喂!一点生命 Feed A Little Life

Skills: 展览 Exhibition
无题空间八月新展开幕
 喂!一点生命 
8月29日(星期日)下午4点
UИTITLEDSPΛCE July Upcoming Exhibition
  Feed A Little Life  
Opening: 29th August (Sunday) 16:00
 参展艺术家  Exhibited Artists 

岑韵扬 Yunyang Cen

王成婧 Chengjing Wang

刘小川  Lucy X.C. Liu

宋思齐 Rita Song

 

策展人 Curator
李小夏 Summer Lee
出品人 Producer
刘震 Liu Zhen
 展览导语 Exhibition Introduction 

冬天使我们温暖,令人遗忘的雪覆盖着大地,干枯的根茎喂养着一点生命。

—《荒原》,T.S.艾略特

Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers.

—The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot

一件艺术品是一个见证。艺术家描述下降去穿越一个黑暗的梦境,给我们通常沉睡的潜意识提供了视觉和空间上的维度,而我们常常认为它对日常生活中的既定秩序有太大挑战。这个展览把这种潜意识看作是遗忘的雪下的一点生命,值得我们去看到并用一些干枯的根茎来喂养。

An artwork is a testimony. The artist’s description of descending and traversing a dark dreamscape gives visual and spatial dimensions to our usually dormant sub-conscience, which we often take to be too challenging to the established order in daily life. This exhibition sees this very subconsciousness as a little life under forgetful snow, worthy to fed with some dried tubers.

四位参展艺术家用高度感觉的作品在埋藏的潜意识中构建了一种沉浸式展览体验,刘小川的作品《另一边》和《忘却之河畔的小屋》将展览空间变成了死亡之后的回忆的梦幻体验,岑韵扬的《回》探讨了因疫情封城期间的植物与人的生命,王成婧的油画作品《月亮吐在了我的画上》在满与空的两极中穿梭,宋思齐的作品在此次展览中通过“标记”潜意识的轨迹,探索真实与虚幻的边界。“有哪些力量在滋养生命?”这个展览提供了丰富的可能的回答。

The four exhibited artists construct an immersive exhibition experience that magnifies the buried subconsciousness with their highly sensorial works.  Lucy XC Liu’s works “The Other Side” and “House by the Lethe” transforms the exhibition space into a container of memories from our temporal world. Yunyang Cen’s artwork discusses the life of plants and people during the lockdown period due to the epidemic, Chengjing Wang’s oil painting “The Moon Puked on My Painting” navigates between the poles of abundance and emptiness. Rita Song’s work explores the tipping point between the authentic and delusional world by “marking” the subconscious track in this exhibition. Feed A Little Life provides rich and creative responses to the question “what is the power that nourishes life?” 

 

 参展作品(部分) Exhibited Artworks 
 

岑韵扬 Yunyang Cen

岑韵扬 , 青年艺术家。她的艺术创作包括但不限于行为表演、装置和摄影,近年来她把注意力放在关于佛学中的无常与灾难理论的主题创作上。对她来说,灾难不只是来自自然环境随机的控诉,个人层面的默然崩坏累积了社会不同层面的失败。在人类自信心爆棚的年代,像苏联狗狗莱卡被送上了太空这种事情常常不愿意被人在晚宴上提起。
Yunyang Cen is an emerging visual artist with years of practice that spans across performance, installation, and photography. Latest years she spent time on the artistic practice in relates to theories of impermanence in Buddhism and catastrophe. A sense of sublime melancholy is embedded into the form of black humor/black comedy, which in her works presents the mixture of horror and the clownery in catastrophically events. She believes that the occurrence of catastrophe isn’t just about random natural disaster, but the accumulation of failures on different aspects and levels of the society. Within the era of bursting human-centrism, things like the Space dog Laika are not so polite to be brought up during dinner.
 
