2002 – CEAC

Civilized Special Zone

root — Fri, 29 Nov 2002 08:28:46 +0000

Opening

November 29 at 5 PM, 2002

Duration

November 29, 2002

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Matthew Monahan and Lara Schnitger

The Chinese European Art Center is proud to present “Civilized Special Zone”, an exhibition by Matthew Monahan (USA) and Lara Schnitger (NL), featuring works made in China during their two month residency in Xiamen. Widely exhibited in Europe and America Monahan and Schniger’s new work bares the influence of their recent experience in China, especially the constructive (and de3structive) energy of China’s drive to modernisation.

Schnitger also particepated in this year’s Shanghai Bienalle, where she addrdssed the theme of “Urban Creation” with a monumental textile sculpture. Her installation mimics the imagery and signage of comstruction zones, city slogans,and pedestrian instructions.For “Civilized Special Zone” at the Chinese European Art Center, Schnitger and Monahan extends the theme into a playful maze-like structure, that combines sculpture, drawings and installation. Schnitger will present an imposing sculpture that fuses traditional and modern Chinese fashion textiles, into a rebellious hybrid of history, genres and artforms.

Monahan will exhibit a complex series of “blueprint” drawings. Produced with his own monoprint technique of folded carbon paper and rice paper, the drawings depict a wide range of imaginary places, human formations, and ornamental structures. The factuality of the bluprint format combines with the
intricatedly hand drawn in a strangly serious cartoon world:
endless cities, walls, parks and gardens, armies, and raw materials,
appear and dissappear in a kaledescopic procession of linear designs.

The “Civilized Special Zone” invites the viewer into virtual contruction
of art and architecture , where neither fact or fiction has the upper hand.

Gallery

This is me

root — Sun, 03 Nov 2002 07:55:09 +0000

Opening

November 8 at 5 PM, 2002

Duration

November 8 till 24, 2002

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Huang Yan

Kan Xuan

In her second exhibition at the Chinese European Art Center The Chinese Artist Kan Xuan, will present new video works primarily made in Holland since January of this year.

Kan Xuan has been working at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, a two years program with an international approach to the visual arts. Becoming more experimental in her works, Kan Xuan is trying to make close relationship between the human body and objects of daily life. She is an artist who likes to uses her own body to feel or to touched by objects surrounding her, and this reaction between individual and object creates a unique story for the viewer, beyond our habits of feeling or seeing.

The body is also central to the paintings of Huang Yan. Live nude models and even dead preserved animals are not the subjects of his work, they are the canvases itself on which he paints traditional Chinese landscapes. Is the body more alive than the trad tion of painting, or just the opposite? Whatever it is, Huang Yan brings us a new vision of beauty. The viewer will have no difficulty imagining the experience of being painted on. After the work is finished the image is washed off, but a clear and strong contradiction remains, as traditional skil and image are transformed, on the human body.

Gallery

Rendezvous at Xiamen

root — Thu, 03 Oct 2002 07:41:48 +0000

Opening

October 2 at 5 PM, 2002

Duration

October 2, 2002

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Group exhibition

On October 2, 4 p.m. the exhibit on Rendezvous at Xiamen opens at the Chinese European Art Center. This is an exhibtion of works made by 28 artists from 14 countries(China, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium, Cameroon, Spain, Croatia, Serbia, Mexico, Japan, South-Africa, Ireland and the United States). Young artists from those foreign countries meet here in Xiamen and exchange ideas with 8 young artists from China and exhibit their works together with them. The foreign artists are at this moment staying in Xiamen, all of them come from the same institution in Amsterdam, called Rijksakademie. The Rijks akademie is not a school but an interational working space for 60 young artists, who are accepted for a
two-year working period after a strong selection. During their working period they have the possibility to concentrate on production, reflection and experiments under the best possible circumstances.

The works at the exhibition are very diverse, and one can see video works, drawings, paintings, installations, soundworks, performances, photoworks, and even a wedding is exposed as a work of art in the exhibition.

Chinese artists in the exhibition are: Yang Zhen zhong, Xu Zhen, Liang Yue, Liao Jia ping, Shen Hong cai, Lin Meiya, Tang Nan’nan, Gu Yue.
Rijksakademie artists in the exhibition: Bas Louter, Paulina Olowska, Stani Michiels,
Arther Kleinjan, Goddy Leye, Jesus Palomino, Ana Kadoic, Aam solleveld, Dieuw kespans,
Agnes Geoffray, Erick Beltran, Ivan Grubanov, Dirk Kome, Covinda Mens, Chikako Watanabe,
Adam Leech, Mark Kent, Sanja Medie, James Beckett and Gregg Smith.

