2016 – CEAC

CHANGING ORDERS

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 10:28:55 +0000

Opening

January 16 at 17.00, 2016

Duration

January 16 till 30, 2016

Location

CEAC (Xiamen, China)

Artist

Carien Engelhard

Changing orders. A broad title, which contains by its poetical inclusions, many layers of meaning for me. I cannot give just one explanation that covers all the meanings. I will give here my associations, which are related directly to my residency in Xiamen. This is my first stay in China and it is overwhelming for me. Before I came here, I have read a lot about this country and its long and admirable history and culture, however – of course – in just one short period of staying here, I am not capable to see, know and understand many things here. I just had enough time to sniff around a little bit.

What used to be order, changes regularly in history, again and again. Not only here, but that counts for the whole world. It’s part of human development, I think. Happily, how West and East look at and validate each other, has changed in time too and will keep changing in future as well. I am very happy that I had the chance to make some great acquaintances during my stay here. Partly because it’s always great to meet nice people, it’s always nice to meet and learn from experts, and partly also because meeting people – especially coming from another culture – opens doors for changing perceptions in relation to changing orders in the world.

During my lessons calligraphy I experienced how controlled the movements, bends and lines need to be made, but at the same time that it was much more playful than I expected. Sometimes things, which seemed – for my laity eyes – to be made with much speed, spontaneously and with a wild gesture, showed to be made with a great sense of order and mindfulness, and a lot of patience and control. It was for me a firm, but friendly confrontation. This experience for sure will have effects on my art work and the way I work and give rise to changing orders in myself.

Light and shadow is for years already a recurrent theme in my art. You can see this very clearly in my paper cuts and also in the metal work – translations of some paper cuts into metal – I realized here in Xiamen.
A form gets its expression only because there is shadow. The same applies to form and space. It is only through space that form exists and has meaning. And vice versa, space exists and gets meaning because form exists. These apparent opposites can only be united in a dance of reciprocal recognition.

The work I show here is just an impression of what I started here and is strongly influenced by what I learned and saw here. It still needs more time and reflection to integrate my new knowledge into the art I make. That will happen when I am back in the Netherlands.

Gallery

MOÐ

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 11:55:47 +0000

Opening

Saturday December 17, 2016

Duration

December 17 till December 31, 2016

Location

CEAC (Xiamen, China)

Artist

THÓR VIGFÚSSON

Thór Vigfússon (b. 1954) lives and works in Iceland. He studied art in Iceland and Holland.

“The art of Thór Vigfússon (b. 1954) is not highly complex, although its technical aspect is often trickier than it appears, and its world of vibrant colours keeps the eye busy. It is; colour and form. However, colour and form are not mere details in art, but rather its true essence, the basis of everything we consider the art form to be. The search for the right balance between these two elements is crucial and eternal, and one sense in Vigfússon´s works a great longing for some sort of visual solution – a solution however, that most likely grows ever more remote as the artist approaches it.”

“Thór Vigfússon comes from a family of craftsmen with a keen eye for detail. While making his way through the gallery districts of foreign cities he is often drawn to hardware stores, where he adds to his colour-sample collection. These prove useful once he has mixed his own colours by hand and has to provide exact details concerning the final finish of his works.”

“. . , the mind wanders to the basic principle of minimalism in visual art from around the middle of the 20th century, which found its outlet in the works of artists such as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman and Donald Judd. In his work, Thór Vigfússon aligns himself with this tribe of artists through the direct, straightforward nature of his art.”
(Gudni Tómasson, 2016, i8 Gallery)

Among Thor’s solo exhibitions is to mention; at Quint Gallery, San Diego, USA (2011); LA art Museum, Hveragerdi, Iceland (2003); Reykjavik Art Museum (2002) and at The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik (1998). In i8 gallery, 2005, 2010 and 2016. Beside that he has taken part in many group exhibitions in Iceland and other countries as well, through the years. He was nominated for the Carnegie Art Award in 2008 (touring exhibition to Helsinki, Oslo, Copenhagen, Reykjavik, Stockholm, London, Gothenburg and Carros, France). He has worked on a number of public commissions and frequently collaborates with architects.

All the works here are new and made here in Xiamen. Thanks to all the people who have helped me.

Gallery

Itinerario: a travel story

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 11:41:11 +0000

Opening

Saturday November 26, 2016

Duration

November 26 till December 10, 2016

Location

CEAC (Xiamen, China)

Artist

Emilie Hudig

This is the artist’s first solo-show in China.

