Passing between reality and falsehood: Chen Paian, Doreen Chan, Cao Shu, Fei Yining, Avita Guo

26 August - 20 September 2022

In Charlie Kaufman's film Synecdoche, New York (2008), the award-winning theater director Kayton was able to create a man-made theater in a giant theater in New York City. Theatrical performances in New York City. Katen used his personal experience as the prototype of the script, reproduced the characters (including himself), scenes, and events in his real life, and performed a theater performance that overlapped with the real world. In this hazy landscape interval, "Synecology" responds to what Ketton said in the film, "This is not a performance about a certain theme, but everything about life."

 

It can be said that there are always traces of reflecting fragments of life into the creation. Human beings can't help but develop their yearning for life and realize it through various forms. This utopian vision of life is reflected in every period of history. . It is the ancient Greek philosophers who were exiled and sold as slaves who would formulate a suitable program for the ideal country in their hearts. It was the poets of the Eastern Jin Dynasty who wrote the poems about the lost fisherman accidentally breaking into the hidden paradise. , also after the 21st century, with the rapid development of stand-alone games in the Internet age, human beings can reshape their lives in the virtual world. In recent years, online games on the island have become a pure land in the heart. These poems, literature, and even games are continuously injected with personal real life experience, to obtain the joy of real feelings in the illusion. In the 1990s, Japanese sociologist Shinji Miyadai put forward the "never-ending daily life", pointing out that no matter what changes or collapses, human beings will still return to the longing for a better life again.

 

This exhibition invites five artists. Their works focus on real or false slices in daily life. They create new creations of paintings, reliefs, installations, videos and other types based on their accumulated life experiences. Thinking about events and emotions, personal cognition, or exploring with real questions. Chen Paian has continued his previous practice of injecting graphic design work experience into paintings. In this new series of landscapes, he decommodifies the advertisements or film and television images collected on various platforms in his daily life. The processing and re-creation of the remaining landscapes are converted by digital drawings to create another artificial landscape that is different from the real landscapes. The pleasure that people originally tried to seek in nature gradually disappears under the transformed landscapes do. Doreen's work "A Cocktail Based on the Dreamer's Dream" is a video installation derived from the participatory art project HalfDream, which she started practicing in 2020. In the picture, the artist repeatedly scrutinizes the dream and the real plot in the form of dialogue with friends, and uses the astringent cocktail made from the recipe in the dream as the entry point, so that the surreal dream scene gradually reveals a vivid outline. The result is a private experience that is both vague and real. Wounds and bodies are long-term matrices in Avita's paintings. "Melancholia A" and "Sunlight" follow the artist's past creations, delicately depicting a certain gloomy mood. What’s different is that Avita’s new paintings are obviously thinner and more direct than his previous brushstrokes. Between the blue-green colors of the sky and plants, each stroke seems to gradually draw the viewer into the artist’s mind. In the poetic core, the blurred body and the liquid that looks like tears and blood droplets give the viewer a more intimate experience. Fei Yining's relief work "Undid the lock" depicts her long-standing imagination of the concept of "door", and the picture is like a needle in her prose video works. The fluid, translucent appearance seems to imply that with the change of consciousness, the appearance of the "door" may also change in the next second. The moment the curtain is lifted and the eyes are turned around, the infinite world behind the door is stirred in the mind. imagine. Cao Shu’s interactive installation “Tired sunset” recreates the epitome of a corner of the Bund office building in a playful way. The flickering light bulbs form an intertextuality with the sound of typing, teacups, and airplanes around them. The orangutans further inspire us to reflect on the disciplinary society in which we live.

 

The works in the exhibition try to present a series of artistic practices based on the living environment, or dreams, or emotions, or objects, or social conditions. Artists in their own era have extended their own unique ways based on real life experience. An exploration of reality and fiction. Art works of different media, such as painting, relief, video, and installation, show a fragmented and familiar scene. Rather than saying that this is the same emotional response to audiences with different backgrounds, it may be that it is actually deeply rooted in every individual life. of the original roots.