2005 – CEAC

Copies of Commodities

root — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 07:04:15 +0000

Opening

December 9 at 5 PM, 2005

Duration

December 9 till 30, 2005

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Hartmut Wilkening

“A Commodity appears at first sight a very trivial thing and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Karl Marx)

‘Copies of Commodities’
More than exchange value of commodities and its copies, Wilkening is interested in its symbolic value and ideological impact in China.
The most striking example he finds in the design of Chinese money:
Today’s Chinese market economy uses bills with the portrait of Chairman Mao on it.

Wilkening is attracted by the harmony in which model products and its remakes seem to coexist, for example the Volkswagen-Passat imported from Germany riding side by side with the look-a-like Shanghai-made Santana, or video-shops offering legal dvd’s. as well as the copies ones. In this mix authenticity is stressed and Wilkening is driven by the question how the message that is carried out by the original generates in its copies.

Wilkening worked in Xiamen from September to December 2005.His exhibition in the Chinese European Art Center will show sculptured portraits of Chinese representatives and figurative images dealing with positions in today’s market economy. The human factor is essential in Wilkening’s approach. The figure stands central in his work. For the show he uses valuable materials as well as the fake copies of them in order to interfere with the symbolic and ideological value of the sculptured protagonists.

Gallery

Loud & Clear TOO

root — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 06:33:24 +0000

Opening

November, 2005

Duration

November, 2005

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Group exhibition

Participants:
A.& B. Blume (D) + fm3+YanJun+DouWei (CN) + International (NL) Candice Breitz (SA/D) + Alex Fahl (D) + KesselsKramer (NL) Christian Jankowski (D) + Chiel Meijering (NL) + DDB Berlin (D) Tamàs Komoròczky (HU) + Thor Eldon (IS) + Heimat (D) L.A.Raeven (NL) + Pupilla (HU) + Double Standards (D)

After successful presentations of Loud & Clear the Bifrons Foundation will continue its travel along venues in Europe and Asia with Loud & Clear TOO. In the past years Loud & Clear has generated a lot of attention in different countries since its world premiere in BALTIC, Gateshead (GB) and has stirred up a lively discussion since. This unique project with visual artists, composers and publicity designers has been enlarged and extended with 5 more video films.

Signboards in the form of electronic screens play a large role in Loud & Clear. These are increasingly to be seen in our streets and in other public spaces. Signboards are designed in the first place to solicit and to promote commercial products, but here there is no commercial purpose to the advertising. Artists, composers and advertising agencies were asked to work together on making a film or a composition for Loud & Clear, with a high degree of autonomy to be sure. This sounds like a paradox, but the combination of disciplines should be seen more as a form of ‘living apart together’. In most cases there was first consultation between the composer and the artist about their musical preferences, after which musicians in Amsterdam, Reykjavík, Zurich and New York – and recently in Budapest and Berlin – were able to begin executing the brand-new compositions. The artists were invited to make a film and the advertising agencies were commissioned to advertise the world of the artist, without any commercial purpose. Or as in Loud & Clear TOO as far as it concerns the publicity designers to make a video work based on the music.

It is striking that the music in LOUD & CLEAR plays a very dominant role in all videos. The advertising agency Fastland from Reykjavik already commented at the beginning of the project that “short advertising spots were in all cases driven along by the music, which is what makes or breaks the commercial.” This could explain why the artists have either responded to the music with slow images or have consciously integrated the music into the montage of their film. Each video is clearly an individual work of art and shows a lively symbiosis between art, music, sound and advertising. Seeing and hearing the results of Loud & Clear, one is immediately seized by the way in which, in most cases, the artists have made slowly moving images, as though life is not meant to have any beginning or end. The advertising agencies reveal a strong tendency towards paraphrasing the artists’ films. Or in the most recent two cases towards a visual paraphrase of the music. Apart from these in all cases they relate their contribution to the sort of clue or joke that we are confronted with in TV and cinema commercials.

It is a pleasure to see how, in all disciplines and at a high artistic level, a great contribution has been made again to the discussion about what art, advertising and music have to do with each other in practice or to what extent they differ.

Gallery

Participate?

root — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 03:44:30 +0000

Opening

October 7 at 5 PM, 2005

Duration

October 7 till 28, 2005

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Group exhibition

Ivan Fayard Valérie Nréjen
Brigitt Zieger
Renaud Bezy
Stéphanie Nava
Emmanuelle Mafille Ghazel

Chinese European Art Center is proud to present Participate? An exhibition that does not work like other contemporary art shows. It invites the visitor to the gallery to actively engage with the displayed artwork and physically change the exhibition. He or she can thus change wall drawing or paintings by Ivan Fayard, Emmanuelle Mafille or St é phanie Nava. The four artists Ghazel, Val é rie Nr é jen, Renaud Bezy and Brigitt Zieger will each present numerous video work or animations. The visitor can browse these carefully selected time-based pieces and display them according to certain specifications supplied by the artists.
Participate? Offers a fresh way of experiencing exhibition and offers valuable reformulation to what participation means in the broadest meaning of the word. A key part in the project is played by art students from the university in Xiamen . They are continuously present in the exhibition throughout the project and assist and aid the audience in changing the exhibition. The visitor interface has been developed by Ciceron at Linkopings University.

