清影

The Chinese character for “secret” or “hidden” things (pronounced yin) alludes to those that are concealed or covered over, implying reconditeness and subtlety. According to Rene Magritte: “All visible things are concealed by their visible facets.” Hence with “reality” as our prospect, in this world, we have to search for the potential of what remains still “hidden” and “abstruse”, to let reality flex, ply and split its seams, to let it breathe.

The three artists participating in the present exhibition: Bai Qingwen, Tan Lijie and Wu Ding are all graduates of the China Academy of Art (CAA)’s Studio of Experimental Video and Film. All of them work primarily with photography and image media, utilising their own, chosen means to embark upon the search for things otherwise secreted.

Bai Qingwen's video works are frequently concerned with literary texts. “Léthé” for instance relates to Baudelaire’s poem of the same name. In another work, “Former River”, certain pieces of dialogue have been lifted from Marguerite Duras’ novel “L’Amour”. For the present exhibition, the work “After I Left” is itself an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, narrating a man’s reminiscences and reflections on times past prior to his death. Such methods might be compared to the lin tie technique (copying from models) employed in the practice of traditional Chinese calligraphy. Here, the objective of engaging in lin (copying) is never merely reproductive, to produce a facsimile, but aims rather to “understand”, not one dimensionally or along a single trajectory, but via a more complex process, internalising and distilling the subject. On a deeper level, here the process of lin tie no longer concerns itself solely with written characters, but rather moves between text and moving imagse, fostering an exchange between the two.

The Chinese character for “secret” or “hidden” things (pronounced yin) alludes to those that are concealed or covered over, implying reconditeness and subtlety. According to Rene Magritte: “All visible things are concealed by their visible facets.” Hence with “reality” as our prospect, in this world, we have to search for the potential of what remains still “hidden” and “abstruse”, to let reality flex, ply and split its seams, to let it breathe.

The three artists participating in the present exhibition: Bai Qingwen, Tan Lijie and Wu Ding are all graduates of the China Academy of Art (CAA)’s Studio of Experimental Video and Film. All of them work primarily with photography and image media, utilising their own, chosen means to embark upon the search for things otherwise secreted.

Bai Qingwen's video works are frequently concerned with literary texts. “Léthé” for instance relates to Baudelaire’s poem of the same name. In another work, “Former River”, certain pieces of dialogue have been lifted from Marguerite Duras’ novel “L’Amour”. For the present exhibition, the work “After I Left” is itself an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, narrating a man’s reminiscences and reflections on times past prior to his death. Such methods might be compared to the lin tie technique (copying from models) employed in the practice of traditional Chinese calligraphy. Here, the objective of engaging in lin (copying) is never merely reproductive, to produce a facsimile, but aims rather to “understand”, not one dimensionally or along a single trajectory, but via a more complex process, internalising and distilling the subject. On a deeper level, here the process of lin tie no longer concerns itself solely with written characters, but rather moves between text and moving imagse, fostering an exchange between the two.

Tan Lijie states that her preferred means of production: “Do not concern themselves solely with the pursuit of novelty, but resemble rather more new growth, budding off of old branches.” With this consciousness as a foundation, the artist has afforded especial attention to certain aspects of China’s traditional cultures. For this piece of work for instance, the artist returned to her reading of the book “Capital of Southern Song Dynasty –Ling’an”. According to the text’s contents, she proceeded then to take the scant few remaining historic sites and ruins of present day Hangzhou as her point of departure, setting out on a journey as much a confirmation of certain things as it was explorative. In Tan Lijie’s work, whether we find her performing the role of the young heroine in “22 ”, the girl in “The Eastern Sea” who on China’s easternmost promontory takes a mirror to herself, both to experience and reconfigure her body, or the urban gleaner of the present work, “Two moons,two stones”, at the same time the artist directs her films, she also assumes roles within them, seeing things as if from both sides and allowing her experiences to intersect with one another. The work itself therefore constitutes a process of the artist’s own coming to terms with her “self”, of her placing her own person - grafting it, even throwing it - into the work.

Wu Ding describes his work as being “An inquiry into those things that exist concealed in the world, things that can only be sensed and whose ‘internal orders’ evade description”. In his work, conventional ways of seeing are tempered by emotion, accompanied by a langorous, almost plastic sense of time, allowing those things “latent” in the gaze of the viewer to begin speaking for themselves, to manifest and tacitly to converge with one another. For the artist, titles are themselves an important part of each work: “A Plane Without Flat Surface”, “The most ambiguous sentences must contain perfected order”, “The reason the past has been able to extend to the present is due to the future of certain objects”, “Is the moon still there when no one’s looking” … By means of each statement’s manner of expression, the artist presents a variety of viewpoints, questions which - combined with images - function effectively as a support.

Here, a vast space has been opened up between what it is to “seek” (the Chinese character xun) and to “secrete” (yin, as before). Whether or not one actually finds what one’s looking for, to search for “secrets”, for hidden things (yin zhe) or to become a “secret seeker”, each implies a movement towards an hazy, indefinite zone, obscured as if by dense clouds.