5
2012 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
37:25 minutes
Jiang Zhi
5 is a three channel video about the dualities of death and resurrection, reminiscence and fantasy, chronological and retrospective narration. The main video features two dancers intertwining, caressing in trancelike movements, with intimacy eventually leading to scarring and bleeding. Towards the end, the trace of bodily movements and fluids crescendo in an image of a skull in a synthesis of performance, painting and theater. To the artist, the skull of smeared fluid can be considered an allegory to Zygmunt Mauman’s concept of “liquid love,” where the loosening up of traditional bonds becomes possible due to increased social mobility. Modernity forces one to make provisional bonds that are more fluid and liquid in nature as many are torn between freedom and security. Thus, stricken by a liquid love, the amorous protagonists of the piece, enraptured in a fluxus of pain and eros, unable to transcend duality, leaves only an image of passion and death in the final tableau.
Jiang Zhi represents a generation of artists whose practice developed against the backdrop of experimental art in China in the 1990s, during which a series of social and cultural transformation occurred in the country. His work actively deals with issues such as body, gender, identity, consumerism, conflict, fear, power, and temporality, and often involves recent social events. Jiang attended the China Academy of Art and has long been engaged with writing and video art. From 1995 to 2005, Jiang was also an active journalist, which had him on the frontlines of his country’s the social transformation, and all of his experiences have deeply influenced the language and context of his practice. Constantly positioning himself at the intersection between brutal reality and poetic imagination, Jiang’s works presents a complex trajectory of the artist’s everyday life and society at large.
Colors:
Related works featuring themes of: » China, » Color Photography, » Contemporary Conceptualism, » Contemporary Fact Versus Fiction, » Chinese
© » KADIST
Sharon Lockhart
2008Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor, through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
© » KADIST
Agnieszka Kurant
2018Agnieszka Kurant’s Placebo VIII brings together a series of imaginary pharmaceuticals invented within the fictional narratives of literature and film...
© » KADIST
Chen Shaoxiong
2006After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
© » KADIST
Lu Chunsheng
2004A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...
© » KADIST
Allan Sekula
1973San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel...
© » KADIST
Pak Sheung Chuen
2008Pak created New York Public Library Projects (NYPLP) (2008) during a residency in New York, using public libraries as exhibition spaces and the books they house as raw materials...
© » KADIST
Pak Sheung Chuen
2017The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement...
© » KADIST
Du Zhenjun
2010The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
© » KADIST
Qiu Anxiong
2011A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...
© » KADIST
Xiaoyun Chen
2012The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image...