2015 inToAsia: Time-based Art Festival
“inToAsia: Time-based Art Festival” is the first art festival specialize in promoting Asian media arts in north America. InCube Arts launched the first edition of “inToAsia: Time-based Art Festival”, a public event for Asian New Media Arts in 2013, gathers together a group of time-based art, including videos, short film, animations, kinetic installations, and sound art performances. Total 33 artists coming from Japan, Taiwan, Korea, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and India. The Festival 2013 was located at four spaces in New York City such as The Queens Museum, Stephan Stoyanov Gallery in Lower East Side, the NARS foundation and Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn.
We are delighted to present the second edition of inToAsia: Time-based Art Festival 2015 which will take place in October, 2015 in New York City, with focus on Asia-based new media artists. Organized by CHEN Wei-Ching, Joanne and curated by WANG Chun-Chi, Loredana PAZZINI-PARACCIANI and Carol Yinghua LU, with three curatorial concepts, inviting a group of time-based Asian artist total of 27 coming from Taiwan, Japan, Korea, China, Canada, United States, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Philippines. The exhibition located in three art spaces in New York City such as The Queens Museum, The Sylvia Wald + Po Kim Gallery and inCube Arts SPACE in Manhattan.
We are delighted to present the second edition of inToAsia: Time-based Art Festival 2015 which will take place in October, 2015 in New York City, with focus on Asia-based new media artists. Organized by CHEN Wei-Ching, Joanne and curated by WANG Chun-Chi, Loredana PAZZINI-PARACCIANI and Carol Yinghua LU, with three curatorial concepts, inviting a group of time-based Asian artist total of 27 coming from Taiwan, Japan, Korea, China, Canada, United States, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Philippines. The exhibition located in three art spaces in New York City such as The Queens Museum, The Sylvia Wald + Po Kim Gallery and inCube Arts SPACE in Manhattan.
Retina of the Unconscious
Curated by WANG Chun-Chi
Venue｜The Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Foundation and inCube Arts SPACE
Oct. 1 – 24, 2015
Curated by WANG Chun-Chi
Venue｜The Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Foundation and inCube Arts SPACE
Oct. 1 – 24, 2015
KUO I-Chen, LIGHTYEARS, 2011, Photography Installation.
One of Freud's central achievements was to demonstrate how unacceptable thoughts and feelings are repressed into the unconscious, from where they continue to exert a decisive influence over our lives(1). Contemporary perspectives on the unconscious mind are remarkably varied. How one views the power and influence of the unconscious relative to conscious modes of information processing largely depends on how one defines the unconscious.
This expanded and enhanced view of the unconscious as the artist analyzing shows the hidden connection between eye and sounds. Being unconscious can be understood as being immediately present, as being here and now.
In the exhibition, TAO Ya-lun, a Taiwanese artist who has been working on Heart Projector (2013), a project based on the installations, which often involve light, are heavy meditative spaces which seek to demarcate a zone outside of the over-proliferation and clutter of visual signs in contemporary life. And the Structure Study III (2014), a project by Taiwanese Canadians artist Hao NI, to present yet vaguely surreal, the works - ranging from sculpture to video and mixed-media installation are installed as a cohesive whole.
Also included Unknown Colors (2015) by Chihiro Minato, he has been working on wide variety of themes, including the relationship between the emergence of images and the memory. His current project about color analyzing using digital photography and automatic nomination system by computer. A new work Mixed Signals (2015) by Korean artist Kim Joon is realized in the form of sound-installation, using the results of collected various sounds in site-specific areas. Also the project Delirious, the Midnight Sun Is Gorgeous (2012-13) by Chinese Canadians artist Yi Xin TONG who was to work constructs poetic and fantastical narratives through multimedia installations, and books to explore the dialectics of romanticism into our era that worships rationality and capita.
The film Day for Night (2014) by Korean artist Sejin Kim attempted to create visual narratives with using an unsynchronized scenes among videos, sounds, and color frames to address the reality of desolation, ruin, and lack where lies on behind of an excessiveness and an acceleration in contemporary society.
A Taiwanese artist KUO I-Che's work Lightyears (2011) shows with a truly multifaceted practice, working across video, photography, performance, and sculpture - incorporating elements of all means into a finished end. A large-scale installation Er lin qi an (2014) by a Taiwanese artist TING Chaong-Wen, he created the excelling in spatial installations of mixed media such as images and ready-mades, the artist has shifted his focus to the exploration of the plastic potential of art with archives.
(1) For an introduction see book Modern Classics Unconscious
Architectural Landscapes: SEA in the Forefront
Curated by Loredana PAZZINI-PARACCIANI
Venue｜The Queens Museum, New York
Oct. 3 – 31, 2015
Curated by Loredana PAZZINI-PARACCIANI
Venue｜The Queens Museum, New York
Oct. 3 – 31, 2015
Donna ONG, THE FOREST SPEAKS BACK, 2014, 2 channel video and mixed-media installation. Courtesy of the artist.
