Exhibitions & Events – List page – CEAC

WHITE MOUSTACHES AND OTHER WORKS

root — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 10:55:03 +0000

Opening

April 27 at 5 PM, 2024

Duration

April 27 till June 1, 2024

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Voebe de Gruyter

CEAC is pleased with Voebe de Gruyter’s new presentation. Being a narrative conceptual artist, the core of her work consists of narrative drawings, texts, photo works, and installations. Some works acquire a performative character through her presence.

In the work ‘Darkened library dictates artworks to hatch’, 2020, artworks are hatched by a library. Guiding forces that influence each other lead to unexpected phenomena. Also serendipity plays an important role in her very wide choice of subject matter. Mysterious situations and phenomena which occur simultaneously are important sources of inspiration for new work.

With Voebe de Gruyter, there is a continuous interaction between human and thing. For example, in her Chewing Gum Drawings from 1994 (collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), she documented that flattened chewing gum on sidewalks contained spoken texts. Later, she developed her ‘cable theory’ – based on an analogy with string theory and on spending a lot of time staring at the ground – a theory describing a world that exists underneath office furniture. Above the desks is the World Wide Web; below is the world of the cables. As an artist, De Gruyter adopts the viewpoint of the scientist. Like in science, her focus is on visualising information that cannot always be seen with the naked eye.

During her stay in Xiamen, De Gruyter became fascinated by the ancient Chinese history that lies out in the open on the ground. Specifically, she was intrigued by the very old shards and pieces of ceramics carelessly placed in and around planters that she observed on a balcony during a visit to her Chinese friends’ house. By examining these shards – which her friends found during walks in parks or construction sites – one can journey through various dynasties, some of which are thousands of years old.

De Gruyter makes sober and honest artworks free of artistic pretentions. Her primary goal is not to create finished, definitive artworks but to note down her experiences or make suggestions which will offer a different view of the surrounding reality. De Gruyter’s work often situates itself in the liminal space between appearing and disappearing. Some works exist only as text or as thoughts in the artist’s head.

Gallery

Mountain Archetypes and Lacquer Situations

root — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 06:38:08 +0000

Opening

March 2 at 5 PM, 2024

Duration

March 2 till April 13, 2024

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Lin Luanchong

Xie Xiuxiu

The Chinese European Art Center (CEAC) is pleased to present Mountain Archetypes and Lacquer Situations (or literally translated as Here and Now), a dual solo exhibition by Lin Luanchong and Xie Xiuxiu. An implicit intertextual relationship is conceived between the Chinese title of the exhibition and its corresponding English translation: Here and Now expresses a kind of transience in which one cannot step into the same river twice; while Mountain Archetypes and Lacquer Situations conveys a common sense between mountains and water. Indicating the relationship between the two artists, the title also reveals their mutual understanding and connection as they face different themes in the creative process.

In recent years, Lin Luanchong has been waiting for someone to arrive in his “mountain”. He relies on his memory to construct empty mountains in his imagination by means of imitating and shaping. For him, the presence of a mountain lies in its almost imperceptible, slowly growing outlines and hollow negative space. His method of using repetitive dots to construct structures rather than directly depicting real mountains stems from the memories he gradually regained in recent years: when he was a child, he copied scriptures and drew dots in the mountain with his grandmother. The strokes he wrote formed into pages of characters as days went by. This method of “recording” resembles self-documenting, but at that time he failed to grasp the essence and often gave up halfway. At present, however, he realizes that what matters are a rhythm of one’s own time and the technique of getting along with oneself. As a result, he starts to present the image of mountain as the subject of his work, including painting, collage, writing and bodiless lacquer ware (sculpture/installation). His efforts are made through continuous material experiments, and in a recent series named Things-in-themselves, a parody of the unfinished work of A Bit of Light in the Darkness of a Stubborn Stone, such efforts are most obvious. He/it is like water dripping through a stone, or the “opening of a paint bucket” in Zen Buddhism (Song Dynasty History of Zen Buddhism in China: Volume 14).

Distinct from Lin Luanchong in the creation form, Xie Xiuxiu broke away from the traditional “repeated polishing” method of applying lacquer since an early stage. One’s patience for the process may simply stem from a desire and obsession to “reveal through concealment”. Her works often vary depending on the personalities she moulds. Most of her friends may have the identical feeling that even though they’ve known each other for a decade, it feels as if they were new acquaintances with years of familiarity. As a reflection of her straightforward character, she intuitively chose to use the flow of water to capture the traces and floating shadows of the paint that change with the “momentum” in her creation. Two sets of her works will be exhibited this time.
One set features a nearly 20-meter-long scroll of bleach paint on fabric, which stretches throughout
the exhibition hall like a river. It can be imagined that creating such a huge painting requires the use of
all devoted postures. Each pull of the movement causes random fluctuations on the water surface. The other
set of works are samples of the paint bleaching experiments she has conducted in the past 10 years.
They are spread evenly on the exhibition hall wall like self-moment specimens,
waiting for the time-gift exchange with the audience.

Although Lin Luanchong and Xie Xiuxiu have different creative methods and styles, they have been
travelling and living together over the years. They frequently travelled to and from their respective hometowns,
facing similar but slightly different landforms, people and customs. Their intertwined life paths
gave rise to the overlaps in their creative methods and focuses. Artists residing in Fujian are susceptible to the influence
of the local region and culture.
In an area where mountains and seas meet, unified and comprehensive regional understandings
could hardly be reached based on the local landform constituted by islands and fractured narrow plains, thus each
municipality emphasizes the diversity of its history and tradition.
While Xie Xiuxiu comes from Youxi in central Fujian, a small town surrounded by a network of water
systems extending in all directions and named after a river, Lin Luanchong was born in the lofty mountains of
Ningde in eastern Fujian, which were the source of his name. With mountain ranges determining the terrain,
a long and narrow valley is formed running north to south.

Whether it is their respective personalities, the customs of their birthplaces,
or the imagery in their creations, this exhibition leads to the intersection of
mountains and rivers. Audience will also see a reassembled “Here and Now” at the scene:
Luanchong will place the collected hollow “mountain utensils” in a wooden frame device
on the top of a mountain; Xiuxiu will use traces of lacquer to outline a twinkling stream.
(Lacquer equals to river in ancient Chinese as recorded by the Chinese classic the
Analytical Dictionary of Characters: “Lacquer refers to water or river.”)

Gallery

COMMENTS: Declaration of Love / Campaign of Hate

root — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 05:56:06 +0000

Opening

January 6 at 5 PM, 2024

Duration

January 6 till February 3, 2024

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Michael Mackenzie

COMMENTS: Declaration of Love / Campaign of Hate examines the positive and negative discourse that is abundant in online comment sections on social media platforms. This projectexplores social media, particularly the attention economy, and its emotive binary nature. To participate in the attention economy is to get attentionfrom the anonymous masses by love or hate.

The social media spaces we inhabitare neo-liberal by nature as everything absorbed into social media platforms can be turned into capital. I explore this through the creative process of the making of these art works. I first accumulate the online comments through purchasing them off people for one yuan. I then appropriate theonline comments and recontextualize them in the form of text drawings, which are then sold for a much higher price as art objects. Some may say that I take trash culture and recontextualize it into high culture.

The purpose of this project is allowing the audience to engage with the ubiquitous online content they consume everyday through a critical lens and acknowledge how daily life has become commodified due to the nature of the attention economy and the structures of social media. By re-contextualizing the digital text into material form, this allows the text to acquire a human expression through mark-making.

This exhibition is part of my ongoing interest in creative works that explore the physical manifestation of the virtual world (the Internet). These drawings materialise social media comments using traditional basic analogue art materials like paper, pencil, pen, crayons, in order to represent the virtual human experience. This work is the beginning of a larger ongoing art project in which I will continue to buy online comments off people from other countries, with different languages, that will collectively form an international textual work that explores the global virtual human experience.

Gallery

“The Sea That Stands Before Me…”

root — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 09:28:03 +0000

Opening

December 16 at 5 PM, 2023

Duration

December 16, 2023 till 30, 2023

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Thomas C. Chung

Faced with hope or despair, humanity often navigates the unknown in life to find what it desires. In their quest for something more, they leave behind the comforts of what was once familiar. Nothing is assured when venturing into the open waters.