参展作品:《回》 
雕塑、混合材质 sculpture、mixed media
240x25x40cm
 
回在中文词汇里可组成回家、回归、回去,至于回哪儿是每个人都在寻找的。我喜欢回字的图像本身,它是包裹的圈,是圆满的,是保护性的,有张开怀抱包容的意思。
“无名周六,世界还是一样乱,吃一整天垃圾食品,或谈一整天恋爱,都无法抓住傍晚六点的夕阳。”我在封城期间写下这些文字。
 
那时在漫长的、无边界的时间中,太阳东升西落都仿佛在问你今天交白卷了吗。真是孤寂有时,焦虑不可竭。那时候网络流行一句话:封城期间请控制自己不要过度给你的植物浇水噢。我觉得照顾植物就是照顾自己的生活,希望这个作品能带出一点讨论:我们从重复轮回的无意义中,究竟怎样才能喂养自己生命的力量呢?
 
“The world still remains entropy, as always, as every other Saturday. We eat and fall, packs of junk food, love could keep us busy all day yet still cannot ask the sunset to stay..” I wrote down these words during Melbourne’s endless COVID lockdown. 
 
Even the sun rising and falling seems too agitating within the boundless mist of time. A COVID meme was like: please control yourself to not flood your plants during lockdown . I figured, to look after the greens was also trying to look after myself. 
 
By showing this work maybe I could somehow bring up conversations about feeding a little vitality and energy, one can therefore not succumb to the cycle of meaninglessness.


王成婧 Chengjing Wang

艺术家以他们对世界的观察作为他们艺术创作的主题,这是一个非常普遍的主题。然而,这样的主题包含着一种源于“自我”的视角,它通常包含着对自我的认识和自我探索。王成婧想要的,是用抽象的语言,表现出一种抽象的、客观存在的自然界,而不是站在自我的角度。是一个纯粹的概念,没有任何情感或感觉。对于她现在的作品,“连接”或“交织”是其主要概念。

It’s a very common theme that artists use their observation of the world as the theme of their works in artistic creation. However, such themes contain a perspective from the self, it usually contains self-recognition and self-exploration. What she wants is to use abstract language to show an abstract objective existence in nature that is not from the perspective of self. A pure concept without any emotions or sense. Now for her works, the concept of “connections” or “interweaving” is the main concept. 

 

月亮吐在了我的画上(局部)

The Moon Puked on My Painting

布面油画 Oil on canvas 

70cm*100cm*2

2021

 

这幅画画面上醒目的黄色颜料以一种喷薄向下的动态姿势粘稠的倾泻于画布之上,毫无疑问黄色贯穿渗透于画中的每一个角落与图层,相对于在画中的其他颜色与形状有着不容置疑的渗透力。但若观者静候一段时间,就会发现黄色颜料旁简洁爽快的线条就会以一种有力扭曲姿态浮上表面与黄色颜料相抗衡。这粘稠与轻快,明亮与晦涩之间的相互拉扯形抗争形成了一种动态的张力,最终在画面这一容器内形成一种平衡。

In this painting, the eye-catching yellow paint is pouring viscously on the canvas in a dynamic gesture of spraying downwards. There is no doubt that the yellow paint has an absolute dominant power permeating every corner and layer to that other colors and shapes. However, those laconic and concise lines that were immersed in the shadow of the moon light will forcibly rise to the surface to counterbalance the yellow in a contorted posture. This tugging struggle between viscous and brisk, bright and obscure forms a best counterweight.

 

泡沫的两种观法

Two Ways of Observing Bubbles

布面油画 Oil on canvas

70cm*100cm

2021 

这幅画中覆盖于表层的圆圈为白色,所谓墨分五色,白亦分五色。画者通过不同透明度的白层叠交汇,使每一个白色圆圈晕出浅色半透明波纹,在每一片波纹交织晕染重叠后最终绘制出一层如梦幻泡影般的纹样。这层白色纹样便是画者用现实的白色圆圈图案比喻的一股力量,这种力量是纯粹的、脆弱的、绵软的,并对于底层颜色的上浮呈一种不置可否的态度。

 

Chinese ink dividing into five colors,which is also reflected in the circle pattern on the surface layer in this painting. Those transparent white circles disperse spontaneous like ripples. After each ripple is interwoven and overlapped, a layer of pattern as visional as the dream is finally drawn. This layer of white pattern is a metaphor for softness, fragility and unadulterated existence, which show a noncommittal attitude towards the rise of the bottom color. 