The project develops the experiences from ‘ I am a Curator’ realized by Per H ü ttner at Chisenhale Gallery in London in 2003.
The project is supported by Moderna Museets International Program, Stockholm , the Consulate General of Sweden in Canton and Linkopings University.

Gallery

PRETEND I’M NOT HERE

root — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 04:10:46 +0000

Opening

October, 2005

Duration

October, 2005

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Magnus Sigurdarson

Patrick Nilsson

Roma Pas

Pretend I’m not here deals with alienation.

Whether it’s culturally in sense of being an outsider on a different continent or metaphorically where as the use of media implies a certain distance from the subject.

The presence of the maker always tends to influence the results, especially when you’re “strange”, so while working the artists felt that their appearance was in the way.

They often asked: “be as you were before” or “pretend I’m not here”. At the same time the title refers to the age of visibility. All different media are competing to be “in the picture”; news, magazines, commercials, home videos, computer games, movies etc.

When you walk down the streets of Xiamen you see a whole range of neon lights trying to be the most dominant.

It seems that what is not visible doesn’t exist, or that we cannot visualize something that we do not understand.

Gallery

SURFACE

root — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 03:56:31 +0000

Opening

September 9 at 5 PM, 2005

Duration

September 9 till 30, 2005

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Anneke a. de Boer

The Video and Photography works from Anneke her exhibition “SURFACE” has been made in Xiamen.

The moment when Dutch artist and photographer Anneke a. de Boer stepped out of Xiamen Airport on June 30, 2005, she never expected that soon she would walk into places of ordinary Chinese people, and work very closely with them.

Anneke was immediately fascinated by the night scene in Xiamen . Watching TV was a very important part of night pastime for lots of people. Also she did discover the strong bonds among the family through the universal act of watching TV, fascinated by the idea of family and people being together in a space and separated by concentration strongly influenced by their own experience.
In her exhibition “SURFACE”, she did discover surfaces that we all never see and made the perspective obvious.

In her work is displayed the complexity of discovering inner world and the fascination of experiencing the inner world from different perspectives.
In front of the TV screen, she felt the inner world of these people and set out to capture evanescent flow of emotions and hidden sentiments of these people as they bathed in the light of their TV screens.

Her conceptual photos follow a special cinematographic form and have framed many moments of people’s trivial inner changes. But these moments aren’t totally independent from one another. Gaps among photos are filled and united by viewers and thus prompt spectators to experience the documentary scene that happened only at special moments.

In her photo series context is usually absent but images are strong, bold or emotional, which make viewers feel connected and stimulate curiosities from viewers as they try to understand what led to all these dramatic inner changes.

Gallery

Concrete blanks

root — Tue, 31 May 2005 03:14:25 +0000

Opening

June 3 at 5 PM, 2005

Duration

June 3 till 28, 2005

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Jeroen Jacobs

Given the fact that space is infinite and everything contained within it represents a disruption of this infinity, then the surfaces of things represent the boundaries of the space. Imagine that you are floating weightlessly in space around those objects, and getting closer and closer to them. The space between any of these objects becomes narrower and tighter. At some point this gap becomes so constricted that it is perceived as a particular space and no longer as part of the endless vastness. The look and quality of objects around loose their significance as our vantage point shifts to the newly created space. Within this space the surfaces of things become more significant. They become the structural framework of this newly created emptiness, the described blank.

This described blank is the starting point for Jeroen Jacobs unique observations. In his studio in Xiamen the artist experimented with the creation of these blanks, repeating the process over and over while varying form and shape. In the casting process form and contra form are transcended and eventually go beyond this aspect.
You might recognise the shapes of everyday objects such as bottles, an eraser or ruler, that have been put into the small grey sculptures. Certain surfaces resemble fragments of the familiar. Yet they remain as strange sculptures in whose material l the process of their creation is revealed. Concrete was cast into carefully constructed molds of lath and tape. Concrete as allowed to leak out of the molds, allowing gravity to determine the form.

The precise analysis of space and material is only considered to a certain degree, where the process has been allowed to take over. Thus the spontaneous, hardly manageable casting process plays a crucial role. The purposeful construction of a complicated mold is superseded by the subsequent casting which appears to have been roughly executed.

The resulting sculptures, with their pure and smoothed surfaces, appear massive and bulky. They maintain a precarious balance and tenuous equilibrium lending them a certain charm. Here, ordinary materials of sand, cement and water, a mixture unattractive in color, take on illusive meanings and evolving figures. Perhaps they are characters escaped from a fairy tale about funny hybrids.