“The Sea That Stands Before Me…”, is an exhibition contemplating the notion of one’s devotion to living as a form of armament. My conceptual practice continues its inquiries into psychology, folklore, mythology, and philosophy, binding them as a cohesive tale.

How do we find one’s dreams if all seems lost? Can we rise from sorrow to feel worthy of embracing life again? These are the questions posed in the form of digital video landscapes, 3D-printed sculptures, and neon lights.

The experience of dreaming is one of the most universal of human experiences. “As Far As I Could See…” is a series of digital landscapes that illustrates this aimless sense of wandering merged with solitude. At times, the sensation seems almost symphonic.

When left to silence and to our own devices, our minds tend to wander, losing their ability to focus. “…The Things I Never Said” and “These Are My Letters…Forever & Ever” are companion pieces arranged as still-lifes. Wishes that go unspoken are often the most unsettling. Each sculpture is elegantly engraved with passages of text indicating the significance of the series, encased in vintage glass inkwells and bottles that contain 3D-printed quills and scrolls of letters.

Resembling washed-up debris in the shape of neon lights, this installation sits motionlessly against a wall, reminding us of the outside forces one cannot control, like a tide that cannot cease. We accept all potential by allowing ourselves to ease into life’s cadence.

Investigating loss and finding catharsis, “It’s Not A Lot…But It’s Something” are diptych sculptures lathered in electromagnetic chrome, resembling a couple of oversized dessert jellies. Galvanized by its exterior shell, these amorphous beings are captured in stasis like a memory frozen in time.

Much like the spirit of a celestial star, once a starfish becomes deceased, its body ceases to exist as a whole, transforming itself by releasing its physical form. Resisting the longing to calcify, “This Is Where I Wish To Be…” are a series of sculptures plated in electromagnetic chrome and embellished with candy to conceal their diminishment in size, preparing to celebrate the next phase of their journey.

Gallery

A horse is not a pony

root — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 08:29:06 +0000

Opening

November 11 at 5 PM, 2023

Duration

November 11, 2023 till December 9, 2023

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Kimball Gunnar Holth

There is a distinction between the moment an artist starts and the moment they finish an artwork.

In the first place, the artist typically chooses the materials and then, following a series of decisions, they use those materials to create an artwork – for instance a painting or a sculpture.

But what if an artist refuses to make those decisions while still wanting to make an artwork? In the work of Kimball Gunnar Holth, those decisions are left unmade, and we see a search for an image that never fully takes shape.

A half-assembled bed, blankets and sheets packed in plastic bags without a mattress in sight suggest a false start, or an abandoned attempt to reach some sort of order. He paints the silhouette of a horse (or a pony?) again and again, yet its face is an indistinguishable collection of random-looking marks.

These works ask the question of what is and isn’t important, which is similar to that of what is and isn’t art. When an artist does something, there is also an option to do nothing – to wait and to see what is already happening on the canvas, and to be open to a different outcome than the one you had in mind.

Gallery

Post-terrona

root — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 09:40:04 +0000

Opening

October 7 at 5 PM, 2023

Duration

September 30 till November 4, 2023

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Francesca Brunetti

Terrone is a pejorative term used by northern Italians to address and describe southern Italians. Rooted in the world “terra”, which means ground, terrone suggests the action of working the land by a poor and uneducated person. The reference to the ground is also connected with the color brown as a way to address the fact that people from the south of Italy have darker skin than people from the north. The term “terrona”, the female form of “terrone”, refers to the southern Italian woman. Famous twentieth-century movies, such as Marriage Italian Style (1964) with Sophia Lorenand Mamma Roma (1962) with Anna Magnani, created the stereotype of the terrona, propelling her into celebrity while also making her charming and lovable. These depictions thus serve only to reinforce the idea that the terrona is a chaotic person lacking intellectual and political agency.

According to these representations, the terrona makes guiding decisions and has authority only in the confinement of her domestic space. Her seductive body is a source of pleasure exclusively for the hetero sexual male needs: she is largely a subject of the male gaze. She leads a cloistered existence as it is only her close family members that benefit from her finely-honed skills to care for and protect the beloved. Unique from this depiction, the drawings composing this exhibition encourage the viewer to deconstruct the stereotype of terrona: to fantasize about a different and imaginative way to signify her.

