Programs & Events
Programs & Events
hearts and arrows by Khan Lee
Public Programming
Khan Lee in Conversation with Amy Kazymerchyk at Centre A
Saturday, July 20, 2013 | 3pm
Admission Free
Please join us on Saturday, July 20, 2013 for a conversation with Khan Lee and Amy Kazymerchyk on Centre A’s current exhibition, hearts and arrows!
Khan and Amy’s conversation began a year ago, when they discussed projecting hearts and arrows onto a floating screen on the Saugeen River in rural Ontario. Transplanting this work to a distinct landscape, economy, and culture brought up questions about the work’s geographic and temporal specificity. One evening in early June, while tracking the coordinates of the setting sun in Crab Park, they acknowledged their mutual attentiveness, attachment, and wonder for living on this land– Coast Salish land–that we call Vancouver. Their conversation at Centre A will begin by reading a series of ‘letters’ written on their reflections, queries, observations, and concerns about the city. Their dialogue following this introduction will loop through thoughts on labour, craft, discipline, human and economic migration and displacement, perception, vision, and light.
Khan Lee was born in Seoul, Korea where he studied architecture at Hong-Ik University, and studied fine art at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. He is a founding member of Vancouver-based artist collective ‘Intermission’ and presently a member of Instant Coffee artist collective. His experiments with form, medium, content, and expression have resulted in performance, sculpture, and media works. Lee lives and works in Vancouver BC, and has exhibited nationally and internationally.
Amy Kazymerchyk is the Curator of Audain Gallery at Simon Fraser University. Previously, she was Events + Exhibitions Coordinator at VIVO Media Arts Centre, and Director of the Signal & Noise Media Arts Festival. Since 2008 she has programmed DIM Cinema at The Cinemtheque.
Khan Lee’s hearts and arrows at Centre A runs until July 27, 2013.
By Jessa Alston-O’Connor
Whether it is through photography, video or performance art, artist Eshan Rafi’s art explores themes of community, family, and the body. Born in Pakistan, Rafi lives on Haudenosaunee and Mississauga of New Credit territory, also known as Toronto, Canada. In 2012, Rafi participated in residencies at the Triangle Arts Association in Brooklyn, NY and at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Their works and performances have been featured in numerous exhibitions in Toronto; Montreal; Brooklyn, NY; and Lahore, Pakistan.
On April 27, Rafi’s performance-based photographic work Skin will be available for auction at the upcoming 14th Annual Fundraising Dinner and Auction for Centre A, the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Founded in 1999, Centre A strives to provide a platform for contemporary Asian art that engages, educates, and stimulates a reflective experience that provokes critical thought. Over the past 14 years they have showcased over 300 artists from across Canada and around the world, and have produced over 80 original projects and exhibitions.
Their* performance-based photography work, Skin, is both unsettling and fascinating, begging the viewer to look closer. The work presents one hand carefully stitched with thread, the other bares the marks left behind after the thread has been removed. The comforting, domestic, and feminized practice of sewing is rendered unsettling with the penetration of the skin and the weaving of thread, and yet it is difficult to look away.
What was the impetus for Skin in particular, how did it come to be?
I was thinking about how the body can be a site of transformation. Our skin is our largest organ, the dividing line between ourselves and others. The literal landscape of the body is a place on which interventions can occur.
I had done some work with sewing on a previous project in which I sewed straight lines through family photographs that had been blown up and printed onto canvas. I became interested in how thread can symbolize continuity and relationships but also disruption.
I had also seen a still from an artist video that had wedged itself into my consciousness, but I completely forgot that that had been an aesthetic starting point until after I had made the piece. What struck me about that work was the utter banality of it. It was playful. But it got into your bones. That is what I want my work to do – get into your bones.
This work builds on larger themes of gender, and the body, can you elaborate on the role that these themes have within your practice?
My lived experience of living between genders informs most of my work. Tied to that is my relationship to my body, and specifically my body as a queer immigrant feminine racialized body.
I have often had discussions about the difficulty of constantly having to explain or justify our existence – asking for basic recognition and respect takes up a lot of of energy. Many of us – trans people, genderqueer people, feminine people, racialized people – would like the world to do their own homework so we can move on with our lives and focus on other things that matter to us. I would like to think that in my work, these experiences show up as fact – they are the underlying framework, the normative facets of my life.
