Island

2006 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

Kan Xuan

year born: 1972

gender: female

nationality: Chinese

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! .