academic Committee and curators, the exhibition title will remain unchanged even it has been postponed.

Georgios Iliopoulos, Ambassador of Greece to China, delivered a speech via the video.

Liu Zhenlin, Director of CIEA, hosted the media briefing.

Leaders of The Art Department of Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China, the Bureau of International Exchange and Cooperation, CAEG and Evergrande Tourism Group, submitted appointment letters to academic committee representatives and curators (Fan Di’an, Zhang Zikang, Wang Chunchen, Sui Jianguo and Yue Jieqiong).

As Chairman of the Academic Committee for “The Tides of the Century – 2020 · Ocean Flower Island International Art Exhibition”, Fan Di’an has invited 10 experts at home and abroad to be the committee members, including Zhang Zikang, Sui Jianguo, Wang Duanting, Zhu Qingsheng, Adrian George, Caitlin Doherty, Paul Gladston, Nanjo Fumio, Chiba Shigeo, and Tatehata Akira. Wang Chunchen, Vice Director of CAFA Art Museum, acts as the main curator; Dr, Katerina Koskina, former Curator of National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece and Culture Counselor of Athens Municipal Government, acts as the curator for the Greek guest-of-honor section; Yue Jieqiong, Vice Director of Co-Innovation Art Creation and Research Center on Silk Road of Central Academy of Fine Arts, and Xu Jialing, a curator at CIEA, are the curators for other sections.

Fan Di’an, Chairman of the China Artists Association, President of CAFA, answered to the reporter’s question.

Li Baozong, General Manager of CAEG, answered to the reporter’s question.

Li Denghai, Vice President of Evergrande Tourism Group and General Manager of Ocean Flower Island Company, answered to the reporter’s question.

Wang Chunchen, Main Curator of this Exhibition, answered to the reporter’s question.

Artist Representative Sui Jianguo answered to the reporter’s question.

About the Exhibition:

Organizational structure:

Academic supporter:

Central Academy of Fine Arts

Sponsors:

China Arts and Entertainment Group, Evergrande Tourism Group

Organizers:

China International Exhibition Agency, Ocean Flower Island Museum

Co-sponsor:

Co-Innovation Art Creation and Research Center on Silk Road of Central Academy of Fine Arts

Chief media supporter:

CAFA ART INFO

Academic Committee:

Chairman: Fan Di’an (President of China Artists Association, President of CAFA)
Members:

Zhang Zikang (Director of CAFA Art Museum)

Sui Jianguo (Professor at CAFA)

Wang Duanting (Director of Foreign Fine Art Research Laboratory, Institute of Fine Arts, Chinese National Academy of Arts)

Zhu Qingsheng (Professor at Peking University)

Adrian George (Associate Director of Exhibitions, ArtScience Museum, Singapore)

Caitlin Doherty (Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville)

Paul Gladston (Professor at University of New South Wales)

Nanjo Fumio (Special Advisor of Mori Art Museum, Japan)

Chiba Shigeo (Researcher, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Professor at Chubu University, Japan)

Tatehata Akira (President of Tama Art University, Curator of Yayoi Kusama Museum)

Organizing Committee Members:

Liu Zhenlin, Liang Anna, Fang Qi, Ma Ruiqing, Hong Ning, Chen Xiangning

Curators:

Chief Producer: Liang Anna

Chief Curator: Wang Chunchen

Greek guest-of-honor curator: Katerina Koskina

Section curators: Yue Jieqiong, Xu Jialing

Exhibition planner: Zhang Jinhao

Guest-of-honor curator assistant: Wang Ying

Exhibition affairs: Liu Wenbin

Operation & maintenance: Zhang Xiujun, Yuan Ye

Public educational activities: Gao Yue, Li Yunyun

Promotion: Zhang Yaowen, Zhu Li, Zhuang Zhuang, Li Tiantian, Yang Yanyuan

Logistics: Liang Yufei, Fan Chuangeng

Assistants: Chen Gengjiang, Chen Siyu, Gong Jian, Huang Lei, Huang Yutao, Jiang He, Li Chaoshi, Liu Yang, Lu Shengqiang, Na Xu, Qiu Yukui, Tang Shunguo, Wang Jianxing, Wang Jingbo, Wang Wanqi, Wang Wenbin, Xue Lijia, Yang Jie, Yang Lai, Zhang Mengyi, Zhang Xinxin, Zhou Bingxue (in alphabetic order)