Can you tell us more about your interest in the imprints on the hand left behind by the thread and the ways in which they speak to ideas of memory and location of violence within the body?
Trauma is something all of us carry, and it lives in our bodies. This became apparent to me when I began training in contemporary ballet and hip hop technique in Fall of 2011. I was learning to be aware of being in my body aesthetically and intimately and it was a difficult process. I was also accessing traditional and ancestral healing practices, such as acupuncture and yoga, which taught me that the body is the central story.
Many people in my life navigate chronic illnesses and chronic pain. It was obvious to me that living in a patriarchal, racist, homophobic, ableist colonial structure impacts those most affected by it on a highly visceral level – in the mind but also in the muscles, bones, joints, organs. We have to relearn how to be with ourselves. Skin looks at the process of taking ownership of our bodies and working with them where they are at. Transforming our futures also means honouring (not erasing) our histories.
What current projects and ideas are you working with today?
I am about to embark on a two month trip to Pakistan and have been in talks with VASL, an artist collective in Karachi, about doing a residency with them. I have so many different threads I can pick up. I would like to access dance training while I am there and work on some video pieces. The subject of hair is something I have been playing with in my work for a while and I am curious to explore it more. Hair has been such a battle for me because it is the most easily altered feature of the body and is so intimately tied to gender expression. My recent work in the fall was really about social practice and collaborating with communities and the public. I am also interested in working with my extended family, perhaps doing some portraits. Let’s see what I do next – if I choose to turn inwards or outwards or somewhere in between!
Click HERE for more information on Eshan Rafi
*Please click HERE to learn about they as a gender neutral pronoun
Since moving to North America almost twenty years ago, photographer Surendra Lawoti’s work has focused on the dynamics of such social issues as class, race, religion, in particular as they relate to immigration, marginalized communities and transnational experiences. Born in Nepal, he now lives and creates in Toronto. He received his BA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago (1999) and MFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2005) in Boston. Lawoti has exhibited his photography nationally and internationally, and his work is included in Bank of America Collection (formerly the LaSalle Bank Collection), Citibank Corporate Art Program, Ruttenberg Collection, and other private collections.
His most recent major body of work, a series titled ‘Landscape in Transformation: The Kathmandu Project’ investigates the changing social and political climate in Kathmandu, Nepal, and focuses on the people and communities of this changing city in his home country. One work from the series, Sabita Poudel’s Bible, Banshighat, one of fourteen squatter settlements along the banks of Bagmati River, will be available for auction at the upcoming 14th Annual Fundraising Dinner and Auction for Centre A, the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Vancouver on April 27, 2013. Founded in 1999, Centre A strives to provide a platform for contemporary Asian art that engages, educates, and stimulates a reflective experience that provokes critical thought. Over the past 14 years, they have showcased over 300 artists from across Canada and around the world, and have produced over 80 original projects and exhibitions.
Where did the idea for this piece, together with the larger desire to travel to and photograph Kathmandu, stem from?
I was born and raised in Nepal. As a young adult, I came to North America to pursue University studies. After finishing up my studies, I decided to stick around, as I liked it here. But after eighteen years in North America, Nepal is still home, which I find it quite incredibly fascinating. In many ways, my current work is about this transnationalistic experience: my life between North America and Nepal and the occupation of multiple places simultaneously. As Nepal is important to me, I have always wanted to do a project based in Nepal. And now Nepal is at an interesting juncture, socially, politically and culturally. So I decided to focus on Kathmandu for my new work.
This specific body of work is influenced by Robert Frank’s The Americans. It is a seminal work in the history of photography. As Frank did, I want to use the social and political vernacular of Kathmandu to weave together pictures of quite disparate and complicated, but intertwined ideas. I came up with the idea of using Bagmati River, which runs through the Kathmandu Valley to thread together the diverse set of images of landscapes, portraits and interiors. I was also interested in fourteen settlements along the banks of Bagmati River for a few reasons. First the settlements spoke to the idea of displacement of Nepali during the recent Maoist insurgency. Second, the settlements juxtaposed with newly constructed and mushrooming housing developments of Kathmandu would address the socioeconomic disparity.
What is the story about this work (Sabita Poudel’s Bible) in particular? How does this series build on some of the ongoing themes within your practice?
I visited a few of the settlements and connected with a few of the families. Sabita Poudel is a young woman who lives in Banshighat with her parents and her younger brother. Her family runs a small mom-and-pop store in the settlement. Sabita’s family is Hindu, but she converted to Christianity a few years ago when she fell seriously ill.