During her artist in residence at the CEAC Emilie Hudig made a travel story. Inspired by a long tradition of travelogues and journals, which goes back to the 1600’s when the famous Dutch skipper Bontekoe wrote about his voyages to the South Chinese Sea.

Her approach follows the more literary genre of the ‘imaginary travel story’ of which Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe is perhaps the most famous. As a photographer with both a documentary and a poetic body of work Hudig is inspired by Defoe because he made ‘truth seems like fiction and fiction like truth’.

In her ‘imaginary travel story’ she is exploring the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity and the role of intuition and creativity in relationship to depicting reality.

The word itinerary comes from the latin, itinerarǐus, it means a sequence of various points on a trajectory, it doesn’t have a minimum or maximum length of time and includes places, stops and accidents that can be found along the route.

About her work she says: ‘I am especially interested in the ‘accidents’ along the route. I seek for the perfect accident, the perfect imperfection in my images. Magical and mysterious. For me, a metaphor for life. At least my life.’

Gallery

Stay Put…

Wed, 12 Oct 2016 11:20:17 +0000

Opening

Saturday October 29, 2016

Duration

October 29 till November 19, 2016

Location

CEAC (Xiamen, China)

Artist

Bettie van Haaster

Stay put… This is the artist’s first solo-show in China
Stay put is an exhibition which shows drawings and watercolours made over a period of 10 years. All works are made by looking closely at immediate surroundings.

In drawings shapes and spaces and their intricate interweaving are followed.

In watercolours fields and shapes of fleshy colour are depicted. The artist alternates making small structured paintings with thickly applied paint with periods of drawing and making watercolors.

Both are sides of an earthiness underlying all works, referring to landscapes and spaces which can be seen as landscapes of our thoughts.

The title Stay put refers to a quote from the book One square inch of silence by Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann. This book tells about a man’s journey to investigate and preserve silence as a human right to be able to connect with ourselves.

-Stay put is also needed to make the works.
-Stay put is needed to look at them and see.

Stay put and concentrates on what you see in your everyday surroundings.
There you”ll find wonderful shapes and colours in a cat, fruit, a plant or tree.

All the miracles of the world are in closed in that surrounding, if you take time and see.

Gallery

It is what it is

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 11:12:56 +0000

Opening

Saturday September 24

Duration

September 24 till October 22, 2016

Location

CEAC (Xiamen, China)

Artist

Pan Feifei & Liu Lulu

Chinese European Art Center is pleased to announce Pan Feifei & Liu Lulu joined exhibition It is what it is.

Pan Feifei was born in Shandong China. She currently lives and works in Xiamen. About her work in this exhibition, she says,

The black crescent moon gives out yellow light;
The elves are rambling along with the dark clouds;
The cactus ascends to a height and look far into the distance in its golden new outfit;
Two islands talk to each other in dense fog;
A low-spirited party for the geeks is taking place under the dull red night sky.
Going through the silent architectures, I experience strange things, people and events.

Liu Lulu was born in Ganzhou China in 1990. She used to study at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands as an exchange student during her postgraduate studies at the Art College of Xiamen University. She currently pursues the finance industry.

Previously her works mainly involve documentaries and experimental photography. Recently, she has been trying new media apart from photography. Her series exhibitions include Nothing special2+, Nothing special 3, Nothing special 5, The possibility of an island, Blindness and Golden record – 2016 final fantasy.

About her work in this exhibition, she says,

For the recent years, I’ve been collecting objects and behaviors related to my own life that do exist or had taken place. In an attempt to express contemporary society, I connect them randomly as raw materials or join them in a most basic and simple way, and then create my works without much pondering. This exhibition features part of the artworks of this series.

Gallery

A travel in a world beyond

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 11:00:17 +0000

Opening

Saturday July 9 at 5 PM, 2016

Duration

July 9 till 30, 2016

Location

CEAC (Xiamen, China)

Artist

Inge-lize Zevenboom

Melancholia, longing,
loss of childhood, innocence, believe in magic.
A story, a tale, a happy ending
about a world far away, but close to your heart
to be found in the middle of nature,
about adventure, discovery, romance
a magical world …

These lines above come as close as I can get to describe the essence of my work. I thought long and hard on these words. It was first paragraph of what I wrote to the CEAC when I applied for the residency. Coming to China has always been a dream of mine. Already as a child I was fascinated by the country. The reason for that is perhaps that here the magic that I look for in my paintings seems to be more alive. And nature in China is still mostly wild and untamed. The fulfillment of the dream to come to China was postponed for some years, because I was allowed to fulfill another dream first, i.e. studying at an Art Academy. But after I graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the Netherlands, there was no stopping me from going on my adventure. To China and beyond, because instead of just taking a plane from the Netherlands I took an older and far more interesting way, i.e. the Trans-Siberian Railway, all the way from Moscow to Beijing. As a consequence, a lot of the art you see here is inspired both by what I saw on that trip and by what I saw in China. It was mostly the nature of this places that inspired me. See if you can recognise the Mongolian rock formations or the Chinese mountain from the Guilin area.