Open weekdays: 10:00-21:00
Weekends and holidays: 10:00-22:00

Participating artists & architects:

Eric Chen (Taiwan, China)
Laura Boles Faw （Philadelphia, U.S.A）
Asma Kazmi (Berkeley, U.S.A)
Lan Ziyan + LLS | Labland Society (Hangzhou, China)
Masako Miki (Berkeley, U.S.A)
Yang Yong (Shenzhen, China)
Yin Xiuzhen (Beijing, China)
Zhang Xinyi (Beijing, China),
Zhuang Ziyu (Beijing, China)
Atelier Bow-Wow (Tokyo, Japan),
Pablo Laguarda (U.S.A)
David Paul Thompson (U.S.A)

In 2020, the boundaries between public and private space will be rewritten and the boundaries between cities and nature will be briefly broken, forcing us to rethink the line between nature and urban development under modern technological conditions, the interactive balance between the public environment and individual experience, reality and virtual reality, and present and future.

The Coastal Cutural Park, where the Oh Bay Art Project is located, has the open nature of a city park and is a public space that provides memories of the city’s experience. The art project revolves around the concept of “marginality”, with the corresponding exhibition area being located in the environment of ocean and continent, city and nature, and making site-specific interventions. The exhibition is composed of 13 works through which the “marginality” theme runs. With records and responses to the development and changes of the city, different technologies integrate reality and the virtual world, but also create a symbiotic environment for human beings and nature for tomorrow.

The project also rethinks the relationship between human, technological, ecological and urban spaces, exploring the alternating margins of time and space, thereby building an entrance to multiple futures.

Supervisor: Shenzhen Bao’an Municipal People’s Government
Support by: Urban Administration and Law Enforcement Bureau of Shenzhen Bao’an Municipality / OCT Alliance of Planning & Design
Organizers: OCT Shenzhen Western Group \ Hotel Group, Shenzhen OH BAY
Operator: Shangqi Art

Curator: Yang Yong
Assistant Curators: Ji Haoru, Zhang Qiaoyi

Acknowledgements: Abby Chen, Tang Contemporary Art, Tonggallery+projects, Pace Gallery

Directions
Subway: Baohua Station / Bao’an Central Station / Bao’an Station
Bus: Longguang Real Estate Building Station / Baohua MTR Station (1) Station / Xilong Bay West Station / Xilong Bay Station / Bao’an Library (1) Station

Stroll along the city’s waterfront and discover the opening of the “Tomorrow’s Park” – Oh Bay Art Project

On December 6, 2020 the Oh Bay Art Project officially opened the Oh Bay Coastal Cultural Park, the occasion also marking the official opening of the Glow Shenzhen 2020. Oh Bay Coastal Cultural Park joins ocean and mainland, blending the environmental advantages of city and nature blend. The project includes site-specific interventions and exhibitions of works by local and international artists and is sponsored by Shenzhen OCT Western Investment Co., ltd/ OCT Hotel Development Co., ltd, Shenzhen OH BAY, with the Bao’an Municipal People’s Government as guiding authority, supported by the Urban Administration and Law Enforcement Bureau of Shenzhen Municipality, and OCT Alliance of Planning & Design, with curator Yang Yong and the curatorial team.

