Li Ran, Mont Sainte-Victoire, Video, Color, Sound,Live performance & Video Installation, 34′36′′, 2012

Mont Sainte-Victoire is a mountain located in South France, which artist Paul Cezanne had a full view of from his studio.  During Cezanne’s lifetime, he had painted dozens of paintings depicting this mountain. Li Ran uses the mountain’s name as the exhibition title, trying to construct his own entry point into this modernist aesthetic, whilst re-viewing fragmented experiences that are grounded in our own history. Li Ran has compiled a four-part statement comprising of the themes: Reflection of Images and Scenes, Gaze, Competition and Encounter. During the exhibition opening, a live performance took place with the artist mimicking voice-over styles from 1970s-1980s’ Chinese dubbed movies. The performance is accompanied with a display of three automatically timed projectors exhibiting a continuous loop of more than 200 photographic slides. The images of these slides feature ‘image extracts’ culled from the artist’s own aesthetic experiences of modern historical images of the ‘west’ found in textbooks and art history.

RELATED

Duan Jianyu, The Muse Has Awoken No.3, Oil on canvas, 181×217cm, 2011

Both Wang Xingwei’s Ji Gong and Duan Jianyu’s The Muse has Awoken No.3 both offer conspicuous comical impressions, which on the one hand, articulate a kind of literary comedy from the narrations of the figures on canvas, their expressions, motion, theatricality and etc., while stylistically – be it Wang Xingwei’s compositional momentum and the exaggeration rendered through brushwork, or Duan Jianyu’s kitsch and crass emphasis – give shape to the comedy of mannerism, providing theatricality for the language of painting. Thirdly, they are comical on a cultural history level as they have adopted the Baroque style to portray the Mad Monk and placed the Goddess on Dunhuang murals into modern countryside context, this kind of casual yet poignant fusion has taken the “La Comédie Humaine” approach to respond to the rapidly evolving Chinese society and the unsettled dust of cultural order.

Jiang Zhi, Fly, Fly, Video, Black&White, Sound, 5’15”, 1997

Man is living humbly like a slave submitted to himself and his surroundings. But this humble life, living in solitude, silence, fantasy, weariness, and passion are sometimes so overwhelming that at times we really just want to fly.
-It’s one way to transcend or escape
Can we really escape this gravity and lift up?
Which direction will we choose to fly?

Zhu Jia, Wardrobe

摄影机的镜头取代了一只手和眼睛的位置在一个衣柜里翻来找去的动作,摄影机记录了镜头与衣橱里的衣服直接的接触过程,强调了主观视觉存在的可能性。

Please scan the QR code to follow us on WeChat :新世纪当代艺术基金会