Gallery

French Springs

root — Mon, 30 May 2005 09:54:48 +0000

Opening

May, 2005

Duration

May, 2005

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Group exhibition

Francisco Ruiz De Infante
Elodie huet
Jean-Charlesb Hue
Regis Baudy
Fabien Gigobert
Philippe Meste
Jo Bartolomeo
Julien Discrit
Valerie Mrejen
Erich Weiss (France)

Gallery

Heike Aumdllor & Elke Mohr

root — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 05:16:43 +0000

Opening

April 1 at 5 PM, 2005

Duration

April 1 till 14, 2005

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Heike Aumdllor

“Wth the advent of postmodernism, the gallery room is no longer‘neutral”. The wall becomes a membrane, where the aesthetic and economic values transfer through osmosis…
The whitewall belongs to the image of society, where it is the ideal project on screen of our paranoia.” After Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the white cube”

In the exhibition at the Chinese European Art Center, Elke Mohr is engaged with numbers and percent sasa crossover to the accelerated exchange of commodities. Her install at on reflects the context of the gallery space, the artist’s role and the we stem media frenzy for China, which is characterized as the ”land of superlative”.

“Brightness” works with a pari ally reconstructed narrative framework. Three protagonists gest iculate within a barely furnished room, each of whom are at different stages of completing a transformation. Through the manipula ton of the fim the protagonists appear alienated, the picture is
fragmented and drastically reduced in speed. The pictures appear and disappear as afi owing sequence from a single brig th ness. This appearance and disappearance of the images, linked with the fractured narrative, create a more or less catastrophic dimension, with an intensity that enfolds and increases as the soundtrack develops.

Gallery

Disappeared Woman Reappear

root — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 09:07:15 +0000

Opening

April 15 at 5 PM, 2005

Duration

April 15 till May 3, 2005

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Erla Thórarinsdóttir

A foreign environment challenges the artist in residency; origins are distant and new experiences influential. Communication is mainly through senses as words are limited to a few. Possibilities of misunderstandings and disrespect for customs due to ignorance are present. Time in residency is limited to three months; space is endless.

CEAC is now presenting an exhibition by the Icelandic artist Erla Thorarinsdottir who has been an artist in residency from the middle of January.
Erla works with spaces, mentally, physically and conceptually. In her constellations narration is absent, but shapes from inner worlds of body and consciousness are apparent, with references to collective memory as a hidden yet accessible ground for communication.

The last three months the artist has been emptying her containers, or attempting to she says as they have a tendency to refill themselves, mostly during nights. For sketching she has used “fake money paper” that she found appealing before knowing its purpose. The use of silver for light transformations is frequently visible in her paintings, so lets hope this ignorance will be of no offence. Some sketches have been given bodies transformed to granite and marble; shapes from generations of women; mothers, grandmothers disappeared, reappear. Dreams appear differently in Xiamen compared to Reykjavik -here the moon is a horizontal crescent in the sky.

Gallery

Illusions of Memory

root — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 08:06:05 +0000

Opening

April, 2005

Duration

April, 2005

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Fahrettin Gürkan Örenli

Yang ah Ham

Illusions of Memory — Rachel Tang

During our daily life, moving form one place to another in time and space, we selectively collect fragments of life, which we remember and use for our experience that we need in order to go further.
We store this information in our memory. But then the question is: can we say that our memory gives us the meaning of our existence as human beings and does it make each life of an individual being different?

How can we catch and hold the senses with time and space? What affects our decision to choose a certain time, place or people to remember and others not? Why do our memories lock up some parts on the other side of the high wall and put the sharp broken glasses on the top of it for keeping them away from us so that what we see through the small hole on the wall is only an illusion of memory?

This is exactly what the work: Illusions of Memory, Made in China is dealing with.

Our daily view
People we meet
Places that attach us highly
The role of time and speed in memorizing things

If the memories were books on the shelves in our library, do we then read those books and use them as references for our life? Or do we just leave them on the shelves and enjoy their existence without touching them?
?In order to enrich our library how de we select each book? If we choose not only real stories but also a lot of dream and fantasy books are they then an illusion of our memory, which we store on the shelves so that we can escape from the thought of reality?

Is it true that history books in our library are one of the biggest illusions of our memory?
While human beings are blindly involved in building social memories that controls themselves, the memories are built by the history of our countries.

What about the memory, which is built up by world history instead of the memory that originate from our own country, which is in our time becoming much stronger and even using heavy weapons dominate us by the economical and political commercial media to built fake memories around us like high walls?

How come that the world has become so small for the human being and that everyone memory has become so similar.

How can our memory separate time, places and people from each other so that we
can survive to be ourselves ?to have our own memory and live as an unique individual?

The largest human population is living here in China. Is the human being unique?