The series shown here is called ‘a travel in a world beyond’ and is, of course, called after the travels that I made to and in China, but also after the trips my mind makes to another world, a world beyond, a world only I see, but like to share with you through these snapshots of paintings. I invite you to enter this world with me and, once there, to invent your own story. Because the story is there, you just have to look.

Gallery

Rolling Snowball 7, Djupivogur, 2016

root — Sat, 02 Jul 2016 08:41:15 +0000

Opening

July 2 at 3 PM, 2016

Duration

July 2 till August 21, 2016

Location

bræðslan, víkurland 6, 765 djúpivogur

Artist

The Chinese European Art Center (CEAC) in Xiamen, China has been organizing large-scaled group exhibitions outside of Xiamen and even outside China since 2010. A total of six of them have been realized in collaboration with local cultural organizations in cities including Shanghai, Guangzhou, Quanzhou in China and in Djupivogur, Iceland. These group exhibitions brought together international artists from the full spectrum of disciplines including drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, video and performance. They serve as the perfect occasion for establishing partnerships, cultural exchange and creating exposure.

The two Rolling Snowball exhibitions that were organized in cooperation with the municipality of Djupivogur in 2014 and 2015 were a great success. The event forms a highlight in the village over the summertime and attracts over 3500 international and national visitors during one month. This year we invited the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, to join the project. The Rijksademie residency is an institute for emerging professional artists from all over the world. It offers selected artists a platform for further development of their work during a two years’ work period. We are very proud to work with Rijksakademie on this event.

The exhibition Rolling Snowball 7, Djupivogur in the old fish factory Brathslan, is liberated from a theme or one single curatorial perspective. Rather is strives and succeeds to show outstanding international and national artists together in the grand old fish factory, exchanging ideas and working together. Twenty-two renowned Icelandic artists from different generationsa are invited to present works together with ten young artists of the Rijksakademie. They show existing works within the exhibition or install a site specific work. Encounters with Icelandic artists and villagers, exchange of practices, work and life are a crucial part of the event. At the same time the show promotes emerging Icelandic and Dutch art.

We thank the municipality of Djupivogur and the villagers for their hospitality, and Alfa Freysdottir, Thor Vigfusson and Erla Dora Vogler for helping us achieve yet another successful event. We thank the Rijksakademie and our sponsors the Mondriaan Fund and Uppbyggingarsjothur Austurlands for making this event possible. Last but not least we thank the artists for sharing their work with us, and the public in Iceland. We are looking forward to a wonderful experience with all of you in the summer of 2016.

May Lee, director CEAC
Ineke Gudmundsson, Senior director CEAC
Annelie Musters, CEAC Platform Amsterdam

The exhibition will be opened by Mrs. Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Iceland’s Minister of Education, Science and Culture and Mr. Gauti Johannesson, Major of Djupivogur.

Participating artists
Arna Óttarsdóttir, Árni Páll Jóhannsson, Christine Moldrickx, Dagrún Aðalsteinsdóttir, Egill Snæbjörnsson, Elín Hansdóttir, Eva Spierenburg , Finnbogi Pétursson, Geirþrúður Finnbogadóttir Hjörvar, Hekla Dögg, Hrafnkell Sigurðsson, Hreinn Friðﬁnnsson, Joseﬁn Arnell, Juliaan Andeweg, Kristján Guðmundsson, Magnús Pálsson, Margrét Blöndal, Marije Gertenbach, Matthijs Munnik , Mercedes Azpilicueta, Olga Bergmann, Ólöf Nordal, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Ragna Róbertsdóttir, Ragnar Kjartansson, Robbert Weide , Berglind Ágústsdóttir, Rúna Þorkelsdóttir, Rúrí, Sigurður Guðmundsson, Tamar Harpaz, Þór Vigfússon.

