2014 – CEAC

Screen Touch

root — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 09:10:17 +0000

Opening

December 20 at 5 PM, 2014

Duration

December 20, 2014 till January 3, 2015

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Sarah Mei Herman

In her work Sarah Mei Herman explores relationships and intimacy between people. The closeness between them or what sets them apart, and the necessity of physical proximity to others. The most fragile and elusive contact between people often seem to exist beyond the reach of language. Herman focuses mainly on adolescents; their constant state of becoming; the fleeting beauty of the continual changes and transitions they go through on their way to adulthood.
“I’m drawn to the intensity, vulnerability and sometimes loneliness of the unpredictable stages of adolescence.” SMH

During her time as an artist in residence at CEAC Sarah Mei Herman approached and photographed several young people, finding her subjects at the university campus as well as on the beach and in the streets of Xiamen. One of the things that struck me soon after my arrival in Xiamen was the extreme and constant use of smartphones, mostly by young people. Everywhere in the city people are constantly absorbed in their screens.” The smartphone seems to somehow function as a tool for intimacy. It disconnects people but at the same time it has the ability to bring them together in a physical sense. It seems to have become an alternative way of achieving contact with each other: sharing intimacy through the smartphone.

I’m fascinated by this contradiction, which I would describe as detached closeness. Apart from photographs of young people, this exhibition also includes several “screens of the city” as I call them. To me these reflections of the city mirror the disconnection and detachment that seems to occur between people as a result of the intense use of their smartphone. They also symbolize the language barriers I experienced, and my struggle to communicate. However, my encounters with young people in Xiamen have also made me realize that language is not always necessary to get closer to people, even if it is just for a brief moment.

This artist in residence at CEAC in Xiamen was made possible by the generous support of Mondriaan Fund in Amsterdam.

Gallery

CEAC 15 Years Anniversary

root — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 15:54:32 +0000

Opening

November 8 at 5 PM, 2014

Duration

November 8 till 29, 2014

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

The Chinese European Art Center (CEAC) is delighted to present this group exhibition on the occasion of CEAC 15 Years Anniversary. Started from 1999 the CEAC plays a central role in southeast China’s cultural landscape. In the past 15 years CEAC has hosted and premiered international artists from all over the world. CEAC’s network is constantly expanding. Hundreds of artists from all over the world have worked at CEAC in the past 15 years. This stimulates action and communication between people from a local to an international level.

This exhibition presents 19 artists who have been worked at CEAC Artist-in-Residence program or connected with CEAC.

Cathelijn van Goor, Born 1976, the Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam. Cathlijn van Goor is an Amsterdam-based artist. In her work she questions whether technological development really achieves progress. The idea of people losing control over their own inventions is a starting point for her recent series of graphite drawings. “Glitches” and “Clouds of paint and walls of paper” are based on destroyed images that were created accidentally by digital devices.

Chantal Spit, Born 1971, the Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam.
About her work Chantal says: “All the fascinating things I see, feel and experience I try to turn into something tangible. My paintings are evidence of my existence.”

Hanne Tyrmi, Born 1954, Norway. Lives and works in Oslo.

Hanne Tyrmi is a Norwegian artist who is unafraid of using a variety of visual languages to achieve her goals. She is a visual polyglot who has a reputation for making sculptures, installations, videos and photographic works that invade the emotions like a benign virus. Her work is infectious and contact with it sets in motion a metamorphosis that brings about a healthy resistance to the emotional malaise of our time.

Jaring Lokhorst, Born 1972, The Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam.
Jaring Lokhorst perfers to paint motifs which may not be immediately recognized as beautiful by the audience. These are scenes he encounters in his own city and during his travels. These motifs are often about changes that cause patterns- casual patterns that you would encounter in nature instead of the rigidity of the city. These patterns are further manipulated by Lokhorst when he paints them on aluminum.