According to this reconfiguration, the terrona’s aggressive and fiery temperament allows her to act ecologically: to govern the Mediterranean territory and to cultivate its natural elements. Brunetti’s drawings reveal how the terrona’s attractive and provocative body exceeds the enjoyment she is supposed to provide to the hetero sexual male. She becomes an autonomous agent of self-love that extends to the world around her. Her bond with the richness of the Mediterranean environment activates this ecstasy and joie de vivre. In addition to this, her talents of hospitality, usually kept for her family alone, invest her with the political and social authority to protect and preserve the natural resources of her environment.

Gallery

Black Tree Bridge

root — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 11:05:13 +0000

Opening & Performance

August 26 at 5 PM, 2023

Duration

August 26 till September 23, 2023

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Chye-Ling Huang

Black Tree Bridge is a full length play that uses a biracial identity whirlpool to explore how we might reconcile the binaries of myth, culture and reality to find meaning in our lives.

I’m a Chinese-Pakeha woman, multi-ethnic or mixed race. Finding one’s cultural (non white) roots has become its own legend among the Asian diaspora, a holy grail, pushing us towards finding importance and meaning in our cultural identity. But what happens if your family and culture are disconnected? Which myths do you use to find meaning?

In Black Tree Bridge, Chrys, a young biracial Chinese-Pakeha (New Zealand White/European) woman, spirals in a post-grad panic. When she meets firecracker Leo, she finds a welcome gateway to her Chinese side. But when he disappears, she must reconcile the myths she’s created around ‘Chineseness’, duality and identity itself.

The image of the fictional village called ‘Black Tree Bridge’ is her symbolic yearning to feeling whole in her Chinese identity – a literal ancestral home but also a bridge between the fractured identity of being biracial. But it’s a red herring. In the end the reflection in the water beneath the bridge becomes a portal that opens, a circle, a new symbol of wholeness to break the illusion of binaries within anything.

Putting a play in the context of an exhibition piece for a gallery is unique to my work so far
(which is mostly producing theatre with my company Proudly Asian Theatre in New Zealand). I’ve finished a draft of the full-length piece, utilising the artistic talents of students from Institute of Creativity and Innovation 淦馨悦 Xinyue Gan, 曹欣然 Xinran Cao, 袁梓超 Zichao Yuan and 夏季 Ji Xia to test some set concepts as well as an animation piece from incredible Xiamen based artists 张峥 Zhazha and陈溢 Yi Chen. We open with a performed reading of a 25 min super cut of the play; what remains will be the exhibition for the next 4 weeks. I can’t thank the team, and all the artists I’ve connected with here, enough for their incredible work and rich ideas that I’ll be unpacking for a long time to come.

As the work was conceived as early as 2014, the process became very meta. The idea for the play was sparked by the fantastical imagination of my family village in China, before I ever set foot there. Living in Xiamen with the actual village and
my family only an hour’s drive away, mid-residency I pushed the fiction further
as my own sense of future-nostalgia became an even more beautiful reality in real time.

The character’s journey is a historical document for a lost and floundering age
when I wanted the world to reach out and give me a sign. It’s tongue in cheek,
using tropes and known myths. It asks: who are the gatekeepers of culture and
meaning? Can we find meaning in culture without mythology? Can culture exist
without mythology? Without lineage? Is it inevitable for lineage to become myth?

Something a new friend told me in my first month here was to just go with the flow.
I feel like this ‘Xiamen attitude’ is a better summary of the moral of the story;
there are no answers anywhere, only beautiful duality, multiplicity and eternal
shape shifting.

