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! .
In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text...
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...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
[Online Course] ArtsEquator Introduction to Reviewing Books | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints July 13, 2020 INTRODUCTION TO REVIEWING BOOKS by Kathy Rowland Course Synopsis: This introductory course will teach you how to think critically and review a book, by drawing on both techniques of literary analysis and criticism writing...
OPEN CALL: Southeast Asian Arts Censorship Documentation | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles September 16, 2021 ArtsEquator invites applications for the position of Researcher for a regional arts censorship documentation and publication project it is piloting...
In addition to Yang’s signature drying rack and light bulbs, Office Voodoo includes various office supplies like CDs, paper clips, headphones, a computer mouse, a stamp, a hole puncher, a mobile phone charger...
A steel clothing rack adorned with turbine vents, Moroccan vintage jewelry, pinecones and knitting yarn, these heterogeneous elements are used here to create an exotic yet undefined identity within the work...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
“Weight & velocity (cat on router)” is a duo of two humorous photographs of a cat lying on a computer router...
In Stilleben mid Zierlauch ( Still Life with Aluminum) Annette Kelm utilizes visual juxtaposition to bring together a gridded aluminum backdrop, a pot with a vaguely indigenous pattern on it, and two purple dandelions...
Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter...