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 Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...
A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...
The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image...
The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...
In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...
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...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
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...
Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...
The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement...
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...