Attending the opening ceremony were Bao’an District Committee Deputy Secretary, District Director, Wang Lide; Shenzhen Municipal Planning and Natural Resources Bureau Deputy Director, Ding Qiang; Shenzhen Housing and Construction Bureau Deputy Director, Xue Feng; Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Culture, Radio, Television and Tourism Sports Deputy Director, Yang Yongqun; Bao’an District Deputy District Director, Cai Fan; Overseas Chinese Town Holdings Company (OCT Group) Group Party Standing Committee, Deputy General Manager, Ni Zheng;  OCT Group Corporation Chief Planner, OCT Group Innovation Research Institute President, OCT Group Planning and Planning Union President, Xu Chongguang, OCT Group Assistant President Jin Yang, OCT Group Assistant President Liu Guanhua, Shenzhen OCT Western Investment Company \ OCT Hotel Development Company General Manager, Xie Tao, and other guests.

Before the opening, curator Yang Yong led guests on a guided tour of the park. The artworks are placed throughout the park, linking up park views, waterfront corridors, and commercial blocks, and leading to the city landmark “Bay Area Light” Ferris wheel, forming a dynamic art park route.

Guided tour

The special guests also customized the immersive theatrical performance of “The Back Journey” for the art project, using a variety of elements such as environmental drama, performance art, modern dance, collision and exchange with the crowd, leading the audience from east to west on the waterfront, but also opened the Oh Bay Art Project series of activities.

The performance of “The Back Journey” ignited the opening atmosphere

Bao’an District Deputy District Director, Cai Fan, said in his opening speech: “Today 2020 Bao’an International Light and Shadow Art Season Oh Bay Art Project opens, and Bao’an people joined the dream of brilliant light and shadow art, and ushered in a better artistic life. Bao’an has always represented the standard people’s yearning for a better life and the growing material and cultural needs, to create an international and modern space to inject more cultural and artistic atmosphere into urban human life.” Xie Tao, General Manager, said in her opening remarks: “The Overseas Chinese City Shenzhen West Group and Hotel Group continue to uphold the cultural and tourism genes of the Overseas Chinese City, through continuous innovation in culture, art and operation, with art in tandem with nature, to foster the cultural development of the city, and strive to make the Bay Area the new cultural benchmark.”

Xu Chongguang, Chief Planner of Overseas Chinese City Co., Ltd., President of overseas Chinese City Innovation Research Institute, president of the Overseas Chinese City Planning and Planning Alliance, delivered a speech: “Thank you to The Overseas Chinese City Shenzhen West Group and Hotel Group and Happy Valley Group for their full support of the Overseas Chinese City Planning and Planning Alliance Conference, and also thanks to the Oh Bay Art Plan of Shangqi Art Planning, which injected more culture and art atmosphere into the Overseas Chinese City Planning and Planning Alliance Conference. This year, the fourth conference, is not only about cross-border integration of high-end academic platforms, but also an important business platform for the innovation and development of overseas Chinese city.”

Mr. Yang Yong, Curator of the Oh Bay Art Project, said that, “The project invited ten artists and architects to do a lot of research and discussion in Oh Bay. With the city residents’ demand for professional culture and art gradually increasing, with this new coastal cultural park, I hope to bring you a higher standard of public works of art, the calling of art in life.”

At the launch ceremony, the leaders and guests pushed the lever and jointly opened the curtain on the Oh Bay Art Project. After the opening ceremony, the Oh Bay Water Show and Light and Shadow was performance, with sound, light, and water constituting a multi-dimensional scene. Curator Yang Yong also personally selected live music songs, from Bach to Gershwin, spanning more than two hundred years, to create a musical journey for the audience. The whole opening ceremony brought a different face of art and was an audio-visual feast the audience.

Water Show and Light and Shadow Show

Building a city’s “new public space”

This art project attempts to respond to the development and change of the city, so that the Coastal Cultural Park  becomes a rich urban experience, the creation of urban memory of the new public space, thinking about the human, scientific and technological, ecological and urban space relationship possibilities.