Gallery

Curious Yellow

root — Mon, 02 Sep 2002 14:50:43 +0000

Opening

September 6 at 5 PM, 2002

Duration

September 6, 2002

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Jennifer Tee & Jonas Ohlsson

Jennifer Tee & Jonas Ohlsson both use various media for their work such as sculpture, video, music, performance and drawing. Both artists have a very open and lose working methods, thus creating a vibrant atmosphere.

Jennifer Tee creates her own mythological stories, a small cosmos in every new exhibition. She adds a new part to this ongoing narrative. In a world constantly changing, she finds it important to tell her own truths. By doing so she is looking for underlying links between herself, history and people all over the world. In Chinese European Art Center she shows two of her latest videos “The Land of To verk nal” features the artist in Brazil, where she learns from an African Brazilian Shaman that in order to follow a mystical path, you have to go deeper and deeper in an unknown truth, in order to do so, you have to make ritualistic offers. Another video “Stualmuur 5: 30” shows five Mongolian throat singers sitting on a nice landscape sculpture made by Jennifer, the start singing their deep sound at dawn(5:30am) untill the sun appears! The songs praise the beauty of the spiritual mountain and its surroundings and recall the times of their mighty leader Genghis Kahn.

Jonas saying something about art:
Let’s say you want to speak to people. There are different ways of doing it:
1. In London, you have the Speakers’Corner in Hyde Park, a small corner in the park where people can standup(usually on a small box) and speak what is on their mind.
That is one way. That is one podium.
2. In Nurberg, Hitler filled a big stadium, with thousands of soldiers matching, light shining, cool flags waving, and manly-macho speeches.
That is another way, another podium built to get a message across.
3. My installations are also podiums, built by me to suit my message. On my podiums, I can talk about what I need to talk about. For example, which parts I like on girls’bodies, The Israeli occupation of Palestine; What I love and hate in the art world; whatever enters my brain.

In Xiamen, people seem to think that art is painting. That is wrong. Art can be painting, but it is
bigger than that. It is bigger than us, than time and place. Like Tao, art is a force with nobody.
Art is a gift to the human race, from the human race. Artists try to give art a body, best we can,
but try is all we can do. If this seems vague to you, I am afraid art will not let me be more specific with outlying.

Here are two tips to becoming artists:
1. Speak what is truly on your mind and form will follow. That is to say, speak
what is truly on your mind and you don’t have to worry about esthetics, etc.
2. Sacrifice excessive skills on the altar of joyful discoveries. Do not focus
on skills too much, or you will lose the fun of having new ideas.

Gallery

EGO-New Nordic Art

root — Thu, 02 May 2002 14:21:55 +0000

Opening

May 17 at 5 PM, 2002

Duration

May 17 till June 9, 2002

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Group exhibition

The Chinese European Art Center is proud to present an exhibition curated by Arni Gudmunddson. The exhibtion brings together five Nordic artists who share a common interest
in how human identities are created in Western society. Arni Gudmunddson(Iceland/Sweden), Per Huttner(Sweden), Juha van Ingen(Finland), Crs tian Riel off(Sweden/Chile), Daniel Westlund(Sweden). The work has been carefully selected to highlight the consciousness of the thinking individuals and how this is set against social conventions.

The work address diverse issues related to identity: The national identity, social identity, intellectual identity, artistic identity and male identity. Each artist approaches the problematic in a different way both in medium and subject matter to create a coherent and accessible exhibition, which gives a vibrant image of the diversity and richness of contemporary Nordic art.

The curator: Arni Gudmundsson is an artist/curator living and working in Stockholm, Sweden. He has curated and co-curate a large number of exhibitions in various European venues. He is one of the founders of the Gallery Konst aku ten in Stockholm, which he co-directed from 1996-2001.He is currently one of the intiators and co-directors of ID-I gallery also in Stockholm.

Gallery

Time Space & Me

root — Tue, 02 Apr 2002 13:56:05 +0000

Opening

April 5 at 5 PM, 2002

Duration

April 5 till 28, 2002

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Wang Qiang, Gu Xiaoping and Gu Xiao jian

Chinese European Art Center invites you to a new exhibition of installations and videos Time Space & Me from the Chinese artists Wang Qiang, Gu Xiaoping and Gu Xiao jian, from April 5 through April 28, 2002.

Time Space & Me consists of installations and videos. The installations include cement, electronic components, glass and stone pictures. The installation artwork, consisting of over 200 bags of solidified cement, is placed in a rectangle shape. The rectangle is placed at where the two dagon also of the exhibition hall cross, and to couple it, a slope installation, composed of graphics and black stones from Xiamen, dashes to a corer of the exhibtion hall. A glass head sculpture is put in the opposite coner.