The image of Sabita Poudel’s Bible is quite introspective. And all my works are quite introspective in nature. The introspection is about longing and belonging to a space and a place. My earlier work was about the immigration experience and now the work is about transnational experience.
I start off the series with two images of B?ghdw?r in the Shivapuri hill in Northern edge of Kathmandu Valley. The headwater of Bagmati River is located in B?ghdw?r. Etymologically; Shivapuri is made up of two words ‘Shiva’ and ‘puri’. Shiva, as in the one of the five powerful Hindu deities. Puri in Sanskrit means abode. So Shivapuri means the abode of Lord Shiva and his wife Parbati. According to the legend, once Shiva laughed feverishly and some of his saliva from his open mouth touched the ground and the Bagmati River sprouted out from the earth. So this series starts with a Hindu mystic, referring to Nepal that was constitutionally declared a Hindu state until 2006. In 2006, Nepal was declared secular giving much yearned for freedom to many religious minorities. So with Sabita Poduels’ Bible juxtaposed with the two images of B?ghdw?r, there is a subtle juxtaposition of the old Nepal and the New Nepal. To me this image is about Sabita Poudel and the New Nepal that so many Nepalis are aspiring for.
There is a quiet, cool ambiance in this work and other photographs in this series. How do you approach your photography practice, what principles do you explore as you compose and create images?
I use a 4×5 view camera and work with colour negatives. So the camera is quite bulky, on a tripod and I am shooting sheet film, one shot at a time. So it is not like I am snapping away with a digital point and shoot. Hence the whole process of making a photograph is quite considered, collaborative and time consuming. I am very much interested in social issues, politics, documentary and beauty. I want my work to be embedded in the social and political issues of Nepal. There are already too many pretty pictures of mountains and temples of Nepal in the West, and I don’t need to add anything to it. Aesthetics is also important to me. I want the aesthetics to play an important part in the content and meaning of the work. I want the aesthetics to feel personal and not didactic.
What current projects and ideas are you working with today?
I made two visits to Kathmandu in 2012. Right now I am looking at the work, editing and printing them. It’s going to be a long-term body of work. So now, I have to figure out how to fund my next trip to Nepal in July and August of 2013. Besides that, I am working on a project commissioned by Toronto Regional Conservation Authority and Harbourfront Centre. It is called Nine Rivers City and looks at the nine river watersheds of Toronto including Rouge, Don and Humber. I am photographing people’s deep relationship with the Rouge River. The work will be exhibited with five other photographers’ work as an outdoor installation at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto in June, and it will be up for a year.
Click HERE for more information on Surendra Lawoti
By Jorma Kujala
This week two free walking tours of the historic BC Electric Railway building, home of Centre A, takes place on Friday, September 28 and Saturday, September 29 from 2-3 pm.
This 1912 building was constructed at a time when the BC Electric Railway Company operated the most extensive interurban (or intercity electric railway) system in Canada, moving people and freight as far as Chilliwack. The six storey Second Empire Renaissance style structure must have been a crowning achievement for the BCER, as the journal, The Architect, Builder and Engineer wrote, “The interior fittings of the building are in thorough keeping with the magnificent appearance of the block. The wood finish throughout is oak, and many of the offices are panelled to the picture mouldings in mahogany or oak.” This depot was a hub for Vancouver’s growing streetcar and train services, with streetcars entering the building through the large arched windows and trains entering from a large square-shaped opening on Hastings Street.
Street railways, which had been operating in the area since 1890, had an enormous impact on the Lower Mainland, opening up large areas of undeveloped land for housing and enabling people to live at a distance from their employment. The BCER depot, which also housed 300 workers, was the largest employer in Vancouver’s downtown area, and the influx of potential customers attracted many service businesses to the neighbourhood.
The glory days of the interurban, however, would not last. By the end of the1930s, the popularity of streetcars was starting to decline, as commuters preferred the comfort and convenience of their own cars. Additionally, the need for major infrastructure upgrades to an ageing streetcar system pre-destined motorized transport as the way of the future, and the entire transit system converted “from rails to rubber,” from streetcars to rubber-tired buses. In 1948, conversion to trolley buses began, with the last streetcar in Vancouver making its final run in 1955, and in 1958, the last of the interurban services finished up in Steveston. When streetcars were replaced by trolley buses and the B.C. Electric (now B.C. Hydro) moved to Burrard Street, the BCER depot underwent renovations, and the ground floor (now the home of Centre A) was closed in for a bank.
