2004 – CEAC

Ragna Robertsdottir

root — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 09:08:44 +0000

Opening

December, 2004

Duration

December, 2004

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Ragna Robertsdottir

The work of the Reykjavik based artist Ragna Robertsdottir(b.1945) is closely related to the strong tradition of landscape and nature art in Iceland. Hers is an unorthodox approach, using directly natural material and installing it in context with the surrounding architecture. Thus, she borders in some ways on Minimalism and Land art.

In her early works she used ” cutouts” from nature, installed as floor pieces e.g.blocks of basalt, rolls of soil and piles of hemp. She also used rubber, but in a limited way, together with the natural material.
In the last decade and currently still, she has been focusing on walls(and sometimes ceilings) working with black lava, red pumice and shining obsidian. Also in this case she sometimes uses artificial material such as crushed glass or multicoloured Plexiglas.

She either attaches the material directly on the wall, taking the surroundings carefully in consideration, or she frames it loose behind glass. The method is an interesting mix of intention and chance. Working on a precisely given part of the interior of the exhibition space she throws handfuls of the grinded material, which then partly sticks on glue, but the rest falls down on the floor. Then, with cosmetic tweezers, she adds and takes away isolated particles to complete the work. The result
looks monochrome when seen sideways but from a direct viewpoint there are
clouds, lines and a structure resembling a drawing.

When using volcanic material such as from the eruptions of Iceland’s most
active volcano, Hekla, Ragna’s works are quite direct landscape works.

When using glass, the sparkling surface reminds one of glacial surfaces,
also closely inspired by the land’s nature. These wall works are somewhat
related to the tradition of protecting the exterior of concrete houses with
grinded crystal, lava or shells. A big part of 30’s and 40’s Reykjavik is
full of these houses, not to mention the shining, black National Theatre,
covered with glistening obsidian. Therefore one can say Ragna’s art is
very Icelandic though doubtlessly inspired by international art movements.

Gallery

Loud & Clear

root — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 15:47:30 +0000

Opening

November 19 at 5 PM, 2004

Duration

November 19 till 28, 2004

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Group exhibition

With Loud&Clear the Bifrons Foundation is broaching a topical discussion. Advertising
agencies are increasingly ending up in the museum with their commission-based work， while artists are trying hard to escape the confines of the white cube. Loud&Clear shows that no borders are safe anymore， especially within art. The project is not a noncommittal confrontation between video art and commercial image production，but a serious attempt at investigating the differences between the visual cultures of advertising and art.

What happens when two forms of visual expression enter into dialogue with eachother， with the same piece of music functioning as the starting point? In making their contribution the composers have taken into account the idea that images would be added to it later and were familiar with the work of the artists. In their turn the artists were free to do what they wanted， while the advertising agencies were asked to react in one way or another to the artist’s visual contribution. In various locations you can see how differently this collaboration has turned out for each trio， and how an interdisciplinary approach makes artists look at their own and others’metier in a new way.

“Ultimately an advertising man will make his work constitute part of the real version of the world. Albeit with a certain reluctance or disdain.However much beauty，humour, ambiguity or confusion he might evoke，the work only succeeds if it makes itself redundant by ending in a strong and unambiguous effect.Unresolved confusion，persistent ambiguity，un divid able ironic content，painful‘senseless’emotions，these are the things that characterise art，but which are damaging for the communication that advertisers want to achieve.

In Loud&Clear the advertising people don’t have to convey a commercial message or to evoke a form of desired behaviour. But what their work does always do is mark the meeting point between the un realities of art and the real， audio-visual version of the world.”

LOUD&CLEAR ON TOUR

Visual artists
Pipilotti Rist, Viktor & Rolf, Marlene Dumas, John M Armleder, Pierre Bismuth, Pierre Huyghe, Yayoi Kusama,
Aernout Mik

Composers

Caroline Berkenbosch, Toek Numan, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Hans van Manen,
Theo Loevendie, Steamboat Switzerland, Haukur Tomasson, Gudni Franszon

Publicity designers
*S,C,P,F…, Saatchi & Saatchi, KesselsKramer, Fastland/Ground, Strawberry Frog,
KesselsKramer, Jung von Matt, Wieden & Kennedy, Gillian Wearing, Yello NEW®

Gallery

A Flirting Rabbit

root — Sun, 03 Oct 2004 14:23:45 +0000

Opening

October 8 at 5 PM, 2004

Duration

October 8 till 26, 2004

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Hulda Hákon and Jón óskar

Hulda and Jón have been artists in residence of the CEAC this summer and this fall all of the art works on this exhibition are made during their stay here in Xiamen.