Jing Jin, Born 1984, Hubei China. Lives and works in Xiamen, China
Jing Jin’s practice focuses on the psychological suggestions that fluctuate inside and behind external and physical appearances. Representing the visual and textual tentacles of her own brain constructs and her self-acclaimed logic of contrasts, Jin’s videos, photography, objects and texts cover a wide range of different and sometimes complementary ideas.

Katrin Korfmann, Born 1971, Berlin Germany. Lives and works in Amsterdam.
In Korfmann´s recent work, the technical and visual conventions she puts into play obey to both a visual and conceptual principle. She does so by questioning the documentary and narrative aspect of photography and its reputation as a “witness to the truth”. Using a bird´s-eye view, she places the event´s ephemerality at center stage and creates a suggestion of distance for the spectator.

Lotte Geeven, Born 1980, the Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam.
Lotte Geeven is a multi-media artist from Amsterdam creating tailor-made portraits of sovereign places. These simple yet graphic renderings aim to envelope the magic of autonomy and explore complex matters, including the idea of a power beyond our control that is related to a specific place.
Marjan Laaper, Born 1971, the Netherlands. Lives and works in Rotterdam.
Simple everyday phenomena are being presented within a quite poetic, sometimes even philosophical framework. General human experiences, human thinking, human nature and the experience of everyday life are starting points in her work. Often there is a tension between contradictory subjects and symbols like beauty and danger, the immaterial or transitory trust and alarm. The work does not give clear answers, but shows recognizable elements that generate questions.

Marianne Lammersen, Born 1984, the Netherlands. Lives and works in Haarlem. Marianne Lammersen is intrigued by the tension between the technological and the maintenance and preservation of human identity.
In her collages she searches for a balance, not only context, but also in her way of using materials. She uses insides and outsides, backsides to front sides, positive shapes and leftovers of paper cuts as important elements. In the work itself she tries to find a certain balance back, in content, in material, in shape.

Meiya Lin, Born 1979, Xiamen China. Lives and works in Amsterdam.
The work Rolling Marbles symbolizes the endless extension of one’s imagination, while presenting the development of imagination as a quality that very often lies in memories and feelings. As shown with the challenging ballet movements presented in Model Plays of the Cultural Revolution, space reflects personal memories. The marketable fragments of everyday life are reconstructed as symbols that have specific meanings. Complicated and dramatic emotional collisions are all laid out in front of the eyes. This world that is created of adult experiences and values starts to show a completely different side under a child-like kaleidoscopic view.

Nick Renshaw (PhD), Born 1967, Lives and works in Amsterdam and Xiamen, China. Nick Renshaw makes sculptures, commonly of a figurative nature, which carry a varied combination of influences. Influences which are equally of both a personal and wider cultural nature. Personal in that they draw from the multitude of significant moments and histories of importance to the artist himself. Cultural in that they convey what he considers to be appropriate subjects for an adequate portrayal and understanding of contemporary society. Echoing the wide and eclectic nature of his own experiences these influences are of a suitably diverse, often contrasting nature. Characteristics which subsequently determine the form, content and processes involved in visualizing each work.

Paul Kooiker, Born 1964, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam. In his work Paul Kooiker explores various aspects of the theme “looking”, such as voyeurism, shame and distance. His work can be seen as a continuation of an old tradition of focusing on the relationship between the artist and the model, the observer and the observed. Kooiker’s obsessive collections of images confuse, humiliate and unnerve. They raise questions about a photographer’s reason for looking at things and the motivation behind photographing something. Kooiker plays a game with the audience, by confronting the viewer with his or her own gaze.

Pieter Holstein, Born1934, The Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam and France. Pieter Holstein is best known for the graphic works he made in the seventies and eighties. His work is poetic and at the same time philosophical and its influence has spread from Dutch to Icelandic artists. His work has been shown world-wide.

Qin Jian, Born 1957, Xuzhou, China. Lives and works in Xiamen.
About his paintings he says: “The elements that I often use for making my paintings come from pictures I collect from the internet. They are for me a kind of document that invites me to get the stories behind them. Some of those stories challenge me to turn them into paintings, which I then do.”

Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Born 1942, Iceland. Lives and works in Xiamen, China. Sigurdur has been living for the most part of his life outside of Iceland and he has spent the last 17 years in Xiamen, China. He is best known for his photographic works which have always been about philosophic poetry. Throughout the years he has also been making sculptures and writing novels and poetry.

Sylvie Zijlmans, Born 1964, the Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam.
Hewald Jongenelis, Lives and works in Amsterdam. Her meticulously staged photographs are based on incidents that bring disruption to many people’s lives. These events occur on a global scale, and as an individual one can barely relate to them, but they nonetheless have a relentless and lasting impact on one’s life. These dramas of devastation and destruction relate to today’s political and economic crisis, but are reduced to a human scale. The scenes in Zijlman’s photos all seem to present us with something on the brink of transition, a scene on the cusp of something new. The video shows in this exhibition The idea of freedom is made together with Hewald Jongenelis.

Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Born 1973, The Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam. Over the last ten years the Dutch artist Scarlett Hooft Graafland has traveled extensively to remote places all over the world to create her temporary sculptures. During these trips she heavily depends on the goodwill of the local community to help her with her interventions in the landscape. The landscape seems almost to dictate the intervention or performance, where the context of the specific place is an important part of the work. In these site-specific installations, Hooft Graafland would make use of local materials, traditions or techniques. Her sculptures often have a surrealistic character while the visual imagery and use of colours are straightforward. Thanks to this simplicity the work is never in a state of conflict.

Wei Na, Born 1981, Inner Mongolia, China. Lives and works in Xiamen, China. Wei Na works in the video medium, which she oftens presents as video-installations. In her work she is occupied with researching people in their daily life and thereby focusing on the psychological aspects of her subjects. The result is always a conflict between the conventional attitudes and judgments of society and of the person in question.

Gallery

Equilibrity

root — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 15:12:44 +0000

Opening

December 6, 2014

Duration

December 6 till 12, 2014

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

About Anne Weshinskey

Anne Weshinskey is, first and foremost, thrilled and eager to have the opportunity to present her work to the always curious and enthusiastic CEAC audience.

Anne Weshinskey explains herself:
Although classically trained as a musician and circus performer, she now works in several mediums in which she was not ‘trained’ at all, but which suit the occasion—from dance, installation, poetry, literature, circus, storytelling, video, puppetry, performance art, sculpture, painting, drawing, multi media, and anything and everything except photography. Underlying her work are the themes of aberration and deviance as mechanisms in the pursuit of balance and control amidst chaos.

This exhibition and performance at the CEAC offers a new gallery context for me to fuse together my traditional circus and acrobatic skills (learned in China and the U.S.) with my contemporary art practice. My acrobatic training, and specifically my work with the umbrellas, has taught me that first of all—chaos is not relevant—and second of all, that relinquishing control leads to the ultimate attainment of balance. The road to mastering the umbrellas requires a physical, mental, and emotional discipline which few people possess. This time and energy-consuming practice constitute a type of creative ritualism which is a pathway to gnosis and balance in many traditions, as well as in my work.

The work for this show came as the result of a residency period at the CEAC. This particular exhibition is part of the exploratory process into a bigger contemporary circus stage production, which also investigates the same motifs of balance and equanimity. This particular exhibition is a tribute to the umbrella and everything that it signifies. Umbrellas obviously mean shelter and protection to most people in most cultures, but as someone who spends an abnormal amount of time with umbrellas, I have infused them with much more significance than the average person, and I intend to share that.

In eastern spiritual traditions, the umbrella’s handle symbolizes the central axis that sustains the world, so that the person being sheltered by the umbrella is at the center of its universe. The acknowledgment that the holder of the handle is at the center of things is also a refusal of chaos. The lightness and free-floating beauty of the umbrella is not only intrinsic to it, but is brought out by the severe control and taming of the person manipulating it. It can also be dangerous, but paradoxically, only by letting go of control, can one hope to tame the beast.