Come explore the history of our building! Please reserve your spot for one of these free docent-led tours by sending an e-mail with your specified date to [email protected].
By Jessa Alston-O’Connor
In Fire/Fire, the works of contemporary artists Marina Roy and Abbas Akhavan draw from 19th century Japanese Ukiyo-e prints of Kawabata Kyosai and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, grounding them in the context of today’s Vancouver through animation, site-specific installation and aquatic-life in the gallery.
The tradition of Ukiyo-e prints (translated to mean “pictures of the floating or sorrowful world”) dates back to the 17th century, depicting the fantastical and the fashionable of everyday life in the pleasure and theatre district of the capital city of Edo (a city rebuilt following a great fire). The 19th century saw Kyosai and Yoshitoshi create Ukioy-e prints; methods of preserving Japanese cultural practices and spiritual beliefs during an era of growing industrialization and Westernization in Japan – a warning or concern for the future. Today, a century since these prints were made, the works by Roy and Akhavan echo those future concerns: environmental destruction and gentrification of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Kyosai and Yoshitoshi’s prints were created 100 years ago, and according to Japanese folklore, household objects come alive and self-aware (y?kai) after 100 years; prints depicting spirits and ghosts that symbolize human relationships to the environment. One-hundred is a prevalent theme in Fire/Fire. Exactly 100 years ago, the BC Electric Railway building, where Centre A currently resides, was once a bank and streetcar hub for the growing city of Vancouver.
The exhibition space is sparse, two lone chairs before Roy’s video animation, mesmerizes the viewer into a 20-minute dream sequence of images inspired by her research of Ukiyo-e prints, image archives, and environmental issues. Two gurgling water tanks feature live sea creatures: urchins, sea anemones, snails and catfish, further emphasizing the ecological themes of the video’s work. Original prints by Ukiyo-e artists Kyosai and Yoshitoshi are displayed along side the gallery. Akhavan’s work explores the building itself; the shifting and cracking of the floor over time is highlighted by the fills of gold-leaf. While plywood planks over every door and window allude to post natural disasters, it’s set against an outdoor sound installation of natative bird calls.
Today, Roy and Akhavan wonder what we have done to our environment and city in this time? Where will we go from here? I sat down with Roy to answer these questions.
Jessa Alston-O’Connor: How did this exhibition take shape?
Marina Roy: Curator Andrea Pinheiro first approached me after having seen my animation and was interested in exploring these Ukiyo-e prints. I thought Akhavan would be good to bring in due to our similar interest in gentrification, ecological disasters, and distain for consumption. At first I was anxious about working with the prints, and concerned about cultural appropriation, as I am not Japanese. But with a post-identitarian idea in mind, one space affects another like an earthquake does. While these prints were created in order to preserve culture, I am interested in the shifting, opening, and deterritorialization of what the prints could mean, and the influence of Japanese prints on the West – bringing these prints into a contemporary situation. I was fascinated with the nature I saw represented in the prints and worked with ideas of human contamination in this video. I filmed oil on water as segments in the video; interested in how it spread perfectly symmetrically as though it were alive. I’m fascinated with the idea of matter being intelligent. We look at the world like we are subjects and the world is objects, but it has influence on us too. Oil is also a big topic in the news now with pipeline projects, and exploring oil flows was already something I have been doing.
JAO: Can you elaborate more about your video “One Hundred Years Later?”
MR: I researched Ukiyo-e prints in archives, selecting images that resonated with me, then removed the figures or elements to then insert my own elements and characters. I compiled thousands of images in order to create this animation. Like the 100-eye monster or the long-nosed people are rooted in Japanese prints, other are conglomerates of environmental concerns like oil, or images from past works I have made that have become my vocabulary throughout my practice. Some scenes are intentionally disturbing or gross, like the penis-headed figure I created that causes an oil spill, while other images like the farting war is taken from a Japanese print. Some images are from my childhood fascination with Big Foot, images I have seen in the media, or questions of animals migrating into the world of humans, and together they are collaged with the Ukiyo-e images – like layered images from dreams. When one spends so much time looking at images, they become part of you, part of an internal world. This video is not literal art, but a non-linear visual language, you will get a feeling, a sense of the main ideas while watching the work.