Gallery

Gravity Escapement

Thu, 12 May 2016 10:50:10 +0000

Opening

Saturday May 14

Duration

May 14 till June 11, 2016

Location

CEAC (Xiamen, China)

Artist

Fei Li

Gravity Escapement is a long term project of landscape painting. The goal is through decades of consistent in-depth working with visual language, to see what the painter can do to the genre of landscape. It is also a metaphor: the intricate structure of nature, the dynamic life force going against the gravity and up to the sky, and the tension between “capturing” and “releasing”. 离相 is a series of it, created during the painter’s residency in CEAC, China.

离相is from The Diamond Sutra, meaning going beyond the appearance. It is relevant to painting in terms of painter’s relationship to the visual reality – an unending concern throughout the history of art. There is a powerful tension involved in the process between the desire to express painter’s feeling that comes with seeing, and the inward searching that comes with memory and imagination, which turns every mark into a question: is this what I saw? In the journey back to the East, where inhabited a profound history of painting with imagination, and in whose greatness of visual tradition painters find inspiring, shelter and hope, something new has opened up.

Gallery

Un state body

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 10:41:44 +0000

Opening

April 2, 2016

Duration

April 2 till 30, 2016

Location

CEAC (Xiamen, China)

Artist

About Phil Bosch

This exhibition entitled un state body presents four artists video pieces by Aimée Zito Lema (Argentina/The Netherlands), Leung Mee-ping (Hong Kong, China), Wei Na (Inner Mongolia, China) and Phil Bosch (The Netherlands).

Leading question in the videos is what shapes perception and meaning at the moment society undergoes radical changes? Taken as a start point from Phil Bosch work Telluric V, all the videos register different bodies in different contexts as carriers and ‘outtakers’ of shifts in meanings. The title of this exhibition refers to these moments of change when meanings are being set loose, or are in the process of becoming something else when coming into contact or connection. All the videos take the body as the vehicle to express this.

Aimée Zito Lema
(Argentina/The Netherlands, lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
‘Rond de jambe’, 2015, 3 channel video installation with sound
www.aimeezitolema.com

Rond de Jambe is a research project that takes the history of the Stopera building in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) as a starting point. Built between 1979 and 1986, the building that serves as a home for the National Opera and Ballet as well as the City Hall was created with strong opposition from the neighbours and left-wing movements in Amsterdam. They claimed, among other things, that the space should be used for social purposes and houses, in opposition to that, the Stopera building would serve to an elite, and had been planned without any historical and social awareness or perspective, nor dealing with the traumatic history of the area (the old Jewish area) which was marked by the WWII. The conflict between the city government which supported the Stopera building and the neighbours led to years of confrontations, protests and demonstrations. The work Rond de Jambe takes this history as starting point and juxtaposes the ‘political body’ and the ‘dancing body’, by using archival images from these demonstrations and protests, and working together with dancers, translating the movements into dance.

Leung Mee-ping
(lives and works in Hong Kong, China)
‘Out of Place’, 2005-2011, video installation
www.lmp.hk

This is a long-term video installation project from 2007-2015. The works covers various cities, starting from Hong Kong, then other Asia cities as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Vanarasi, Singapore、Bangkok, Tokyo, Bali, Yangon, Hong Kong, Wu Chi Minh, Seoul, Phnom Penh, Colombo, Manlia, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Macau, Ulaanbaatar, …etc., up to now 26 cities. It is I about close surveying and following a complete wanderer who wandering aimlessly in street. Through his/ her long feature to reveal the current scene of a city around her / his own life under Asia’s influence of globalization —sameless within differences.

Through the individual, and probes into the ordinary life of a lone figure on the micro- views of Aisa’s cities. I was survey a person wandering but also leading by them through the streets in city. It appears that I am secretly investigate a person who has no fixed place in the city, fast city development, homeless with nationalism, new technology in a traditional religious heaven and material world of a late capitalism.

Wei Na
(Inner Mongolia, China, lives and works in Xiamen, China)
‘Temple’, 2011, video with sound
‘Mr Zheng’, 2010, video with sound
www.weina.nl

The center of my work comes out of my observations and personal experiences of the world around me as I explore the basis of civilization, social process, human survival, and similar questions.

Mr. Zheng
An old Chinese man tells his own story in a certain room in Amsterdam China town. It based on my own experiences of communicating with different Chinese generations who live in Amsterdam. The work expresses feelings of living in a totally different world.