*Performance direction by Oskar Samson Gudmundsson.
*Kisses to Arni Gudmundsson for providing technical assistance and collaborative input.

Gallery

Sandhouse-project: Stillness, Movement and Transience

root — Sun, 12 Oct 2014 09:20:28 +0000

Opening

September, 2014

Duration

September 2014

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

About Stephanie Rhode

Rhode will build the installation of ‘sandhouse-project’ on the beach of Xiamen. This will be done during her stay in the Chinese European Art Center (CEAC) in Xiamen, with the help of students from Xiamen University who are studying Art and Culture. In September and October 2014 Stephanie Rhode will be in China to work at CEAC, an Artist in Residence with several studios for international artists.

Project description:
A giant art project with a lifespan of 12 hours.
Everything in life is current, everything comes and goes, and nothing stays as it is. We live in a world where everything changes all the time, there’s nothing we can keep, and nothing stays the way it is.
It’s a process we come across daily, sometimes we are very well aware of this, and sometimes it passes by without us knowing it. By creating a huge and current piece of art, Rhode wants to show the process of coming and going, but at the same time movement and stillness. She wants to demonstrate this in an easy, comprehendible and recognisable way. In 2007 she created 3000 houses of sand on the beach of Langeoog/ Germany and 2008 in Katwijk aan Zee/ The Netherlands. Then the flood came and took, piece by piece, all the houses till there was nothing left but a blank beach.
During her stay in Xiamen she wants to find out how the people in Xiamen react to the phenomena of transience when shown and experienced through a piece of art. Everything in life is transient, nothing is the way it was, and everything is constantly moving. Artistic representation and the underlying message will be actively experienced. Transience will become visible in a monumental way.

What’s going to happen in Xiamen:
• Art installation from artist Stephanie Rhode on the beach from Xiamen on 18th October 2014
• And exhibition at CEAC at the same week 11th till 25th October
• Try out on Sunday afternoon 12th October
• 3000 houses from sand build by hand
• With a measure of 150 x 50m on the beach
• 65 moulds from wood
• Two big projection screen with informative film about this art installation and interviews with local people about the theme: Transience
• 50 volunteers from Xiamen University and other people who built together with the artist the 3000houses
• A unique project travelling around the world

With thanks to:

Huisman (China) Co., Ltd.
International support from the city council of Amstelveen, The Netherlands
Daring Duck Sailing and Scouting Club, Xiamen

Gallery

The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

root — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 16:13:14 +0000

Opening

September 6 at 5 PM, 2014

Duration

September 6 till 27, 2014

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Joey Syta

The Chinese European Art Center (CEAC) is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Joey Syta titled The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den. This is the American artist’s first solo exhibition in China.

Syta approaches artwork with a sensitivity to a linguist. The intricacies and limits of language serve as inspiration to explore the capability of objects acting as communication devices. Through minimal, calculated gestures he alters the structure of familiar forms to unlock or accentuate their latent messages. Logistical constraints, whether material or intangible, often direct those processes. Past works have taken the shape of self-forming molten plastic as well as experimental bismuth crystals. Other, more explicitly language-based pieces, exposed morphology and syntax as modulating elements. In the works on display at CEAC Syta favors bare methodologies of displacement to strip objects of their functionality yet maintain readability. This propensity towards controlled, non-authoritative simplicity honors his viewpoint that materials and objects already come loaded with innumerable subjective characteristics. Analogous to poetry, the most subtle metamorphosis of vernacular, be it visual or experiential, can yield unique formidable presence.

Gallery

40 titles

root — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 08:59:56 +0000

Opening

August 16 at 5 PM, 2014

Duration

August 16 till 20, 2014

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

About Reggie Voigtländer

Reggie Voigtländer is a Dutch/German (audio) visual artist, working with photography, also resulting in installations and environments. She often uses day to day life as inspiration and utilizes ‘found objects or moments’. With her work she questions general assumptions and investigates universal aspects in relation to human existence. During her artist in residence with the Chinese European Art Center here in Xiamen, several new works came into existence, like (digital) videos, public interventions and photographic works. Inspired by several cultural aspects, she integrated that into some works that will be presented during the exhibition ’40 titles’.