JAO: How did you and Abbas begin collaborating?
MR: We met while we were both in Victoria, working together on projects in order to keep the discussions going and [we] kept in touch. We did my first video work together and then another that looked at Victoria as a tourist site, where space is highly regulated. This brought together ideas of landscape and enclosure, questions of conquered land, of what Victoria stood for, and of how the city was portrayed. Abbas took this idea of landscape further by creating a hedge barrier in the gallery that made viewing my work difficult. He often responds to my work in this way when we collaborate, creating barriers to access the work, making the visible the invisible, disciplinary structures that control access to lands. It is a bit different here in the Downtown Eastside with building that are already boarded up, some of the best ones are deteriorating.
JAO: What directions did the exhibition take?
MR: We started with the prints, then expanded to investigate questions of environmental collapse, how cities are constructed, and urban planning as they relate to the scenes in the Ukiyo-e prints, the DTES, and the history of this building where Centre A is today. Both of us were a bit nervous about the Ukiyo-e prints, and didn’t want to be confined while working with them. Instead we wanted to reference contemporary issues too, with loose reference to the Ukiyo-e prints. The city of Edo, for instance, during the 17th century after the great fire was reconstructed to create a pleasure district. We were interested in how the DTES has become something of a pleasure district for artists; a strange entertainment district is growing here with shops, bars, and restaurants. Time passing is often key to my work. The Shinto, “We are beholden to our history, what has come before us,” resonates with me. One-hundred years [since the Ukiyo-e prints were made, since this building was a bank] is a lifetime, and a lot can be forgotten. We could have cleaned up some of the environmental issues over the years, but problems are so big now and it’s only been a century. The environment has an effect on us and ultimately, we must ask how we can sustain ourselves as a species. Are we in denial as a society because we are afraid we have no ability to solve it?
by Jessa Alston O’Conner
As Yellow Signal exhibitions continue across Vancouver over the next several months, it is worth exploring more about the origins for this city-wide project that date back 15 years. In 1998, Jiangnan: Modern and Contemporary Art from South of the Yanzi River was a major exhibition series across Vancouver on a scale not before seen outside of China. In his talk at Centre A in March, curator Zheng Shengtian spoke about origins of Jiangnan and how that series opened doors for Yellow Signal today.
Zheng explains in his curator’s talk that in 1997, Hank Bull (co-founder of Centre A) travelled to China where he visited Shanghai and other cities in the Yangzi River delta region, also known as Jiangnan. Returning to Vancouver with great enthusiasm, he began to generate community interest in bringing Chinese art to Vancouver with a desire to introduce these artists and their works to new audiences. Meetings were held, but no one dreamed that it would grow to become city-wide, but also one of the biggest exhibition projects ever undertaken in the greater Vancouver area.
Jiangnan began in 1998 at the Vancouver Art Gallery with Pan Tianshou’s first exhibition ever in North America. 12 other exhibitions followed, in almost every venue in Vancouver including non-profit centers like Western Front, Access Gallery the Contemporary Art Gallery, Artspeak, Grunt Gallery, Presentation House, and also in private galleries. It was a major series of exhibitions that brought more than 24 Chinese artists to Vancouver. Jiangnan came to a close with a symposium that included major scholars from around world.
The Chinese name for the Yangzi River is Chiang Jiang, ‘the Great River’. Jiangnan means “South of the River” and is a region that includes Hangzhou, Suzhou and Nanjing, and the metropolis of Shanghai.
This area is lush, supplying food, silk, tea and ceramics to northern China. At times, it was the location of the nation’s capitals, and during end of the Northern Song Dynasty in 1127, it was home to many of the scholars and artists of China. With the Republican Revolution and the end of Qin Dynasty in 1911, the role of art changed with the time. Instead of serving elite and Imperial interests, the art schools that opened in Shanghai and Hangzhou were more openly accessible, and modern artists from these regions began to study not only traditional art forms, but also Western and international media and art trends, including the avant garde. Yet under General Mao, Social Realism was adopted as the only officially accepted artistic style. This curtailing of artistic self-determination ended with his death in 1976 and by the 1980s, the region once again rose as a prominent creative center in China.