For the first time, Chinese contemporary art leader Yin Xiuzhen brought her work “The Conveyor Belt” to Shenzhen, inspired by the “Bay Area Light” Ferris wheel and the airport as a transit station. Make a “circle” in the park similar to the Ferris wheel – a conveyor belt. This “conveyor belt” divides the world into “inside” and “outside”, forming new thinking possibilities in different rotations, taking on the thinking hub of the Internet of Everything, and incorporating visual art and into the thinking path.

David Paul Thompson, “Leaping Fish”

Pablo Laguarda, Partner and President of international architects, David Paul Thompson, and Executive Director of SWA Group, uses lines as inspirational and structural tools, and archetypes of living elements of land and sea, to create clouds, shells, waves, and leaping fish, for four groups of ornamental, structurally aesthetic and practical art structures, in the land and sea, blending city and nature in an urban park to forge a harmonious coexistence between human beings and nature in symbiotic beauty.

Zhang Xinyi, “The Man of the Crowd”

Artist Zhang Xinyi re-creates George Seurat’s most famous painting, “Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte” (1884-1886) (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte) showing the late 19th-century Parisian community on the park’s lawn.

Yang Yong, “Entry Plan”. Yang Yong is also founder of Shangqi Art.

Yang Yong, an artist, curator and founder of Shangqi Art, tried to reshape the everyday space with high-purity colors and minimalist cubes, stimulating the endless possibility of resetting visual language and spiritual space.

To achieve better symbable life between people, nature and city

The Oh Bay Art Project focuses on the use of elements related to new technologies and new media to explore the relationship between new ecology and new space. The intervention of art blurs the boundary between present and future, virtual and reality, balances the relationship between human activities and environmental ecology, and realizes the necessary symbiosis between human beings and nature.

Oh Bay Coastal Cultural Park has a high level of vegetation coverage of the natural landscape, helping exhibitors to create a variety of artistic spaces in the environment.

Eric Chen, “Transmutation”

Eric Chen, an architect from Taiwan, created a cascade of landscapes on the park’s grass to forge a place of co-existence of people and plants.

Zhuang Ziyu, “The Cloud Maze 4.0 – Cloud Atlas”

Architect Zhuang Ziyu’s “The Cloud Maze 4.0 – Cloud Atlas”, a group of maze-shaped works, interacts and blends with the surrounding trees. Visitors can experience their surroundings in this ever-moving space and rethink the relationship between the city and nature.

Laura Boles Faw, “The Long and the Short of Time”

Laura Boles Faw, from the United States, used 3D printing to create a transparent a resin tree stump sculptures similar in form to those in nature, and placed them in the park’s woods. Over time, these stumps will record the mark of urban development.

Asma Kazmi, “Urban Forest”

American multimedia artist Asma Kazmi uses Augmented Reality technology to bring 1700 year’s Indian mango trees to a modern Shenzhen park, combining large metal installations that allow fictional people to meet nature.

Lan Ziyan + LLS | Labland Society, “Day after Day”

Cross-media artists Lan Ziyan + LLS | Labland Society’s created “Day after Day” works, geometric vertical shapes in the imagined future form of oriental sundials. In front of this device, one can feel the fleeting moment of time and ponder its significance to humanity.

Masako Miki, “Shapershifters”

American artist Masako Miki has created a story about Shenzhen’s development, drawing on feathers, peaches, gourds and lotus patterns from traditional Chinese culture. Peaches and gourds symbolize good luck, feathers are derived from the myth and legend of the DaPeng bird, adhering to DaPeng’s moral of openness and inclusion, daring to be a free spirit. Lotus refers to Shenzhen’s achievements as the result of generations looking forward to the future and working hard.

Atelier Bow-Wow, an architect’s firm from Tokyo, Japan, will build a “Wind and Sun Music Pavilion” on the shores of Shenzhen’s Oh Bay, where music lovers can gather to share a musical feast and also be a great place to relax. The work will be presented to the public later in the exhibition.

Yin Xiuzhen, “Converyor Belt”)