But the exhibition also includes a work that marks the start of this artistic adventure: the video ‘Made in China’ she produced in 2012 in the Netherlands. It is since then part of CEAC’s video program. And exists of digitally modified photographs of the Great Wall of China, mostly taken by tourists and placed on the internet. Voigtländer arranged them in a sequence, suggesting a linear narrative within a seemingly cohesive whole, although each photograph was taken on a different spot, by different persons, on different moments. Bringing the images back here, she calls ‘Returning landscape’.

The title of the exhibition refers to her 40 artist books, also created during her stay here. Each book has a different title, for they were given by 40 different persons. Most of them she met wandering about during her stay in Xiamen. The concept is related to the working process.
“As an artist I am the center of my work but I walk different paths simultaneously and often they cross. I like to make things happen so I’m not totally in control and often create by interaction. The many works that came into existence after the video ‘Made in China’ in 2012 (part of the video program of CEAC), were created walking one path with several crossings and are now bundled in the book.”

Gallery

Rolling Snowball 5, Djupivogur, 2014

root — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 09:31:04 +0000

Opening

Saturday July 12 at 3 PM, 2014

Duration

July 12 till August 15, 2014

Location

bræðslan, víkurland 6, 765 djúpivogur

Artist

The Chinese European Art Center is delighted to present the event “Rolling Snowball- 5” in partnership with the Municipality of Djúpivogur. The purpose of this exhibition and the summer artist-in-residency program it is connected with, is to promote dialogue and cultural exchange between Chinese and Western cultures, as well as to bring an art-loving public to Djúpivogur.

CEAC’s network is constantly expanding. Hundreds of artists from all over the world have worked at CEAC. This stimulates action and communication between people from a local to an international level. “Rolling Snowball-5” is CEAC’s first large scale event outside of China. We are very proud of our part in bringing these wonderful artists from China and Europe to Djúpivogur!

Rolling Snowball/5, Djúpivogurpresents works of thirty-three visual artists from China and Europe who nearly all exhibited for or worked as artists in residence at CEAC in China. The exhibition consists of photographs, paintings, sculptures, video and drawings. An exhibition catalogue will be available.

CEAC also opened an artist residency in Djúpivogur where artists can work. This summer two Dutch artists will live and work in the village during the summer months.

Collaboration is at the heart of this work. The huge show of solidarity and support received from the artists and the villagers has been of extraordinary importance to our success. Djúpivogur proved to be a perfect host for this event. Together, we are working to make this event at Djúpivogur something truly memorable.
About Djúpivogur

Djúpivogur is a member of Citta Slow movement for small local organizations in 27 countries around the world. Cittaslow is the international mark of accreditation for municipalities that provide the highest quality living environment, local produce, hospitality, natural environment, infrastructure, cultural history and identity preservation.It is in this spirit that Djúpavogshreppur takes part in the exhibition in collaboration with the CEAC.

Opening words by

-mrs.InekeGudmundsson and ms. May Lee, directors of CEAC
-mr.GautiJóhannesson, mayor of Djúpivogur
-mr.ÓlafurRagnarGrímsson, President of Iceland

Participating artists
Árni Guðmundsson, Cathelijn van Goor, Chantal Spit, Erró, Hanne Tyrmi, Hrafnkell Sigurðsson,
Jaring Lokhorst, Jia Zhixing, Jin Jing, Katrin Korfmann, Kristján Guðmundsson, Lotte Geeven,
Marjan Laaper, Marianne Lammersen, Meiya Lin, Paul Kooiker, Pan Feifei, Peng Wanling,
Pieter Holstein, Qin Jian, Ragnar Kjartansson, Ragna Róbertsdóttir, Renate Wernli,
Rúrí, Sara Riel, Sigurður Guðmundsson, Sylvie Zijlmans, Scarlett Hooft Graafland,
Teresa Eng, Þór Vigfússon, Wei Na, Xu Huijing, Zhong Zheming.