The funny title: A Flirting Rabbit comes from a little event when Jón was making the invitation card and asked me to take a picture of him on my balcony at my home. Immediately Jón was inspired by the look of the ceramic rabbit on my balcony and the title of the exhibition was born.

For both the artists Hulda and Jón it is significant to their art that they use small events from every day life to play an important role in their work. Hulda is making a rabbit here for the first time in her life and maybe the origin of that rabbit is the ceramic rabbit on my balcony.
Jón is showing his 80 drawings, which he made when he was an artist in residence this summer. They deal with memories and they also express his feelings of being a foreigner in such a foreigner country as China is for him coming from Iceland a special reality.

It is interesting to investigate what happens when a person cannot understand the language in the place you are living, in this case Xiamen China, and for us the spectators it is interesting to see with our eyes what the artist has done with his experience.

Hulda’s work relates almost always to human relations sometimes referring to
mythology and the sea and fishermen and sometimes animals appears in her work
like the rabbit here. Text always plays an important role in Hulda’s work and
the text most often comes from the daily life but when she has integrated the
words and text into her art we are always confronted with a reality of many
layers, that is what makes her work so interesting and because of that her
work is exhibited here at the art center.

Gallery

Stories of Dystopia

root — Fri, 03 Sep 2004 14:00:42 +0000

Opening

September 10 at 5 PM, 2004

Duration

September 10 till 26, 2004

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Klitsa Antoniou

Klitsa Antoniou is presenting her latest work at the Chinese European Art Center in Xiamen, on the 10h of September. The exhibition consists of multimedia installations constructions and photographs. The works are dealing with issues of displacement, hybridism, transience and mutation, utopia and dystopia, memory and identity.

Dr Antonis Danos, art historian, writes：In Stories of Dystopia, the viewer is led into a seemingly strange universe, which has been created by the stuff of wishes， dreams and frustrations, both our individual, as well as our collective ones, particularly, as in a bit ants of a small land, surrounded by water.

While using contemporary, ‘interational’artistic vocabularies, Antoniou’s work is deeply embedded in the history and the predicament of her homeland. Cyprus is a place with along, turbulent history, in the course of which, the ‘natives’ have rarely been allowed to determine their destiny, it is a place, moreover, with a wavering, as much as dead-end present, and with an uncertain future. The imaginary world, which Antoniou has installed, maybe seen as away out, as the desired escape, as an answer to her people’s frustrations.

This new environment looms, at once, utopian-an ideal place, object of our desire, and a new(brave?) world-and dystopian-a nightmarish space, in which we may enter only as “transmuted” beings.

Gallery

Spatial behavior

root — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 13:42:56 +0000

Opening

June 2004

Duration

June 2004

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Aam Solleveld and Erik Olofsen

Aam Solleveld makes drawings about spaces. In the CEAC she draws with black cello tape directly on the walls. ‘Walls are not just a carrier for artworks, I intend to make the viewer repeatedly switch between seeing the drawn space and the actual space.’

In October 2002 in the Chinese European Art Center (in a group exhibition of both Chinese artists and artists from the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, The Netherlands), she made a tape wall drawing of a red bar.

In her new wall piece Chinese street archetypes, architecture and daily objects are combined with elements of mass media and fast-culture. The tape marks the borders between spaces and matter. The wall functions alternately as solid matter, air, distance, as a food counter, or a sidewalk. With a minimum of information (few lines) objects are characterized.

Solleveld demonstrates the equivalence of the daily things and the mystic. Mysticism expressed in ordinary objects. The idea that emotions and perceptions can be reflected in matter. These implements that feelings can be expressed in for example an electric wire hanging in a street.
Erik olofsen will be showing sculptures and photographs. A binding factor in the installations, photographs and video’s Olofsen makes lies in the spatial experience of them.