In the other exhibition hall is the installation My city My dream, which is composed of eight city models made by electron components. Kept in suspension by steel ropes, these models look like movable cities. The graphics how Hallucinogen City wil also be arranged in the same hall, at tempng to be interactive to My city My dream. Another installation consisits of 100 figure sculptures and their belongings. The artists have temperately damaged those pictures with flames when making the installation. There are two videos in the exhibition. One is called No, which is composed of pictures shot by a single lens. It reflects a youngman’sabre action when the pressure is beyond his endurance. As the artists once said, “I am always trying to show peoples complicated emotion in a simple space, so the contrast between the content and the form is sharply intensified.” The other video shows overlapped several layers of pictures shot from a high place in the city, which portrait the crowed streams of people. The disorder lines sand uncertainty of the streams of people put audiences in the interlaced contingency and necessity. The video is named Eyes of
Paradise.

The three artists come from Nanjing. Their artforms include installation, videos and performance. They took part in the famous performance arts “Human VS Animals” in Qing liang Mountain, Nanjing. In 1998, they setup the working group “Post-idealism”. Facing the coming new century, they threw away all their idealistic burdens and setup an art group “W&G” to carryout their project. To them, arts are things that happen right now and right here, manifesting the way they exist in the same time and space.

Gallery

Passing the Information

root — Sat, 02 Mar 2002 09:10:11 +0000

Opening

March 8 at 5 PM, 2002

Duration

March 8 till 31, 2002

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Gerald van der Kaap

The Chinese European Art Center presents a new exhibition, the video
installation Passing the Information(2002) by artist Kaap(Gerald Van Der Kaap), one of Europe’s leading media artists, from March 8 through March 31, 2002.

Passing the Information consists of a classroom complete with school desks and benches, as well as a video blackboard. The blackboard has a white rectangle on which a DvD is projected. The DVD showcases images from various sources, from footage recorded from TV(ranging from nature documentaries to raw images received by satellite), short video she made during his travels around the world, to portraits in close-up of students hemet at the Xiamen University. The latter were made during his stay in Xiamen as an’artist-in-residence: By a how ing young a people on gt hessereen, Kaap mv wants to create a regenerative environment. Young people are the future. Always and everywhere. As one writer recently put it: *Experiencing Kaap’s art means entering into a kaleidoscope where anything is possible”. Conceptually, Kaap’s video recordings are almost like moving photographs. In one videotape the artist samples a 20-minute excerpt from a nature documentary(broadcasted by the BBC) while the artist was listening to the music of the English band Underworld. Kaap recorded both’live’ a this studio using an audio mixer to mix out the spoken commentary. In a recent interview Kaap says about this work: “I recorded it just like I make my photos. It’s like a 20-minute snapshot.”

“Kaap used photography as an entrance to the entire field of(new) media, ” says Arjen Mulder, critic and author known for his writings about new media. At the beginning of his career Kaap soon developed and introduced a number of brand new formats within a wide range of fields: first staged photography and later computer manipulated photography(extensively shown abroad at over 200 exhibitions). As a director/producer he made experimental television for Ra bot nik TV(1987-1988) and the award winning CD-Rom Blind Rom(1993), which many consider to be the world’s first artist CD-Rom.

Gallery

THIS MINUTE

root — Wed, 02 Jan 2002 08:15:40 +0000

Opening

January 26 at 5 PM, 2002

Duration

January 26, 2002

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Femke Schaap and Sjerk Timmer

The exhibition “THIS MINUTE “is a preliminary presentation of works made in the new-media workshop that is given by dutch artists Femke Schaap and Sjerk Timmer on invitation of the Xiamen Art College Chinese European Art Center (CEAC).

Presented are the outcomes of the first two assignments: “Universal Potato” and “Electric Sculpture Museum”.
In one minute film “Universal Potato”, their students could use the given potato in the film and make the way they like to.

In”Electric Sculpture Museum”, each student was issued a photocopy of a classical European statue, and asked to use it together with a lamp in a moving installation. Students now are in the middle of processing these installations into a new one-minute film.

During the past three weeks of this workshop, plans also evolved and have been developed into a number of free works that not relate (visibly) to the assignments anymore. The assignments are an open invitation to seek for the adventure, to develop new ideas to make images that have not be seen before.

The workshop will continue(and more films will be made) until Saturday the 26 of January. Most films that are being made in the new-media will be presented in
the next months be shown in”the-one-minutes” an art-show by
Dutch television, broadcasted by the Sandberg Institute for
Fine Arts in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.