Southeast Asia, often generalized as an “exotic destination,” is actually eleven distinct countries stretching over vast land and sea. While Southeast Asia (SEA) encompasses extensive natural landscapes, the biodiversity reflected in nature is mirrored in the complex social, cultural and economic transformation of each country.
As urbanization reconfigures parts of SEA, natural landscapes have had to adapt to manmade architecture. Architectural Landscapes: SEA in the Forefront not only looks to natural landscapes that are transformed into urban spaces, but also focuses on local architectural landmarks that are slowly disappearing, leaving gaps in the cultural and social legacy of each country.
How do the artists and their communities relate to this transformation? Architectural Landscapes: SEA in the Forefront unravels these negotiations by focusing on four SEA countries – Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore.
As Cambodia faces great social changes in recent years, the capital city of Phnom Penh has been undergoing major urban transformation mostly due to outside capital brought in by developers to leverage on the unplanned settlements in the city. Khvay Samnang’s Untitled, part of the screening program at the Queens Museum, pins down one aspect of this transformation through a performance of the artist pouring sand over himself. Samnang’s video-documentation echoes the illegal operations of filling Phnom Penh’s lakes with sand in order to sell the reclaimed land to eager developers.
Also addressing land redevelopment in Phnom Penh, Memory by Sok Chanrado presents a compelling video-testimony given by Rada, the artist’s younger brother. Stepping back in time, the footage in reverse shows Rada’s walks about in the building that was once their home. The silent yet overpowering urban transformation of Cambodia is equally negotiated in Kim Hak’s video installations ON, which marries the iconology of old buildings from the French colonial period and the new generation of buildings developed over what remains of the preceding constructions; and Someone, which takes the audience to Kep, once a glorious Cambodian seaside resort.
Like Cambodia, in neighboring Vietnam the rapid transformation of the urban landscape relies largely on foreign investment for business and land redevelopment. Nguyen Trinh Thi’s video work Landscapes engages the viewer in Vietnam’s current urbanization by presenting a collection of Internet images of various people that are involved in land disputes – from industrial development to environmental pollution. The people in the images have surrendered to hope, in collective pointing gestures that are, as the artist says, “like a quiet protest.” At the same time Le Brothers’ three-channel video installation Into the Sea depicts the gradual transformation of the Vietnamese natural landscape as a price to pay for economic development. Shot along the coast of the South China Sea near Hue, Into the Sea is a reminder of the quiet yet staggering beauty of Vietnam afflicted with political and economic instability.
Thailand, on the other hand, through several coups and uprisings is caught amid unarrested urban growth, as is the rest of SEA, and political impasse. Yet its strong cultural legacy continues to be reflected in typical Thai architecture alongside new urban development. Referencing history Prateep Suthathongthai employs light boxes and video installations to make collages of photographic images of typical Thai architecture, not by altering the sequence of the shots but rather overlapping them to create entirely new constructs; in Myth of Modernity, Chulayarnnon Siriphol re-appropriates the ancient myth of Tribhumi, or “three planes of existence,” to focus on the architectural and social importance of the pyramid in Thai culture.
The feature film Syndromes and a Century by Thai artist and film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, also part of the screening program at the Queens Museum, on the other hand focuses on the urban and rural dichotomy. In the film, Weerasethakul describes the events in a rural and urban hospital respectively, offering sensitive interpretations of country and city life.
The city-state of Singapore presents Donna Ong and Ho Tzu Nyen, who conjure yet other interpretations of urbanization. While catering to the colonialist assumption of tropical paradise, Singapore seems to point to the positive aspect of progress while refusing its negative connotations.
Through Donna Ong’s mixed-media installation we observe how the city-state has embraced meticulous urban planning over the years that transformed its villages and plantations into gleaming skyscrapers and highways; while Ho Tzu Nyen’s iconic short film Utama, also one of the Queens Museum screenings, explores Singapore’s alternative histories, one of which traces back to Utama, a 14th-century Sumatran prince who upon arriving on the shores of the island spotted a strange beast, presumably a lion (the lion is the national animal of the city-state).
Ultimately, Architectural Landscapes: SEA in the Forefront makes us ponder and reflect on the meaning of change and transformation. In times of urban development is the cultural identity of a city (or a country) forged by the people or its building? Posing more questions than answers, Architectural Landscapes: SEA in the Forefront offers a much-needed discourse with and of Southeast Asia, thus tracing an important cultural nexus between the East and West. We hope that Architectural Landscapes: SEA in the Forefront is but the first of many steps towards this objective.
