:::金江波的个人博客:::

Crystal City brings together the work of asian artists alongside New Zealand artists of asian descent. The works range from photography and video to installation and performance, showcasing recent developments in contemporary art.

A central theme of Crystal City is what it means to live in a built-up urban environment, yet remain connected to the natural world and the world of imagination. It reveals the city as a site for wandering and exploring, but also as a place of meaningful connections.

Many of the works discuss what it is to be a traveller. Strangers see the landscape with fresh eyes, but Crystal City shows that when we travel we bring our own experiences and viewpoint with us, reinterpreting the world we find ourselves in. Sensual and humorous, spiritual and philosophical, these works chart a geography of both familiar and unknown terrain.

The artists involved are: Kim Beom (Korea), Pak Shueng Chuen (HK), Jin Jiangbo (China), Hye Rim Lee (US), Kerry Ann Lee (NZ), Tiffany Singh (NZ) and Cheng-Ta Yu (Taiwan).


http://www.dowse.org.nz/en/Exhibitions/Future-Exhibitions/Crystal-City-Contemporary-Asian-Artists/

Time-lapse describes a photographic technique in which pictures are taken at long intervals between each frame. Time-lapse, as a process of delaying or prolongation constructs an obviously accelerated artificial effect by synchronizing a 24 frame per second playback speed, which typically creates the illusion of real-time movement in human visual perception. Time-lapse therefore manipulates an illusionary reality to achieve yet another level of syntheticity – a virtual reality as opposed to the “reality” arrived at by simulation.

Time presents itself by movement, which is the continuous covering of space. In space where movement unfolds abound the actions and happenings of distinct progression, that of heterogeneity. In timelapse, through the drastic slowing down of speed in space, in between the delays and elongation for the finale of speediness and continuity, elasticity metamorphoses into virtuality, transcending ordinary perception of the temporal and the spatial, creating memory in a succession of variations.

By metaphorically invoking the photographic terminology in the spirit of Bergsonian / Deleuzian time-movement interpretation as inspiration, the exhibition Timelapse in which a dozen artists from both Switzerland and China will participate, attempts to examine the fundamental constituent of digital media: the concept of time and its embodiment in space, its evocation of passage and memory, its movement of differentiation and its state of representation in diverse formal grammars to reveal the social implications of the fast in the disguise of the slow, the multiplicity in temporality and disparity in spatiality, both psychologically and geographically, stirring up a desire to scrutinize the nuances and ramifications in regards to the construct of cultural being in the disparate framework of time in distance and space in locality and the potential collapse of such time-space duality.

Although congenial in their technological outlook, the Chinese artists often invoke in their work a narrative approach imbued with subtle social critique, which reflects the influx of great social changes and transformations in contemporary China. Works by Swiss artists, on the other hand, tend to have a particular interest in the fundamental shift that digital media has engendered in reframing our perception of time and space, stylistically abstract and austere, prompting a sense of epistemological urgency.

This project is part of the exchange and cooperation programme ?Swiss Chinese Explorations? of Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council. This exhibition will be a traveling show with one venue in China (The National Art Museum of China) and one venue in Switzerland (Centre Pasqu’Art, Biel). A bilingual catalogue of English and Chinese is planned to accompany the exhibition.

Media Release

16 June 2009

 China in Four Seasons: Jin Jiangbo

4 July - 6 September

Opening 4 July 2009, the vast and penetrating photographs of acclaimed artist Jin Jiangbo mark the beginning of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s major series China in Four Seasons. Eschewing the national survey format in favour of a year long project comprising four exhibitions and residencies, that presents to New Zealand audiences the extraordinary power, singularity and insight of certain artists working in China today. 

Against a backdrop of worldwide economic malaise, Jin Jiangbo presents recent series of photographic works begun in 2007. Using series titles such as Great Economic Retreat, Chinese Market Scene and Shanghai, Shanghai, his arresting panaromas offer an immediate response to the complex fabric within the unique socialist economic landscape of China as it negotiates within wider frames of globalisation and integration.

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The 2008 series Great Economic Retreat features the industrial ruins of factories in Dongguan, Southern China, recently and hastily abandoned by companies chasing ever lower productions costs. His images capture the empty production workshops and the deserted dormitories of factories shut down literally overnight.

The artist says, “My process enters a space of expressionless aesthetic research. Within the long process of history, things and people shuttle though, and as time passes they gradually disappear and are lost, leaving only the buildings and spaces, as ‘witnesses to history'.”

In the months immediately preceding this exhibition Jin Jiangbo turned his attention to Shanghai where he documents the massive construction, and urban renewal projects underway in the lead up to the 2010 Shanghai Expo with its theme of ‘Better City, Better Life’. The Chinese economic engine is being re-started, and the artist asks, 'Can it be sustained?' This series Shanghai Shanghai is presented for the first time as part of the Govett-Brewster’s exhibition.

As the Gallery’s 2009 International Artist in Residence, Jin Jiangbo will also explore related concerns by examining disused architectural factories and sites within the region of Taranaki, itself a unique story of radical economic growth and change over the past two decades.

China in Four Seasons curator and Govett-Brewster Director Rhana Devenport says 2009 is a potent moment to examine contemporary arts practice in China after twenty years of tremendous social, political, economic and cultural upheaval since 1989;

”This century has witnessed unprecedented attention on Chinese contemporary art from the (western) international arts community while art production, infrastructure and distribution within China has radically expanded and redefined itself. Museums alone have grown exponentially from 300 to 2,300 over the period. The current global financial crisis has now provoked an equally dramatic deflation of the Chinese art market 'bubble'. Jin Jiangbo's work interrogates the very heart of these last five to ten years as evidence of the China's 'Economic Miracle' and subsequent 'retreat' and 're-balance' playing out in the physical world”.

Based in Shanghai and Bejjing, Jin Jiangbo is one of China’s foremost recent generation of media artists while the exhibition presents his first investigations with the 'historic' process of medium format photography. Jin Jiangbo was born in 1972 in Zhejiang province. He is Director of Digital Arts at Shanghai University and is completing his PhD at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Jin Jiangbo exhibits internationally; exhibitions include the Venice Biennale (2003), the 3rd Nanjing Triennial (2008), the Shanghai Biennale (2002) and Booming?, Wall Art Museum, Beijing and Shanghai Gallery of Art (2008).

Further artists to be presented in China in Four Seasons include Guo Fengyi (curated with The Long March Space, a leading independent artspace in China), Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen.

The Govett-Brewster’s Artist in Residency programme brings one international and one New Zealand artist to New Plymouth each year. It is offered in partnership with Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki and with support from Creative New Zealand. This exhibition is also supported by Asia New Zealand Foundation, Te Kairanga Wines and Radio Network Taranaki.

 
Image: Jin Jiangbo Mass production workshop no.1 of a foreign capital television manufacturer 2008

ENDS

For more information, high resolution images and to arrange interviews please contact:

Rhana Devenport 

Director 

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

 HYPERLINK "mailto:rhanad@govettbrewster.com" rhanad@govettbrewster.com

+64-6-759-0854

Hannah Leahy

Communications Co-ordinator

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

 HYPERLINK "mailto:hannahl@govettbrewster.com" hannahl@govettbrewster.com 

+64-6-759-6717