China is diverse country, and Jiangnan has been a center of artistic production since at least the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279). Some artists continue in traditional practices of painting, and others breaking from it, re inventing tradition with new media. Jiangnan sought to reflect this diversity of artists and perspectives. Some of the artists selected were part of the artistic community that were exiled from China after the catastrophe at Tiananmen in 1989, and other artists were practicing within China. After the artistic style of Social Realism being the sole genre enforced for so many decades, the artistic exploration of personal, self-expression and abstraction became a highly politicized act. The works in Jiangnan demonstrated how contemporary artists in China were not only working in the transitional period in the late 90s, but also in a time when transnational networks of economy, culture, crime and communication were interconnected. Jiangnan was about artistic concerns that mattered globally, not just to artists in China. Some artists drew from traditional Chinese art forms and themes, while others created works that stemmed from universal experiences devoid of Chinese signifiers, relating to global audiences.
The works exhibited as part of Jiangnan brought together a variety of the subject matter, media, and perspectives that were characteristic of Chinese contemporary art in the late 1990s. Many artists synthesized traditional art forms and subject, but did so in a contemporary way in order to bring these art forms in to the 20th century. Media including fibers, silk worms, video and performance were exhibited in conjunction with contemporary expressions of traditional calligraphy and landscape painting. The works explored themes of migration, love/birth, the power of the Western art world, the construction of social control, modernist and Dadaist influences, urbanism in Shanghai and Vancouver, sexuality, and both written and spoken language. Several artists played major roles in modern and contemporary art movements in China over the past few decades: Qiu Ti and Pang Tao were important for abstract modernism in China in the 1950s, and Huang Yongping was the founder of the Xianem Dada, one of the leading grounds in avant garde art in China in the 1980s.
Zheng recalled in his talk how the president of the Chinese Academy of Art then told him how impressed he was by Vancouver audience’s reception to Chinese art. He said he had never seen a positive response on such a scale in other countries he had been to, and he felt that this series in Vancouver was one of the largest of this kind.
Sheng explained the significance of Jiangnan because of its historical relation to Yellow Signal. Even after a decade has passed the tradition continues. Last year, when Centre A invited Sheng to curate a show of contemporary Chinese art, they soon drew the same kind of positive response from other venues who all wanted to participate, remembering the success of Jiangnan. And so, what began with one single exhibition at Centre A has now grown to an exhibition series with 7 galleries and venues involved. Yesterday one more venue has joined the list: a film screen about Ai Wei Wei has now slated for the Vancouver Art Gallery, bringing the series to 8 shows.
Sheng expressed how pleased he has been to see such a reaction from other venues, curators, colleagues, the general public to the idea of bringing more artists to Vancouver so that we can understand a bigger picture of contemporary Chinese art and at what stage it is at now. The reason for Yellow Signal’s focus on new media art is a correlation that Zheng drew: Vancouver being an art centre that emphasizes photography and video, and with a long history of high quality production artists like Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, He could see that in the past Chinese artists learned alot from these Vancouver artists, while now Chinese media work has developed rapidly at an impressive rate. Yellow Signal generates the same kind of excitement in Vancouver that Jiangnan did 20 years ago, bringing these fresh, innovative works by contemporary Chinese artists here for our audiences once again.
By: Rachel Ozerkevich
Kan Xuan is one of the artists featured in Centre A’s current Exhibition, Yellow Signal: New Media in China. Xuan is a contemporary female artist working in a still male-dominated field, and her participation in the exhibition provides us with an exciting insight into her unique creative process and film projects. Currently on display in the gallery space are two of her poignant and humorous video pieces: One by One (2005) and Nothing! (2002). Through Xuan’s work, we are given brief glimpses into her exploration of the nature of image making and the possible failures of artistic representation.
Simply put, much of Xuan’s work explores the relationship between life and the world that surrounds us. Her videos are brief and simple, yet they allude to a deeper sense of spiritualism. The influence of Zen spirituality is often evident in her work. She has explored economics and politics as well: in her 2007 piece Island (2 yuan/1 Pound/1 Euro/1 Dollar), she depicted coins from various international currencies resting against objects. The piece was a reflection on the “vast economic and political changes that have affected every aspect of society” (Hou Hanru, “Paradigm Shifts”). Xuan’s seemingly simple footage and rough aesthetics forces the viewer to consider simple and often easily overlooked issues that bare significances in everyday life.