In general, the works give an impression of a landscape or surrounding in witch scale, gravity and time are being redefined. The works have a mental character, where by, for instance, one’s psychological state is made visible through materializing this in a collection of objects surrounding the person.

Olofsen has always consciously played with the game of control (controller/controlled). For years he’s been making work in which objects are divested of their power, picked apart and scattered through a space. At the same time he reconstructs things, assembling them and adding new elements. Sometimes he literally sets the objects in motion. These reconstructions, as he calls them, keep the world at arm’s length, yet simultaneously bring it closer. Reality is dislocated but restored to unity in the same gesture, however clumsy, as though in a lengthy exorcism process of the angst we all feel when confronted by a disintegrating world. Erik Olofsen did receive for his work the prestigious Prix de
Rom the honorable second price.

This project was realized thanks to a contribution of the Netherlands
Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture

Gallery

Picture – Reality

root — Mon, 03 May 2004 13:27:47 +0000

Opening

May 15 at 5 PM, 2004

Duration

May 15 till 23, 2004

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Gu Yue

Paitings Gu Yue is presenting on this exhibition are chosen from the works he has created over the past three years as a postgraduate student in Art College. Other medias like installations, video films and photo works can also be found on this exhibition.

Through Gu Yue’s practice in creating art pieces with different medias, we could trace a clear feature of his works: the sharp criticism and questioning—the sensitivity to catch any reality that reflects the real world in individuals’ eyes. In this sense, Gu Yue’s paintings exhibited this time represent his development in two directions: his reflection on the “picture age” we are living in, and his discovery of people’s real life condition from pictures. There is never fine line between the two directions. But in Gu Yue’s works, the relationship between picture and reality has been shifted.

Pictures would become blurred when overlapped. When Gu Yue takes overlapped picture as an important elements of his works, he is pleasing the audience with visual satisfaction. He gets rid of the habit of telling a story to audience in and normal conditions: to stimulate the audience to think and judge with the help of clear images. He only shows the audience the abstraction of blurred pictures and people’s special embarrassment reflected by such abstracted pictures: we could not tell any differences of needs and desires from the blurred faces and the exaggerated motions. Is it the characteristic of the “picture age”—the time dominated by medias? Or the author’s feelings in such a reality? This is the question Gu Yue leaves to us audience. Let us appreciate his works and ponder our own answers.

The other parts of the exhibition are related to the images that produced with the help of photoshop: they are “imitations” of the visual images often produced by photoshop on canvas, which are much larger than computer screen. Those images are funny and sarcastic, which focus on people’s embarrassment in the relation between human beings and machinery.

Gallery

A party for Tessa

root — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 13:16:15 +0000

Opening

April, 2004

Duration

April, 2004

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Erik van Lieshout

A Film evening work from Erik van Lieshout. A’dam/Xiamen; Happening/Performance.

Erik van Lieshout (1968, Deurne, The Netherlands) is a Dutch artist whose projects are multi-media installations encompassing video presented in specially built video rooms/installations, often encircled by collages of drawings and paintings. In his work van Lieshout addresses a multitude of contemporary socio-political issues such as multiculturalism, right-wingers, the position of minorities and outsiders as well as the modern consumer society. Van Lieshout looks at these issues from a radically personal point of view, putting himself into the actual environment at hand. By typically not adapting to the general behavior of his surrounding he becomes an active player in the action which causes many humoristic situations but also provokes strong reactions of others.

Gallery

Happy Life

root — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 12:43:17 +0000

Opening

April, 2004

Duration

April, 2004

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Chen Wenling

Chen Wenling has been working in Xiamen for many years. In 2001 he took part in the
Ship-Xiamen Modern Art Exhibition with his work “Red Boys” the side was the beach of Xiamen City. This sculptures were a great number of boys whom he portrayed in scarlet colour. The “Red Boys” sculptures has also been selected as the most fevered work by the audience of the Chinese Sculpture Masterpieces Exhibition of the Beijing international Biennale.

Right now, another interesting sculpture is being presented in the Sculpture Park in Xiamen as part of the Xiamen “Sea and Music” International Sculpture Exhibition.

