27:38 minutes
Canton Novelty by Fang Lu captures the adventure of a group of three girls, Ruohan, Lily and Zoe on a summer vacation in Guangzhou, China. Throughout the course of the trip, they film themselves with their cell phones singing in a karaoke room, shopping at a hardware store, sitting at a park, hanging out in a hotel room and exploring a neighborhood looking at vacant apartment ads. Although their days may seem uneventful, the girls seemingly discover the ability to perform impossible “miracles,” including cooking a full pot of rice from three grains, summoning objects to appear and disappear, and turning off street lamps on command. Drawing inspiration from daily life is the overarching theme found in Lu’s body of work. Here, instead of visiting historical landmarks and seeking out-of-the-ordinary amusements, the group creates extraordinary moments while simply walking down the street or eating at a restaurant table. Canton Novelty exemplifies the artist’s signature style of filmmaking that she has progressively developed in the past ten years. This includes transforming simple tasks and everyday actions into built up tensions between the choreographed and the unrehearsed, filming women in domestic spheres in such a way in which they become instruments of performativity (gender roles), and creating superficial environments, or “situated reality” that examine hidden truths from daily experience that are often dismissed.
Fang Lu uses intimacy as a place for self-expression in her videos and draws out mundane moments from everyday life as a strategy to heighten one’s awareness of existence from the rest of the world. Instead of using the camera as a tool to document or capture, she stages a superficial experience, or “situated reality,” that locates the self in relation to a relationship, environment, or idealistic notion. For example, examining behavioral patterns of being in love or being sequestered in an empty building with nothing but circulated online images. For Fang, there is no one reality and everyone creates her own reality. Thus, her practice is an ongoing exploration of self-awareness and seeking realization of truths within experience, and the content in and direction of her videos are directly influenced by her immediate and living environment.
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...
State Terrorism in the ultimate form of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood features a portrait of the artist wearing a zipped utilitarian jacket reminiscent of a worker’s uniform, with one arm behind his back as if forced to ingest a bundle of stick—a literal portrayal to the definition of fascism...
The Body Remembers: Kitt Johnson on "Stigma" at M1 CONTACT Contemporary Dance Festival 2019 | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles "Stigma", photo by James Quah (left), Kitt Johnson, photo by Per Morten Abrahamsen (right) April 29, 2019 By Germaine Cheng (605 words, three-minute read) 2019 marks the 10th edition of the M1 CONTACT Contemporary Dance Festival , a humble endeavour by Kuik Swee Boon, artistic director of T...
Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience...
The black-and-white projection, Araf by Didem Pekün, begins, as a lithe man stands high up in the middle of the grand, rebuilt 16th-century Ottoman bridge in Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina...
The stained glass windows of Chloé Quenum’s Les Allégories evoke the sacred and describe the movement of a rooster in the form of patterns extracted from a wax fabric found in Benin...