2021 – CEAC

Events not yet born

root — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 08:31:01 +0000

Opening

November 28 at 4 PM, 2021

Duration

November 28, 2021 till December 31, 2021

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Hao Lin

After graduating from university in the summer of 2020, I stayed in a mountain primary school as a teacher until today. During this period of my life I often felt some strong oppositions, such as concealment and repetition, reason and emotion, order and imagination. I kept rediscovering the relationship between people and the world, and realised that the beauty of things lies in the chaos, in the vacuum that it reveals when it changes, in the subtle moments that are indifferent between fiction and reality.

One day I read a line from Stevens’ poem: The moon is the mother of pathos and pity. And the image of this little girl immediately came to mind, for I have often been ashamed of myself in her silent and troubled eyes. She is a full moon born early, pacing through the damp, dim bamboo forest and displaying a brief season. Eventually she looks into the abandoned ocean, which responds to her with a violent outburst and a long tremor.

Once I found a graffiti in a student’s book of ancient Chinese poems, drawn by SJQ, What I had them write that time wasa story about Confucius passing by and seeing two children discussing the changing size of the sun. Above that graffiti are the words of the young child mocking Confucius in the original text: Who says you have more wisdom?

During this experience as a teacher, I often fell into this type of question: Am I qualified to influence these children’s memories and help them appreciate theabundance of human emotions? My answer later was to forget the illusory sublimity, the existence, the order, the inseparability of the ever-repeating daily life of all of us. With SJQ’s permission, I collaborated with him on this work.

This is the story of a fishman named Weldon who tells how he lost his left eye in anticipation of psychological solace.

A little boy promised to play a game with me: he would pick 7 stones and hide one in a different place every day, and he would be able to last seven days. Eventually he failed at the end of the sixth day, and the seventh stone was thrown into a rain-soaked spider web.
Thanks to the kids who took part in my shoot and played with me.

Gallery

No planet is smooth and lovely

root — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 08:11:59 +0000

Opening

October 23 at 5 PM, 2021

Duration

October 23 till November 20, 2022

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Li Jiawen

Shen Mingquan

In the practice of Li Jiawen and Shen Mingquan, various and elaborate threads are revealed to the audience through a range of forms. Originating from personal experiences and visions, they experiment, explore and present work through graphic design, mixed media installation, film, and experimental video.

Li Jiawen’s real-life account of a fraud is told through the eyes of a young woman who sells flowers for a living. The figure in the work is driven away, wandered, and encounters the same experience in a different time and space in a state of limbo.

The artist forensically revisits, deconstructs, and reconstructs this experience, extracting visual elements and coded language, fusing time, place, and events to recreate an unstable space-time, filled with fragments of elements from different dimensions. The artist’s individualized perspective creates a thread that collides in a cascade of virtual and real events. The artist does not present a direct facsimile of the events but leaving gaps in these ‘scenes’ for the viewer’s imagination.

In the Shen’s two videos work, she presents the behavior of a ranger who develops into obsessive behavior as they repeatedly photograph trees repeatedly. Through this behavior we witness the process of the ranger and a human ape exploring each other. In these two stories, the authors attempt to make visible movements hidden in linear time and real space, capturing what remains of the daily fracture, revealing, small and always unbridgeable gaps in time. At that point where nothing is seen, where there is no meaning, the image returns to our gaze, where one encounters one’s own object-relative. Do clues and information become lost in this flow?

Gallery

Boat is sailing into Island

root — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 05:36:04 +0000

Opening

July 31 at 6 PM, 2021

Duration

July 31 till September 11, 2021

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Liu Yuanyuan

Liuyuanyuan’s artistic practice stems from the dual pursuits of cognizing the true self and exploring a free mind, and during this process, she has been building a self-consistent creation system——the “Bottle”, and it contains concepts such as transitional abstraction, deconstruction-construction-reconstruction, geometric structure, and shadow zone. Meaningless is the core concept of the “Bottle”, which means space, interspace, and nothing. At the same time, she created the Bottle Language, which is the imagined community in the sense of the Bottle. She uses the Bottle Language to create works to construct the Bottle World.

“This world is the real abstraction without any meanings,
because the free-land only can be reached without meanings.”

In this exhibition, I get inspiration from classical music, takes rhythm as structure of the subject, and use installation, image, painting and photography to compose “Nature Symphony.” It consists of four movements, each part of which is composed of multiple sequences, and each sequence is filled with individual events. At the same time, I used this creative logic to construct a graphic Bottle Language, each graphic is like a sequence of sounds, so as to achieve the purpose of interpreting complex spiritual feelings with low-limit materials. The exhibition presents the process of perception, organizing the various sensations in the deep Icelandic natural landscape and composing them into visual music. It is about nature’s purposeless, meaningless structure of existence. Perhaps this is a truly free life form, after the mind gets rid of memory, puts aside thoughts, and escapes the constraints of self-consciousness?

【Cosmic Meaninglessness of Human Life】

In the summer of 2019, I came to Iceland and started a three-month residency project. Being in the vast nature for a long time, I truly feel the insignificance of human life. It’s not on the scale, but on the limit. Mountains, rocks, and moss still exist after I died; and I will be erased forever. My existence is just a small fluctuation in the space and time of the universe. What gives life meaning is ourselves, and this meaning is only meaningful from the perspective of the world. From the perspective of the universe, our lives have no meaning.
The pursuit of meaning is the pursuit of transcending the “limits of individual life.”
If we are not finite beings, there will be no pursuit of meaning.

