Contemporary Chinese Art- another kind of view
DSL Collection
Passages
Three screens, oblong, hanging from the ceiling, receive moving images from hidden video projectors. On each screen fast changing visual fragments of high-speed urban life appear and vanish in quick succession, irritating the spectators perception with familiar sights.
Zhu Jia counts as one of China?s most innovative video artists. His 1994 work Forever acts as a landmark in the evolution of China?s video-arts-scene. Zhu fixed a video camera to the left rear wheel of one of those tricycles, "sanlunche", which used to be so typical for Beijing and are now more and more vanishing from city life. The images filmed during a ride through Beijing constantly turn around, gain speed or slow down just as the cart follows the traffic flow. Watching the video sets the viewer in a state that may be described as a constantly moving feeling of visual intoxication. The, often blurred, images also give an impression of the physical strain of riding a cart through Beijing?s overcrowded traffic.
While other videos of the 1990s deal with repetitious movements like Open, re-open of 1996 or with color like Blue glow of 1994, his 2001 work Passage returns to the act of negotiating perceptions of contemporary city life. Projected on two long stripes of hanging screens are various scenes of Beijing street life while there are close-ups of faces on the third. These canvases resemble the paper hanging scrolls of traditional painting. As Zhu projects more than one scene on each screen at the same time he creates a visual mood resembling the perception of spatial organization one experiences in a walk through a mega-city like Beijing. There is a constant simultaneity of below, beneath, on top, besides that is so typical for the architectural organizations of those big cities as it is for it?s social reality.
The works of Zhu Jia combine in an intelligent way observations on present day China?s society with general reflections on the gaze which make them a rare phenomenon within the arts, one that easily transgresses the boundaries of realms generally held apart: social critique and theory of artistic creation.
Christof Buettner
Zhu Jia counts as one of China?s most innovative video artists. His 1994 work Forever acts as a landmark in the evolution of China?s video-arts-scene. Zhu fixed a video camera to the left rear wheel of one of those tricycles, "sanlunche", which used to be so typical for Beijing and are now more and more vanishing from city life. The images filmed during a ride through Beijing constantly turn around, gain speed or slow down just as the cart follows the traffic flow. Watching the video sets the viewer in a state that may be described as a constantly moving feeling of visual intoxication. The, often blurred, images also give an impression of the physical strain of riding a cart through Beijing?s overcrowded traffic.
While other videos of the 1990s deal with repetitious movements like Open, re-open of 1996 or with color like Blue glow of 1994, his 2001 work Passage returns to the act of negotiating perceptions of contemporary city life. Projected on two long stripes of hanging screens are various scenes of Beijing street life while there are close-ups of faces on the third. These canvases resemble the paper hanging scrolls of traditional painting. As Zhu projects more than one scene on each screen at the same time he creates a visual mood resembling the perception of spatial organization one experiences in a walk through a mega-city like Beijing. There is a constant simultaneity of below, beneath, on top, besides that is so typical for the architectural organizations of those big cities as it is for it?s social reality.
The works of Zhu Jia combine in an intelligent way observations on present day China?s society with general reflections on the gaze which make them a rare phenomenon within the arts, one that easily transgresses the boundaries of realms generally held apart: social critique and theory of artistic creation.
Christof Buettner
)
Zhu Jia
videos, 3 screens
videos, 3 screens