A Thousand Plateaus Gallery is participating in PHOTOFAIRS SHANGHAI from April 20 to 23 at Shanghai Exhibition Centre, showcasing works of Chen Qiulin, Chen Xiaoyi and Li Lang. Booth A04.
Chen Qiulin
When covid-19 broke out in early 2020, no one, including artist Chen Qiulin, anticipated it would become an unprecedented global pandemic. The fear and anxiety brought by the pandemic aroused struggles and constraints and emphasized the conflicts and resistances. Chen Qiulin sees the fragility and vulnerability of humans and our contemporary society. In her most recent non-site-specific body experimental project Drown (2021), Chen uses tofu - a traditional Chinese food ingredient and a cultural symbol, fragile in nature - as her creative medium, combining installations, body performance, live sound creation, and video output to visually showcase the human presence. Through exploring fragility and struggle under the pandemic induced confinement, Chen Qiulin sets out to re-examine the reflections of female identity and local traditions in the context of a global epidemic which has highlighted and exacerbated geopolitical constraints and cultural conflicts.
Unlike Chen Qiulin’s usual solo performances, Drown (2021) is a collaboration with modern dance artist Zheng Yuanyuan and sound artist Chen Hongli. The performance abandons the conventional background music, but instead, the sound is captured and produced through a live sound performance - the sound artist is invited to use his own body to perceive the dramatic changes brought by the dancer, interact with body language, improvise on the sounds he collects onsite, and eventually compose the holographic sound for the Drown video piece.
65 million years ago, the Indian plate violently collided with the Eurasian plate from south to north and the Paleo-Tethys Sea retreated. This led to the birth of Hengduan Mountains. Hence, those ancient mineral deposits were born in the ocean. According to the legend of the Tibetan and Yi people in the mountains of southwest China, ore is the food of the mountain gods. But who could have ever predicted that for thousands of years, humans have been taking away the food from the mountain gods, for paving the way to modern civilization.
When Tethys Sea retreats westward, leaving the reverberation (2022) is based on the white conch revered in high-altitude mountains. The moving-images are switched between freeze-frame shots, all related to "landscapes". These landscapes focus on the abandoned mining areas and the land in the Hengduan Mountains in southwest China. As for The text and narration corresponding to the video, one is from an old man of the Ersu ethnic group who is using their endangered language to tell the ancient legend of the white conch, and the other is adapted from Novalis's unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), which explores the human’s experience in the face of ore. In the relationship between the ephemerality of the scale of life and the permanence and change of the land, This work summons an ancient time and space. Although we can only see the current mining ruins, nature and mountain forests, through the polyphony of video and text in this work, the aroused imagination becomes a stack of geological layers. The white conch is like a key, acting as a link between the dialogues in different scales as well as a time passage from the present to the past, the mountain to the ocean, the person to the stone.
As life has to continue, tomorrow is coming, and this day is definitely not the last day.
On the last day of 2012, I vividly remember that it was the last time I went to the office, the media company I worked for was closed due to poor management so I had to leave. I moved into this new office only 598 days ago, in mid May of the last year. Looking out of the office window, one can see a construction site and scattered small buildings waiting to be demolished. From that day on, as I had to clock in every day to work, I began to observe and shoot this area day after day, recording the changes in the scene outside the window, and naively imagining enormous buildings rising from the ground. These has been past for ten years. At that time, WeChat was not yet popular, and I had never heard of QR codes, let alone facial recognition systems. People are concerned about the constantly rising house prices, and houses sometimes become more important than life.
Today, I used my diary and photos taken in the office to reconstruct my work and life during that time. I also used the applied color blocks to connect the past and present together. Looking back on the past emphasizes the perception of the present and provides a clearer understanding of the changing life.
The seemingly unchanged photographic images silently record the passage of time, and the subtle changes on the demolition site hide the game between interests, which cannot be directly viewed, and are even more difficult for the images to record. Facing the photo, I thought I saw everything, but the truth was unknown. The mundane and trivial diary records the details of my life, with complaints, disappointments, indifference, and more helplessness in the text. The color blocks applied to the photo are traces left every day and also pixels in the blurry image that evoke my memories. The combined color blocks are more like mosaic used to conceal the truth. The colorful squares adorn the boring life with richness and variety. Gradually, I got used to watching the surface, getting used to watching after being disciplined, accepting the fact that reality is colorful and gorgeous, so much so that I forgot the background color of life. It's really good for me to forget, live today, and keep tomorrows unknown.