 


刘小川 Lucy X.C. Liu

 

刘小川,艺术家、诗人、独立撰稿人。她描绘个体的饥饿和向往,和神秘而令人生畏的事物,来对抗我们常常更愿意轻信的那一版本的历史和事实。

Lucy X.C. Liu is an artist and writer who wrestles with grief and historical residue by portraying hunger, uncanniness or individuality as challenges to the version of history often used to justify power.

 

另一边 The Other Side

丝绸刺绣 Embroidered fabrics

2020

 

我在12张印花丝绸上倒着刺绣了“死亡”。文字正的一面对着墙,因此观者只能看到倒着的文字和刺绣背面的线头。作为一个作者和艺术家,我感兴趣用文字来界定空间并使其在展厅内具备视觉化的特质。这个看似简单而重复性的刺绣动作把我们现实的世界和不可知的另一边隔开。

I embroidered “Death.” on 12 pieces of silk, and displayed the front side of the embroidery against the wall, so viewers can only see the reversed word and the fraying threads. As living beings we cannot fathom what is on the other side. 

As a poet and artist, I am interested in defining and visualizing three-dimensional space with language. This simple gesture of inverting the line “Death.” divides the temporal space we live in from the unfathomable.

忘却之河畔的小屋 House by the Lethe

影像与综合媒介 Photography and mixed media

2021

“我们会忘掉逝去的事物”这句话反过来说也是成立的:逝去的事物也会忘掉我们。忘却之河是古希腊冥界的五条河之一,逝者的灵魂会被迫喝它的水来忘掉前世。我凭空想象出了“忘却之河畔的小屋”这个概念,用它来形容一种敏感的知觉被埋葬在泥土里,却又以不为人知的方式一直活下去的临界状态。

这个抽象的小屋由三面巨幅照片印制的布料围成。我把挂满晾衣架的干枯玫瑰花用皮带吊在墙上,它们还散发着浓烈的香气。干的树枝和铜链纠缠在一起,地板上是新鲜的小花束和没干的白胶…在忘却之河畔,记忆以遗忘的方式,脱离了它们的主体而获得了独立的生命。

“We will forget the deceased” is still valid when stated backwards: The deceased will also forget us. The Lethe is one of the five rivers of the Greek underworld, the shades of the dead were made to drink from it to forget about their mortal lives. “House by the Lethe” is a concept that I invented which poetically describes the precarious state of existence when conscience is buried underground but still palpitant. 

This imagined “house” is defined by large fabric prints on three sides. Clothes hangers laden with pungently fragrant dried roses are hooked to the ceiling with a rubber belt, dried branches intertwine with bronze chains, on the floor is still wet glue and a fresh bouquet…By the Lethe, memory gradually learns to forget, freeing themselves of their earthly origins.

 


宋思齐 Rita Song

她的作品主要关注梦境与记忆的相互映射和重叠,从个⼈的视⻆不断接近,游离在介于真实和虚幻,记忆与遗忘,意识和⽆意识之间的状态,并尝试唤起存在于集体潜意识中的共有经验和感受。她近期的创作包括⼀些实验影⽚,通过关注物质的转化和消逝,重复的⾏为,图像之间的关联,试图重现梦境的逻辑,和以⼀种意识流⽅式进⾏的梦境叙事。她很好奇梦境是如何在清醒状态下被重新构建和叙述的。
 
As an interdisciplinary artist, She views material as metaphor. Her practice includes experimentations in sculpture, painting, video and installation. She became interested in dream experiences, and in particular the relationship between subconscious activities and reality during the process of investigating the inner psychological world. Her works mainly focus on how dreams and memories reflflect each other, and reenact these moments by repeating and emphasizing certain behaviors or images in dreams. 
Starting from a personal perspective, she aims to approach the in-between space of real and surreal, conscious and unconscious, internal and external. Her work tries to resonate with others’ experiences and feelings that are shared in our collective unconsciousness. Her recent work has included experimental fifilms in which she explores how dream scenarios are reconstructed and narrated through the waking state.
 

Marking

视频装置 video installation

2021