“The paradox of life is that even though you try to ‘be’ something meaningful,
in the end, you just exist.”

In the early morning, the sun pierced through the dark clouds, touched the snow-covered
mountain peaks, strolled the ravines valleys, and finally poured on the earth.
I listened to the symphony played by nature, with light, mountain streams, trees,
wind, and birdsong all in it. My sense of self disappeared, and the spirit entered
the silence that was not existed by memory and thought. This is the interspace between
the two types of memories. When this interspace can be maintained, a new state is created
that is no longer a memory. I am like a rock, just a pure existence in the universe,
this is real freedom.

Gallery

I Know No More Than What I Know Now

root — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 00:22:27 +0000

Opening

June 19 at 5 PM, 2021

Duration

June 19 till July 17, 2021

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Jin Jing

“I had never seen the sky so close to the ground.
I believed I could touch it as long as I keep going up.

…Yes, I did believe at that moment.”

In the summer of 2019, I went to Iceland for a three-month residency. After the initial excitement over the pure and deep beauty of the natural landscape, I felt only frustrated and directionless on my own work. The creative methods I had been good at before all failed there. As Camus said: “Discovering the thickness of the world and seeing how unfamiliar a stone can be, we feel powerless. With what intensity nature shows, any landscape can deny us.”

Once, I stood on a mountain and watched tourists in colorful mountaineering suits walking in the distant mountains like colorful pixels moving on the dark screen. Suddenly, a distant mountain shook a bit, I felt. It was as if the blowhole on the back of the giant whale let out a low sigh, shaking off the dust on the back. At that moment, I realized where my frustration on creation came from.

I have been living in cities, in man-made landscapes and in the constant stream of data… We are linked; I am a part of them. But here, we are not connected to the ground under our feet. There is an invisible barrier separating us, even though we are standing in the middle of the landscape. And that “shake”, even if it were an illusion, reminded me that I had nothing to do with where I stood. So, I began to try to put the entry point into a kind of subtle awkwardness and sense of distance in the relationship between human and landscapes. Trying to show how human’s “outsider” position is further emphasized when facing non-artificial nature after escaping from the piled up urban spectacles.

This exhibition includes photography, video and related sculptures and texts. In the presentation of photography, each image forms a stage setting (tableau) without context and spatiotemporal boundary. People and man-made objects appear inside this “tableau”, but lack a narrative connection. It shows that in front of nature, the appearance of human in landscape is like having just landed on the surface of an unknown planet; uneasiness emerges behind the seemingly orderly and all of us seem to be an instant that can be completely ignored.

Gallery

There is something wrong but it looks poetic

root — Thu, 20 May 2021 01:56:46 +0000

Opening

March 27 at 5 PM, 2021

Duration

March 27 till April 25, 2021

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Qianfu Ye

My work observes the process of making something, and the minor difference during the repetitive process. This time it is about the creativity the mindful students have while they forget the correct answers during the examinations.

I mostly work with video, performance, installation and drawing.

When I was young, I was always against transcribing. The first reason is I couldn’t write the mechanical typing style letters. I also hated following the construction of writing. Sometimes my mom had to help me with my transcribing homework as I was extremely slow.

But maybe once you have the freedom, you might choose something you escaped from. While creating my artwork, I found myself sometimes do the transcribing thing.

Sometimes I drew my moving shadow; sometimes I tried to repair a broken letter; and sometimes I cooked all the words as soup, once I even transcribed the reflection in my footbath.

Recently, while sitting next to my mom who teaches mandarin and was correcting the examination papers, I was gradually lost in the different fantastic wrong answers: there was something wrong in these sentences, but they certainly looked like a piece of poetry.

Wrong poetry is still poetry, and what’s right and wrong? Going beyond all the wrong answers, I can feel the energy of creativity.

What’s the “wrong answer”? Humans are always correcting themselves and redefine the “right” — a man is just a thinking reed.

In the mean time, I feel sorry for these poetries, as nobody would appreciate these messy pieces, including the creators: students who study hard will go for the right answer; and the one who is not interested in study, would mostly forget the examine as soon as possible.

So I start my transcribing task again, only me, but perhaps this time it could be a little bit fun.

Gallery

Under The Bed Sale

root — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 11:31:42 +0000

Opening

April 30 at 5 PM, 2021

Duration

April 30, 2021

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Most artists have a secret pile of older artworks, prints, photos and sketches that accumulates in a dark corners of their studio or home. One of the classic places to store these artworks is under the bed. It’s nice and dark, flat and undisturbed down there. For this event, we’re inviting a mix of Chinese and international artists to look under their beds, to dust off an interesting art work and to bring it to CEAC on the 30th. During the daytime the artworks will be on display and in the evening we’ll sell them by auction!

For the auction, the artists will first introduce their work and then the bidding will commence. It will give us all a chance to get to know one another’s art a bit better and build community. It will also be a chance for you to join in the bidding and take an original artwork home with you. So come along, meet the artists, take a look at their work and if you like it, take a chance in the auction, you might have something to take home.

In the spirit of a high-end international art auction, we too will also have the possibility for a limited number of online bidders who can join the event… via a WeChat video call. If you cannot attend in person but want to join the auction this way, please get in touch.

Participated artists: Fraser Stephenson, Daniel Staincliffe, Grant McTavish, Yujun Wang
Jill Vincik, Bill Aitchison, Qianfu Ye, Huang Shizun, Jin Jing, Liu Yuanyuan, Wei Na.