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...
The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it...
War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...
The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands....
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa...
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...
Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...