The Guangzhou Biennale catalogue of 2010 describes Xuan’s work as an exploration of the “cognitive dissonance between the seen and the known, between representation and reality”. This “dissonance” that the viewer experiences is precisely the point. For Xuan, the nature of image making—itself inherently problematic and full of inconsistencies—is a central aspect of her work. In an environment as politically charged and full of contradictions as modern-day China, her work is remarkable for its simplicity and honesty.
Xuan’s work plays an important role in Yellow Signal. The exhibition according to the curator and one of Centre A’s founding members Zheng Shengtian, is “a metaphor for the communal state of ambiguity in Asian countries…(it is) about limitation and possibility, choice and chance, confusion and self-confidence, feelings that many Asian artists experience, but that artists everywhere may also relate to in their creative practice”. Xuan’s work conveys these issues of ambiguity, dissonance and duality in a simple and universally relatable way.
One by One is a single channel video filmed with a rotating camera. The video captures a group of security guards under the sun in an unidentified urban setting. The spinning of the camera varies in speed, ranging from slow and steady to almost frantic. The result of immersing oneself in the projection room is varying degrees of dizziness. The camera jerks to a stop periodically to focus on aspects of the guards’ uniforms. The guards do not speak, though the viewer gets a sense of their environment from the sounds of the city: the birds, construction, pedestrians walking, car alarms, etc. The direct sunlight on the uniforms gives the scene a feeling of warmth. In short, the setting feels recognizable, normal and everyday.
The guards’ uniforms seem somewhat sinister. Since the viewer never sees anything above or below the lapel of the uniforms, the guards are faceless and dehumanized. One could easily overlook the fact that the guards are human if it weren’t for faint signs of movement and breath. The guards are interchangeable and seemingly permanent aspects of their environment. Many questions are invoked by experiencing this piece: who are these guards, and how are they interacting with their immediate surroundings? Since the uniformed torsos almost span the entire screen, they seem to define the surroundings, as they are the only beings visible. Do they control the environment? They certainly police it successfully by grabbing our immediate attention and making us dizzy.
One by One is very much indicative of Xuan’s desire to express a more direct understanding of life and illuminate commonly overlooked feelings of the everyday. The piece presents the mundane in an active and dizzying way. After mere seconds of viewing, one is overcome with the desire to see more of a recognizable urban scene. Even though we think we know what’s beyond the uniforms, we very much want to see for ourselves. The viewer is highly aware of having his or her gaze controlled and policed.
Nothing!, Xuan’s other work on display, is also a single channel video. In her brief description of the piece, she writes: “searching for it, crazy about it, and troubled by it, but ultimately, as we often see, there’s ‘nothing’”. The viewer is presented with shaky, frantic shots of the ground, leaves, holes and cracks in concrete and stone. Here, there are bugs, garbage and other debris. The narrating voice, distorted and manipulated to sound high-pitched and vaguely foreign, is clearly looking for something in a satirical and perhaps sarcastic way. The voice exclaims things like “Oh wow! Jeez! Jesus! Aaah! Shit! Ohhh!”. These exclamations are always followed by “Nothing!”
The result is a frenzied, hyperactive and very humorous look at the mundane, at the “nothing” that hides on the streets, in old concrete and in spaces that only insects inhabit. Really, there is always “something” in these spaces. The exclamation “nothing!” seems to belittle and discount the existence of what actually lies in these overlooked cracks. The implication is that bugs, garbage, rotting fruit and bizarre rock formations aren’t actually anything. The excited exclamations of “nothing!” suggest that this is exactly what the voice has been looking for. The mundane is made to be exciting, busy, blurred and worth commenting on. It’s everywhere! Go find it! This is what the voice seems to urge in its sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek way.
Nothing! seeks to explore the somewhat pointless nature of life for creatures who live close to the ground and who spend their energy following scents and trails. However, it invokes much more than pointlessness. The video’s humour and simplicity seem to urge the viewer to slow down and notice the seemingly insignificant, and often silly, aspects of everyday life. Both videos currently on display articulate this theme of the everyday presented under an inquisitive new lens.
Xuan’s participation in Yellow Signal is a unique opportunity to become acquainted with an important and noteworthy artist defying genre and subject matter boundaries in a politically charged climate. Her work is humorous and thought provoking. Her seemingly simple imagery makes for engaging experience that is in reality anything but simple. One comes away from viewing a Xuan video with a renewed curiosity, and perhaps even a criticality, for life’s little details.