Gallery

Double Dutch 2

root — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 08:33:49 +0000

Opening

August 23 at 5 PM, 2014

Duration

August 23 till 27, 2014

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Mels Dees

Mariëlle van den Bergh

Mariëlle van den Bergh often uses nature as a source of inspiration. In China she was struck by the variety of seafood and fishes on display in roadside stalls and aquariums. Many of them, like sea slugs, octopuses and jellyfish are rare in European waters. She combined her interest in these exotic animals with her fascination with Chinese glass. The products of the Xiamen glass factory Xinnuo, which van den Bergh visited with the staff of CEAC, reminded her of the colourful sea creatures. On a later visit to the Textile Market, she fell in love with the beautiful and complex woven wedding dress fabrics. To combine the hard and colourful glass and the soft, shapeless textile was a challenge, as was the construction. Another contrast van den Bergh wanted to use was that between the beautiful, shiny textile versus the cheap plastic, omnipresent in Chinese daily life. To her, the contrast between the exquisite and the practical, but ugly, is characteristic for present-day China.

“In spite of the fact that Mariëlle’s sculpture is quite tactile and concrete, one could actually call her a conceptual artist. She never makes anecdotal images – she departs from an idea and tries to produce a shape to materialise it, usually creating different layers of meaning, so the work can be interpreted from various angles. It is to her advantage that she has mastered many techniques: there will always be a material which expresses her ideas in the most effective way. As a result she keeps surprising us with the beautiful, lyrical and theatrical artwork.”

John van Cauteren, curator of the Municipal Museum Weert, Holland

Mels Dees:
“Most of my work is concerned with man’s relation to nature, and with the way our civilization uses space and natural resources to create our habitat. There is beauty and sadness in the products of man’s dream of independence, in the constructions he has made for centuries to assert his shaky dominion over nature. I planned to take this as my subject for my residency in China – and in particular I wanted to make a connection to the (recent) past. However, from the moment we left the airport I was overwhelmed, by the sheer size, the numbers and the tremendous liveliness of Xiamen. I did not know where to look first, but I felt I was constantly being looked at by everybody around me. And my plans suddenly seemed inadequate and slightly artificial.

So I needed to reduce the scope of what I wanted to do and, as language was no viable means of communication, I decided to take all this looking, seeing, watching – my own as well as other people’s – as a point of departure. In the early hours of the following days I made long walks through the city and along its beaches. The pictures I took focused on observing, on the continuous photographing all around me, on CCTV, all the different ways people are watching each other and themselves in this city. But my lifelong preoccupations also sneaked into the images, and, to add new layers of meaning, I manipulated part of the results on the computer.

The outcome was a mosaic of more than 50 images which are about Xiamen as much as they are about me – which means that some are ironic constructions, some quite straightforward representations, others just visual puns. It is for the spectator to decide. I intend to publish this series of photographs, combined with short texts, as an artist’s edition or in the shape of a book.

A light-hearted or even mocking approach is even more evident in the shopping bag project. Here I try to combine remembered images of the Cultural Revolution (as they filtered through to the West during the sixties and the seventies) with the happy-go-lucky consumer mentality that is prevalent in present-day China. And – at least to me – shopping bags have even acquired certain political connotations.”

Mels Dees and his partner Mariëlle van den Bergh, together with their son Quirijn, have been at many residencies in Europe (Ireland, Spain, France, Germany), Canada (Québec), Australia (Tasmania), India and Japan. They have been working at CEAC in Xiamen from July 9th onwards, taking lessons in calligraphy and traditional Chinese painting. Quirijn learned some Chinese and studied music production. They will be leaving China at the end of August: two months was far too short!