Gallery

Water Glass

root — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 07:27:46 +0000

Opening

July 1 at 5 PM, 2023

Duration

July 1 till 29, 2023

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Yang Jianxiong

I wonder since when, every time I go back to my home in Hubei, I have to walk around the old house a few times. This is mainly because I can see new changes every time I walk. Below the eaves is a stream and different green plants constantly grow on its banks throughout the four seasons. Some of the plants have been there as long as I can remember, yet I am never able to name them. For example, there is a large plant with broad green leaves. I often sit in the middle of it as my exclusive sofa. Its leaves are very strange, a bit like aloe vera, but not as thick as it and without thorns. It has over a hundred leaves like that and can even lift me up halfway. Its stamens, which are stiff and fragrant, emerge in the middle each year. I know there are apps to identify photographed plants, and it should be easy to find out the species, yet I still feel reluctant to break the mystery. So I simply conserve it in memory. There are also some plants that I can name, such as orange trees, tangerine trees, plantains, bluegrass, ginger seedlings, konjac, celosia, and morning glory. The plants under the eaves are changing all year round. Some are seasonal flowers and plants, and mom always picks out the beautiful ones and keeps them. I, however, can only occasionally see these naturally growing plants in the rain with dripping raindrops during my brief visit back home.

As I want to reproduce the garden in my mind today, she is like a cool summer mat, gently rubbed on the drawing board. I have a pleasure of trying to compete with the city in terms of quietness. Although it seems to be coaxing myself, I really feel more connected to the moment when I first produce them. They travel from the number 0 to this world peeped by living creatures. Thus form is still important, even though it may be a mere shape.

Gallery

Man Trapped In a Room

root — Wed, 17 May 2023 05:30:43 +0000

Opening

May 20 at 5 PM, 2023

Duration

May 20 till June 17, 2023

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Temo Dou

“I have been exploring the possibilities of images, not just a momentary freeze. Reality has always been a puzzle to me, walking in the world is not necessarily more real than a dream, since I was young I like to observe quietly in the corners of the crowd. Those individuals like me, one by one, make up the so called reality, do they see what I see? Do they think the same as me? Is the environment or a memory stagnating? Individual absurdity emerges spontaneously. What about a group? A group is consisting of multiply individuals, the sum of absurdity. In the myth of Sisyphus, Camus said that once a person realizes the absurdity, he does not belong to the future. Since then my life has merged with dreams, books, movies, and photos, they have all become three dimensional, life is inseparable from them. Photography walks towards me as I walk towards photography, I cannot explain it, My thoughts always appear in a strong visual way on images, filled with magical mysticism in front of the camera the display is unobstructed, this is the sense of mission photography gives me.”

From 2020-2021 I devoted most time in my film project MAN TRAPPED IN A ROOM.

It tells about a story that this lonely man that been always trapped in a room imagined by himself, all his life is based in this imaginary room he built up, everything he use is illusionary objects comes from himself, this lonely man also projects his imagination about the outside world on the wall of the room. Till the end of this film I wanna raise the question to the audience about the current reality we have been living in the whole time, how we treat life and death, how us as human beings are so limited in our own consciousness cause these kind of questions are what I face on daily bases , I never understand this world we live in, attached with the rules and values human built up , these thinkings drive me to create art in general.

MAN TRAPPED IN A ROOM is in a way an end result after all the research (mostly focus on Lacan’s mirror theory) I did.

Gallery

Within Reach of Naturalness

root — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 07:10:00 +0000

Opening

April 15 at 5 PM, 2023

Duration

April 15, 2023 till May 13, 2023

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Yi Chen

The show stems from Yi Chen’s ongoing project, “Nearly Natural,” is a response to his experience of feeling alienated while living in urban environments. By exploring the boundary between naturalness and artificiality in these spaces, Yi investigates how the built environment is intentionally crafted through landscape design and architecture. Through his work, he integrates the concept of engineered space-making into his image-making process, employing digital manipulation and staged settings to offer a new perspective of the urban landscape from an elevated vantage point. Through this approach, Yi highlights how the identity-less urban environment blurs the line between reality and illusion, reflecting the everyday experience of urbanization. The natural elements incorporated in his work become a visual metaphor for our desire for fantasy and escape from the busy city life. Ultimately, “Nearly Natural” is a reflection of the human need for compensation in the face of a reality that can often feel overwhelming.

—-Boyang Yu

Gallery

16 x 13 inches

19 1/2 x 24 inches

14 x 11-3/8 inches

29-1/4 x 36 inches

16-1/4 x 20 inches

16 x 13 inches

20 x 16-1/4 inches