The CEAC is proud to present Chen Wenling’s new sculptures which he calls “Happy Life”. In his new work Chen Wenling has a critical look at the meaning of “Happy”. All these powerful figures represent a special group of people in China’s society. Those people who became the new rich because of the economical development in the nineties.
But are they happy with their new successful life?

For Chen Wenling the meaning of “happy” has changed again and again in the history. But most of the time it was connected with power and money. People seem always to strive for a “Happy Life”. These phenomenons exist in all cultures. Another global phenomenon is that these rich people seem to feel bored. After becoming rich they try to find their happiness in adventures and suggestive sensuality.

Consequently the dog, the pig and the fish – women are not necessarily simple animals or a super- realistic women in his opinion.These creatures could rather represent those, who erase their dignity or self-respect to please the rich people for a more comfortable life?

Do they want to become a member of the modern society?
The ten pigs and dogs standing around the woman and the man?
They depict those people, who are not active participants yet. Striking are the retracting tails of the dogs. Are they embarrassed? Are they afraid?
Do they want to participate in the new living standard?
The artist has left this open as well as other questions. The viewer is invited to make her or his own thoughts and imaginations.

Gallery

Crossing the Rainbow Bridge

root — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 07:09:58 +0000

Opening

February, 2004

Duration

February, 2004

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukàcs

In the film Crossing the Rainbow Bridge, Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukàcs are pushing artistic form and content to the limit. With a grand gesture, they open the floodgates of sentiment, but ingeniously prevent it all from turning into treacle. The film is shown on split screen, with the two parts sometimes complementing each other, sometimes being played off against each other. A simple story develops amidst this fragmentation, about two young people who are apparently involved in a love affair, and are thinking about each other. Their thoughts include the usual lovers’ dreams and tender reflections. Sometimes the camera takes over their musing, in a sort of ‘visual thinking’. Action, patterns and images then melt together, and continue the story in a poetically associative manner. Sometimes the lovers find each other and sing a song together. And then she says: it seems as if everything is connected. To understand one thing, you have to understand ten other things, and to understand those, you need to understand a hundred more. And so on. The message seems clear: things are incomprehensible, but they can be made visible. Or tangible. And that is what this film does magnificently: making things visible and tangible.

The images and narrative situations rely very much on familiar sentiment and the image idiom of music videos, but the shameless nature of both gives them the stratification desired. Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukàcs did not try to let form prevail over content in order to create art in the classic way. They bypassed our time to head for the past, picking up a thread that was abandoned in the 18th century. In those days, sentiment was still a modern element in contemporary art, but during the course of the centuries that followed, it was rejected in such dismissive terms as ‘facile’, ‘kitsch’ and ‘superficial’. True enough, art has always been useful for the cultivation of our feelings, certainly in the past era of modernism, when individual sensitivities had to be disappear under the surface of the ‘total design’. But for the celebration of emotions we always had to resort to life itself, with such great events as falling in love, marriage, childbirth, and burial.

In Crossing the Rainbow Bridge, we find ourselves in the middle of a love affair, and, depending on how sensitive we wish to be, we could be touched by it. The accompanying music by the Amsterdam group Bauer is infectious and effervescent like a musical. Those who understand the charm of the musical, can see how its magic sparks can suddenly light up our dry-as-dust lives, will also understand this film.

Lex ter Braak,
Director of the Dutch Foundation for Arts, FBKVB

Gallery

Painting 2003

root — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 09:40:32 +0000

Opening

February 29 at 5 PM, 2004

Duration

February 29 at 5 PM, 2004

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Gustav Meist

The Chinese European Art Center is delighted about presenting an exhibition of works made by the Netherlands’ artist Gustav Meist. Presenting his paintings in Xiamen is a particularly pleasant because of the artists’ profound connection with this town.

Gustav Meist worked as a teacher in the Xiamen University Art College. This work gave him the opportunity to get a deeper insight into Chinese art as well as an art and cultural exchange with Xiamens’ art students.
This contact to China is clearly visible in Gustav Meist’s colorful paintings. Most of the art works show portraits in a very reduced way. The observer will find the painting “Matisse and I” next to “China” (2002) and “Nanjing. Portrait Xin Xin” (2002). The abstract forms of the arrangements and the rich in contrast of the colors unit them.