Gallery

Anaglyphs, 3D woodblock prints of Seascapes

root — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 15:33:42 +0000

Opening

June 28 at 5 PM, 2014

Duration

June 28 till July 11, 2014

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

About Bob Takes

‘Anaglyphs’ shows the result of a three months project that artist Bob Takes started in Xiamen at CEAC and finished in his hometown in Belgium.

Bob Takes (1953) is a steel sculpture artist based in Antwerp. He studied graphic design and audiovisual design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in the 80’s. Although his art is diversified, his background in graphic design is still clearly recognizable. Within his autonomous work Takes likes to play around and balance on the border of abstract and figurative. In the past Takes showed his work in established art spaces but also on a large scale in public spaces. Within most of the processes he goes through in order to make an artwork, he combines the digital with the manual. He came to Xiamen to take this merging of digital craft and manual craft a step further.

A recurring aspect in the work of Bob Takes is the ‘Seascapes’. Within the Seascapes, Takes translates the dynamics of the sea into steel sculptures. For his project in Xiamen he wanted to use the same concept but use a different method. Instead of using steel, Takes experimented with the traditional Chinese woodblock printing technique dating back to ca. 1500. Nowadays there are only a few people left in China who still master this traditional technique. Takes reinterpreted this ancient method and made it his own by introducing
digital craft and the art of 3D into the production process and the artwork itself.

In this exhibition, there are three works on show that mark the production process and
Takes’ practice of the traditional woodblock printing technique. The other works,
the 3D Seascapes, named after their GPS position, N14º | W118º V1, N14º | W118º V2 and N14º
| W118º V3 are the final results of Takes’ project. The Seascapes are colored in red and
cyan, so when seen trough the 3D glasses the Seascapes come to life.

Gallery

I AM A MOUNTAIN

root — Sun, 11 May 2014 16:26:33 +0000

Opening

May 25 at 5 PM, 2014

Duration

May 25 till June 11, 2014

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Jens Pfeifer

Katrin Korfmann

In different ways and with diverse media, the Dutch/German artists Katrin Korfmann and Jens Pfeifer investigate cultural identities and juxtapose unfamiliar and common ideologies. The result of their three-month residency at the Chinese European Art Centre is a surprising manifest of how entrenched we are in our own culture, even though we are living and creating art in a globalized world where we can easily set up a temporary studio on the other side of the earth.

In Korfmann’s new body of works she allows for realism, documenting human behavior that leads to a uniform result. In various places collective rituals are photographed: rituals sustained by individual euphoria in which colour – or colourful garment – dissolves all individuality. This uniformity consists of freely deployed ‘closed ranks’ and shows a euphoric play. The work presents a painterly, varied flurry of colours but on closer inspection, it reveals a physical, material essence of individuals who blend together into one large organism through their common actions.

“Wen ji qi wu” is the title of the large-scale photograph (270 x 385 cm) shown in the exhibition. During her residency at CEAC Korfmann devised, designed and carried out a ‘fake’ ritual that took place during Easter: Korfmann created special costumes and a choreography together with the dance students of Xiamen University and their teacher, Professor Li. The picture is a result of her made up ritual merging the European tradition of collecting hard-boiled colored eggs during Easter celebration with a Chinese traditional dance.

Jens Pfeifer’s work evolves out of his personal context and appears in various materials to enrich and emphasize his narrative. In search for objects which represent a personal though still Chinese identity, Pfeifer found once again that we most strongly connect our cultural identity to typical phenomena of local or regional expressions of nature.

At CEAC, Pfeifer exhibits two installations that deal with this manifestation of ‘nature in culture’. The first one, called “Elevated Nation“is a stack of glass tubes in the shape of bamboo, which reaches for the ceiling but is bound to collapse when carried out to its end.
The second is a series of hammered stainless steel objects. These depict some of China’s holy mountains but are titled after Pfeifer’s own personal saints. “I-Shan”, “J-Shan”, “K-Shan” (to be continued).

At first glance the material holds no association with the context. Pfeifer offers with this contradiction a different perception. What we see is not what we get as the work has it’s own rules.