Albert Van Der Weide, artist in residence at the CEAC, Art College of the Xiamen University, lives in the Netherlands. Since 1977 he makes drawings, paintings, sculptures and is doing performances or projects. His work was on show in museums and galleries in Europe and the USA. His exhibition in the program of the CEAC is the first presentation of his work in China.

The project of the artist in Xiamen has been inspired by what he saw of daily life in the city of Xiamen. Just by looking around at the behavior of the people and meeting the people, the mobility, the building and urban planning, the food and drinks, the trees, stones and water. These observations were recorded in notes, drawings and photos. Three art works are the outcome of it and these works will be exhibited in the CEAC.

Above the front door of the CEAC he placed characters in bronze with the sentence: “All power (in Chinese translation : force) to the arts”. With this he wants to make clear that he sees art as the domain of imagination, innovation and freedom.

For this installation on the floor with the title “Chinese Blue”, he collected more than 50 different utensils, in which one can put water, as there are: buckets, pans, vases, bowls, tanks, glasses and water pitchers. He painted these objects blue on the inside. The kind of blue that one can see often in Xiamen on the roofs, fences, taxis, and in the advertisements on billboards. He refers with this blue also to the water and the sea, what are important sources of life. His floor installation in the CEAC will be the connection between the outside and the inside. During the opening of the exhibition objects will be filled with water in a kind of ritual.

In the exhibition space he will show 50 photographic prints of drawings and texts with the size 100 x 150 cm and the title “With & For” Xiamen. The artist asked 50 inhabitants of Xiamen, what they thought was the most important thing in their lives. He made these texts part of the drawings, that he specially made for it. He used in these drawings his observations of what he had seen in Xiamen. In the drawings with the texts two cultures will come together. The culture of 50 inhabitants of Xiamen by way of the texts in their own language and on the other hand the culture of the artist who has his roots in Europe. “With & for” deals with difference as well as with what binds us.

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