In Kan Xuan’s four-channel video Island , a series of objects like nail clippers, hairbrush, toothpaste, and house decorations are shot in close-ups. These highly polished and aestheticized images create a poetic visual flow. However, in front of each object lies a coin of different value—two yuan, one pound, one euro, one dollar—that silently reveals the material value of the household supplies. Underneath the video’s elegant surface there is a deep sense of critical irony, elaborated in the contradictory nature of the cheap plastic items and their sophistic visual interpretation. Kan poignantly and metaphorically comments on the economy and production at the base of today’s global market and shows that extremely influential visual spectacles can be generated by the most everyday of items.
Experimenting with painting, photography, performance, and video installation, Kan Xuan explores the everyday from a very personal perspective. Though she graduated from the China Academy of Fine Art with rigorous training in oil painting, Kan quickly adopted video as her primary medium. From often ignored daily life experiences as points of departure, Kan creates a visual diary. Here, the camera amplifies mundane activities to reveal absurd and eerie details. For example, in Kan Xuan, Ai! , she calls and answers her own name among the crowd in subway station; in Eggs , she squeezes and breaks eggs with her hands, and in A Sunny Day two middle-aged men laugh and tickle each other in a public plaza. In other works Kan engages feminist discourse by situating herself in uncomfortable situations or exposing her body, such as standing naked on a public pedestal in A Happy Girl or allowing spiders to crawl over her in Looking Looking Looking For! .
A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China...
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Pak 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...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...
After 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...
LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...