Exhibition
Between Past and Future
New Photography and Video from China
Fri, Mar 24–Sun, May 14, 2006
Tickets: 3 Euro, concessions 2 Euro (Free admission with ticket for concert, reading or opera at the same day.)
Guided tours through the exhibition: on Sundays 16:00 h (admission free with ticket for exhibition), information: next@hkw.de or 030-39 787 180
With more than ninety works by forty-eight artists, this is the most comprehensive overview of contemporary Chinese photographic and video art ever to be shown in Europe. The artists respond to the upheavals to which people in China are subjected every day by making highly individual statements and engaging in an innovative aesthetic discourse.
The radicalism of their imagery is intensified by the use of novel techniques, resulting in monumental dialogues with reality. Wang Qingsong dedicates his huge digitally manipulated works to the workers of China, who are no longer cast as heroes but have become an insignificant element in a process of radical economic change. By spraying an enormous profile of his head on the ruins of old Beijing, Zhan Dali points his finger at the proliferation buildings that discard all human scale in the cold environments of high-rise offices and apartment blocks. In her works, Cao Fei presents cities that are experiencing indescribable growth as the playgrounds of an isolated, self-alienated youth.
The exhibition is divided into four sections. "History and Memory" focuses on the diversity of cultural traditions in China and raises the question of how to deal with a culture’s memory in an age of upheaval. The experimental approach to history finds an outlet in the radical use of the body as a means of artistic expression, as the sections "Performing the Self" and "Re-Imagining the Body" show. These works lend the new generation a voice of its own: a voice that has become urgently necessary in the process of reappraising the heritage of the Cultural Revolution. The last section "People and Place" deals with the dramatic changes and the specific form of westernisation which China - and its cities in particular - is experiencing. Three performances as well as a musical and a text intervention complete the picture of a society in radical transformation.
Curators: Wu Hung, Christopher Phillips