Cause Commune (Common Cause)
Curated by Carol Yinghua LU
Venue｜The Queens Museum Theater, New York
Film Screening on Sun. Oct. 4, 3 – 5pm
Curated by Carol Yinghua LU
Venue｜The Queens Museum Theater, New York
Film Screening on Sun. Oct. 4, 3 – 5pm
Manny MONTELIBANO, SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, 2013, multichannel video installation, 5’17”.
The title of this programme is taken from the title of a short-lived journal, Cause Commune, (1972 to 1974), which was published by French cultural theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio, socialist and humanist Jean Duvignaud, and French writer George Perec. The mission of the publication was described as seeking to search for the thoughts and beliefs that were the foundation of our civilization and cultural operation and to raise questions about them. The editors call for a desire to carry out investigation into everyday life on every level, especially by looking into those layers of folds, caves and undercurrents that were neglected or repressed by existing social orders, appearances and organization of life.
This screening programme invites artists and present works that embody a dissatisfaction with and an incessant curiosity and urge to inquire into given orders of life, phenomenon, common experience, assumptions and established historic accounts and power structure. They advocate, manifest, and act on an unstoppable thirst for hidden truths and unseen realities, and their investigative gaze towards objects, cultural practices, consumer products, shared understanding and cultural characteristics, events, historic constructs, surroundings, awareness, means of social organization, and ideologies that fulfill our immediate desires and expectations.
Korean artist Bo Kyung Suh challenges the associations drawn between the postures of female bodies and the basic natural elements of water, fire, earth and wind in the common projection of the Nature and the identity of the female body in her work. In the video of Summer Vacation (2013), one sees the artist performing the actions that emulate the arrangements of standardized symbols yet deliberately highlighting the performativity of such actions so that they become alienating rather than conforming to accepted perceptions.
Chinese artist Liu Ding’s Karl Marx (2013) also addressed the issue of the profound disparity between ideologies, consciousness and the living realities by presenting his personal encounter with a group of Chinese communist party members on their way to visit the Karl Marx tomb in London, a ritual and duty that many carried out in order to have the excuse to do sight-seeing and shopping in London. As this video reveals, it is very likely that Karl Marx as an ideology was never really introduced into China, but it remains a “name” and an empty shell.
Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi work Trapped Words contemplates how speaking or the impossibility to speak bears testimony to experience and ideology and narrates the story of a man Mr. Harada who had a traumatic experience as a child of seven years old when his town Maebashi was bombed. He was saved by an unknown lady who covered her body around him and lost her life in the end. This drama left lasting marks on his consciousness.
Several works in this programme are collages of video clips the artists directly sourced from the Internet. Chinese artist Guan Xiao’s video collage David (2013) pieced together 50 “trash” materials she’d downloaded from youtube, of David, the sculpture of the Italian Renaissance while conducting her research on the Renaissance sculpture in vain. As she was frustrated and bombarded with many random and unusable materials people uploaded to the Internet about their encounters with and myriad efforts to see this famous sculpture, she also realized that it was often more of an unconscious act of pursuit, which becomes the subject of ridicule in her work.
Pilipino artist Manny Montelibano’s work Sorry for the Inconvenience (2013) similarly sourced video speeches of different personalities in history and the present from YouTube and TV news and collaged them into a confusing range of speeches that are disorientating and impossible for the viewers to have a specific anchor in terms of time and space. It becomes a fitting metaphor for the experience of being exposed to a globalized world with multiple realities existing in parallel and simultaneously.
Another Japanese artist in this programme Yuichiro Tamura has taken all Google street views to compose a movie titled Nightless, accompanied by sound tracks taken completely from YouTube. The artist has made different versions of this work for specific occasions and the 11th version as presented in this programme was created for Hong Kong. Using existing materials from the Internet, the artist wove together a narrative of Hong Kong through history and fiction, all set in the daylight. As photographs of Google Street View have all been taken in daylight, Hong Kong becomes a city without any nighttime.
The artists that are invited to present works in this programme come from extremely mixed national, social and cultural contexts, that of the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China respectively. The perspectives and entry points of their artistic investigations into the order of the daily structure are drastically diverse, some personal, some political, some historical, some playful, and some seemingly accidental even. Yet all the works are still speaking about the persisting sense of urgency and necessity, which we should maintain at all times in our engagement with, and the process of learning and understanding both our immediate surroundings and our historic realities, as was articulated in the founding and operation of the journal Cause Commune some four decades ago.
Locations
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The Queens Museum
New York City Building Flushing Meadows Corona Park Queens, NY 11368 http://www.queensmuseum.org/ |
The Sylvia Wald + Po Kim Art Gallery
417 Lafayette Street 4th floor New York, NY 10003 http://waldandkimgallery.org |