Temple
This work “Temple”, it happened in summer 2010, I came back my hometown-Hohhot of Inner Mongolia from Amsterdam for summer holiday. The city had changed rapidly, I felt foreign once more.
It was one o’clock in night. With my friends I was searching for a place to eat. Came across a popular barbecue area. The building was architecturally miserable. It smelt of frying oil and coal-fired mutton; the tables were dotted with islands of dried ketchup and seasoning from the meals of leaving guests; the lighting was unforgiving, bringing out pallor and blemishes; And the chairs painted in childishly bright colors, had the strained jollity of a fake smile. I heard this building would be going to remove after two weeks (During the city development, all the old houses would disappear in my hometown soon).

I noticed a man was standing near the door and cooking the barbecue; sweat poured down his face, the gust of wind was blowing the smoke into his eyes, he was a bit cough, Sometimes the risen fire almost touch his face. But he has to continue all night, night by night… Yet something about the scene moved me. There was poetry in this cooking man. Or it is a picture of sadness – and yet it is not a sad picture. It has the power of a great melancholy piece of music. No one was talking, no one admitting to curiosity or fellow feeling. People gazed blankly past one another at the serving counter or out into the darkness. We might have been seated among rocks.

Its appeal made me think of certain other equally and unexpectedly images that had been touched me: the hands of a dustman, the mud on the face of a builder, the wrinkles on a vendor… and the work of a nineteenth-century philosopher on pessimism and a twentieth-century painter…

Phil Bosch
(The Netherlands, lives and works in Utrecht)
‘Telluric V’, (2014) video with sound
‘Telluric II’, (2012) video with sound

The two videos by Phil Bosch are part of the Telluric series that opens up to the question of what is that shapes perception and how meaning is being established.

The focus is to localize the unidentified space in what we see, what we think we see, and where not yet words have been found for. ‘Tellus’ means in Latin ‘of or belong to the earth’ and refers to the ‘Telluric system’, where the earth is being regarded as a living and breathing body where all natural phenomena and human activity are being established from their local context (and not by long distance forces such as the sun and the moon).

Telluric II is a poetic sequence of hand-shot, grainy 8mm images that seeks to defamed perception, opening up to subtle visual relations in between the different frames. Ultimately creating a shift from looking at a thing towards the act of looking itself.

Telluric V is a cinematic investigation that seeks to open up to a prelinguistic space in the attribution of meaning. Composed of digital video recordings and digitalized 8mm film, it deals with fragments of conversations about the origins of language and of a hunter gatherer society by means of the presumably oldest prehistoric sanctuary known as ‘Göbekli Tepe’. The video is a woven structure of recordings of moving, watching, listening bodies in (for the viewer) unrecognizable, darkened spaces of monuments of historical importance such as the Vatican (Rome) and the Haya Sophia (Istanbul); of talking bodies in public spaces of resistance such as Taksim Square (Istanbul) by night where people were invited to speak about their wishes and hopes for the future, of pre-historic, rural landscapes and of vast colorfields of 8 MM recordings at moments of sunrise and sunsets.

Gallery

Draiocht

Sat, 12 Mar 2016 12:13:24 +0000

Opening

Saturday February 27, 2016

Duration

February 27 till March 19, 2016

Location

CEAC (Xiamen, China)

Artist

Paddy Lennon

When Paddy Lennon paints what interests him in the work is its underlying abstraction. This is what generates its quality, its life and its innate truth. If the viewing can arouse sensations, thoughts, ideas and feelings and stimulate the viewer then for Lennon it is successful.

However an underlying thread runs through his work. The visual exuberance of the landscape, the richness and rhythm of life are all an essential element of his art. Over time the landscape has become minimal while colour and light came to suggest glimpses of the subject; sea, rock or sky. He uses vibrant colour and ethereal light to change the mood and atmosphere of these images asking the viewer to immerse themselves in the interplay of form and tone. Through a balance of colour, the light of the sun has been transcribed into his paintings through the vividness of hue giving an intense illumination. Lennon paints and draws a country whose existence is found only in his work. A country both imaginary and real. Formed from sensations, memories of a place connected by a sense of space and time. He lives his work before it comes into being.

Paddy’s short immersion in China has been a very liberating and exciting one. His work has taken some surprising turns. He has become more concerned with the exploration of the medium itself and the challenge of taking his work (still tentatively connected to figuration and landscape) to another level.

These paintings are from the storehouse of his memory. He has not forced a particular style or look. Instead he has allowed the work to develop in a natural way. This process allows the work to become open to discovery. Through this Lennon achieves a harmony and an art of balance. Sometimes his work is somewhat sombre and mysterious but it is always an uncluttered essence, subtle and evocative. He creates an emotional resonance that not only attracts the viewer but remains with them long after viewing the work.