| Visitors
to the Beijing 798 district have been drawn to the
artist run Beijing New Art Projects where the emergence
of an immense mosaic of visual blogs has attracted
the attention of the artistic community as well as
regular checks by local government officials who approved
the content of the show just two days before its opening,
on the condition of hanging a curtain to cordon off
controversial works by the gallery’s owners
the international photography and performance artists,
the Gao Brothers.
Field
of Vision Beijing coincides with an exciting phase
within the evolution of comtemporary Chinese Art.
Since 2002 the Factory 798 (aka the Dashanzi Art District)
has become the place to go to see the latest developments
in Chinese art. This discarded Soviet era industrial
complex, once an important electronic production site
(making, amongst over things, key components of China’s
first atomic bomb) now houses Beijing’s artists
and galleries alongside trendy Chinese restaurants
and European style cafes.
Saturday,
September 16 marks the official opening of Field of
Vision: Beijing, the culmination of a year’s
work by its artistic director Stephan Hausmeister
and the Gao Brothers in collaboration with a core
group of international artists. Installation began
five days earlier and predominantly features work
by Chinese artists brought together by the Gaos. Featured
artists include Cang Xin, Feifei Lu, Han Bing, Ji
Shengli (Hei Yue), Lao Liu (Tian Yi Bin), Fei Liu,
Ma Han, Miao Xiaochun, QingQing, Ye Fu
Created
in three distinct stages, the week long process of
building the field begins with pasting a wallpaper
of digitally stitched photographs; a journey between
Shanghai and Beijing. The 12 metre screen spans the
entire length of the gallery. Added to this surface
is a transparent layer of crimson stencilled with
the phrase in Mandarin which translates as “objects
populate the world without, images populate the world
within". These layers form the backdrop
for a vast collection of over a thousand visual blogs
and as the work evolves, it migrates from billboard
poster to a complex mosaic of overlapping, idiosyncratic
perceptions of China. Images range from the banal
to the iconic, the unpredictable relationships between
imagery creating a multitude of hidden narratives
and thus meanings. Visitors navigating the wall experience
an oscillating sea of diverse individualistic focus
points, constructed from cropped, crumpled, crushed
and obscured imagery pasted to the field, creating
a tactile surface that disturbs the viewer’s
sense of spatial relationships.
Field
of Vision can be seen at Beijing New Art Projects,
No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing
100015
Email: bjartprojects@yahoo.com.cn
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Supported by:
Goethe-Institute, Beijing
Greenwood Global Media, USA
Institute for New Media, Frankfurt a.M., Germany
University of Hertfordshire, UK |
