Past

Sights and Sounds: China

Jun. 27 – Jul. 31, 2014

Sights and Sounds: China features new work by Chen Shaoxiong, Huang Ran, Li Ran, and Hao Jingban, selected by Carol Yinghua Lu.

Recent video art from China has expanded the narrative potential of film to create work that is nuanced and subjective while investigating social and political conditions.Video as an artistic medium arrived in China in the late 1980s. A decade of economic reform spurred a rise in consumer culture, and household electronics became accessible and popular. The first work of Chinese video art is often said to be Zhang Peili’s 30×30 (1988), a single-channel video of the artist piecing together a broken mirror over the course of half an hour. However, a number of other artists at that time were also using video to document monotonous actions, such as a wheel spinning (Zhu Jia) or a person sipping a bowl of noodles (Yan Lei). To a large extent, these faithful recordings of banal activities were meant as a gesture of rebellion against social realism, the enforced mode of artistic production in China for several decades, which featured exaggerated, false depictions of everyday life in the service of ideological beliefs and political propaganda.

In recent years Chinese artists have greatly expanded the narrative potential of film and video to create work that is more nuanced and subjective. Cinema has clearly inspired both Li Ran’s humorous Soviet-style film and Huang Ran’s elaborate drama. Hao Jingban captures the routine of ballroom dancers in her understated observational documentary. Chen Shaoxiong personalizes photojournalism through his ink paintings, re-presenting news footage as an animated music video. While an exact sense of time and location are left vague in each of these works, all revisit the past in order to investigate the social and political conditions of the present.

Carol Yinghua Lu
Curator

Carol Yinghua Lu (b. Chaozhou, 1977) lives and works in Beijing. She is a contributing editor at Frieze and the first visiting research fellow at Tate Research Centre: Asia-Pacific. Lu served on the jury for the Golden Lion Award at the 2011 Venice Biennale and was co-artistic director of the 2012 Gwangju Biennale.

About Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video

This long-term series offers a rotating selection of vigorous film and video works by contemporary artists from around the world — with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.

Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video is a long-term presentation of new film and video works made in the sphere of the visual arts. The series offers a rotating selection of vigorous works by contemporary artists from around the world. It introduces New York audiences to the latest developments in filmmaking within the art context and underlines the Jewish Museum’s holistic and global approach to the understanding and presentation of art and culture.

Sights and Sounds takes advantage of the straightforward way film and video travel: shipped on discs or streamed online, these works provide an instant connection to new creative practices from even the most remote locations.

Twenty-five international curators have selected new film and video work from their respective regions of the world—ranging from Argentina to Vietnam, Nigeria to Romania, New Zealand to China, and many places in between. Their picks are screened for one month each in the museum’s media center, which has been turned into a miniature cinema for the occasion.

The works in Sights and Sounds touch on themes significant to both Jewish culture and universal human experience: spirituality, exile, language, conflict, family, humor, history. The series creates a broad network of artistic expression and curatorial perspectives that takes stock of what is happening in film and video art at this moment in time across the globe—with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.

Sights and Sounds will culminate with a selection of highlights from the series. One work from each country will be presented in the gallery from February 5, 2016 to June 30, 2016.

Jens Hoffmann
Deputy Director
Exhibitions and Public Programs

#sightsandsounds

Installation view of Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video in the Goodkind Media Center. Photo by David Heald.

Exhibition highlights

Chen Shaoxiong, still from Ink Media, 2011 – 2013, video, sound, 3 min., 45 sec. Artwork © Chen Shaoxiong, provided by Pékin Fine Arts Gallery, Beijing
Huang Ran, still from Blithe Tragedy, 2010, video, 14 min., 52 sec. Artwork © Huang Ran, provided by Long March Space, Beijing and Simon Lee Gallery, London
Li Ran, still from From Truck Driver to the Political Commissar of the Mounted Troops, 2012, video, sound, 8 min., 51 sec. Artwork © Li Ran, provided by the artist and Aike-Dellarco Gallery, Shanghai