Silk Road| PORTAL TO WORLD IMAGINATION ON THE EAST-WEST CULTURAL JOURNEY

DURATION: 2017-09-16 ~ 2017-10-03
OPENING: 2017-09-16 00:16-AM
VENUE: Xi`an Art Museum
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Curator 策劃︳MOST (Andrew Lam) Artists︳Collectives參展人員︳藝術家︳團隊 Andreas GUSKOS (Athen-Greece), NGUYEN Thuy Hang (Ho Chi Minh City-Vietnam), CHIU Ching Yi (Hong Kong-China), CHU Hao Pei (Singapore), Conny ZENK x Matthias HURT x Daniel ASCHWANDEN (Bern-Switzerland) , Rulf HINTERECKER (Cologne-Austria) daDa (Hong Kong-China), Dona TAM (Hong Kong-China), Frank CHAN (Hong Kong-China) , HYBRID SPACE LAB (Greece-Netherlands) Joein LEONG (Macau-China) Video Projection, Jose DRUMMOND (Lisbon-Portugal), JIANG Zhi (Beijing-China), Kay BEADMAN (London-England), LI Tal (Incheon-S. Korea), LIU Qing (Xian-China), BA YE (Xian-China) D-Print Painting, HE Libin (Kunming-China), Lisa PARK (Belgrade-Serbia), Minza STOYANOVA (Los Angeles-US) Oahgnuh x Ielnay (YAN Lei-China x HUNG Hao-China) (Beijing; Shanghai), Pradeep CHANDRASIRI (Kotte-Sri Lanka), Rashid RANA (Male-Maldives), Robert CAHEN (Paris-France), Saleh HUSEIN (Jakarta-Indonesia) Sarawut CHUTIWONGPETI (Bangkok-Thailand), Siddharth CHOUDHARY (Mumbai-India) Swazduski XU (Xian-China), Victor WONG (Hong Kong-Guangzhou-China), WANG Hsin Jen (Taipei-China) BAI YE (Xian-China), William FURLONG (London-England), XU Tan (Shenzhen-China) Video Projection, YAO Jui Chung (Taipei-China) , Zoran POPOPSKI (Macedonia-Hong Kong)This exhibition invites some 30 international artists or collectives to discourse our urbanity on the many physical and psychological layers pertaining to our cities along the contemporary Silk Road (One Belt One Route), by contributing thought-provoking works of installation, painting, d-print, sound, video and film/ photography. The project facilitates our re-imagination of these cities and refreshes our dialogue in an era of (post) modernity. CURATORIAL STATEMENT A journey creates experiences, and experiences are found on reality; reality embraces the known spectrum, knowledge, experience, and sensation. “Imagination” provides spaces of interpretation and speculation for the unknown; it as such complements a meaningful, holistic approach for the experience. “Imagination” weaves the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown, initiating an understanding of the world. Action comes with “imagination”, voyagers in ancient Xian from the beginning of China’s Han Dynasty (206 BC) to recently have made their ways through mountains and rivers. They overcame all the obstacles, from the West to the Middle Kingdom, or from the Eastern to the Western territories. In their journeys passing through the Gobi desert, voyagers rode along their travelling experiences and the unknown world with “imagination”. Life is inescapable from hollow “imagination”; and reality is about recovering the lost, departing from the death, and pondering upon the paradise. Throughout the ages, travelers and artists in the silk-road have been climbing numerous cliffs, high and steep, to strive for the unknown or green oasis; many of them have endless quests for knowledge and desire for the outside terrain and the brave new world. The faculty of “imagination” is found on “imagination”. It is co-extensive and opens up a resource for the aesthetic/ knowledge/ wisdom-renewal. “Presumption” forges a new meaning and spectrum for theoretical exploration. “Art experiment” activates communal spaces for refreshing framework and social experience. Desire for survival-cum-better livelihood fabricates the adventurous life with delusion and fantasy, being and not–being. Such state of mind accords with the course of contemporary art or science, enriching the “general-state of life” with imaginative experimentation! In a Silk Road journey, there are mirage and phantasm of temporal infrastructure and city. Outside the trading district of Dunhuang, there is snow and storm, thunder and lightning, together with the Gobi Desert. In the course of cultural tours, there are worlds of risk and uncertainties, imagination and possibilities. Voyagers have to invent means to manage border-crossing and space-time travels. Excursionists have to come across innumerable adventurers and culture workers from around the many mega cities and big towns, posts and stations. Gathering for discussions, discourse, share, trade and interchange of ideas and goods are rampant. Collaborative support makes sense of everything. Interchange springs up in a way alike that of the “Lanting Xu” or “Prologue of Orchid Pavilion (353AD)” which recorded: “…While looking at the mighty universe above, there are myriad entities below. Sight-seeing satisfies one’s audio-visual, or any form of sensory sensation, which is indeed a delightful and enriching experience!” Transaction encompasses not only the material objects, but the invisible, spiritual concepts as well. With new contacts and convergences, the Silk Road is viewed more than a barter system, being the portal to countless glocal psychological and metaphysical interchange. Where something ends, something begins; there are mountains over mountains, and rivers through rivers; local streams and rivers run, converging into big river, merging and going into the grand, global sea; such is the trans-culture, cross-border, exploration-filled art journey. “A result”, is not the end of a process, but the beginning of another journey, the overcoming of another mountain and river. The Chinese and visiting literati artists, travelled their ideas along the bizarre, colourful, delirious Silk Road, encountered more glocal inter-culturing experiences, and confronted more cultural differences. In the course of exchange, ideas were generated and developed, intertwined and intersected; they have passed through the many psychic levels and premises of “imagination”; which groomed refinement and enhancement of the projects, and with more unseen opportunities ahead. “Imagination” is the prime source of knowledge, and in the late thirteenth centuries, the Italian voyager Marco Polo, wrote a half-documented and half-imagined travelogue, titled “Dong Fang Jian Wen Lu (The Oriental Discovery)”, during his voyage to the Orient in the Yuan Dynasty. This inspired the Spanish navigator, Columbus’ re-imagination of the remote China/ Middle Kingdom, to set sail and begin his sea adventures. With ideal and reality, illusion and delusion all in one, Columbus discovered a new continent, the North America in 1492. History was re-written. The “imagination” in art is not contrary to “reality”, instead, “reality”serves as the source knowledge of “imagination”. For the exhibition of “Silk Road| Portal to World Imagination”, it makes use of “imagination” as a starting point for the communication with “reality”. While the exhibition takes a close look at reality, it allows a space, distance or withdrawal from reality; it fabricates spaces for cross-imagination. In the exhibition, a good array of visual or mediated images forms the curatorial platform for display and dialogue. The ideational images embody the many levels of artists’ sensory experience, thought-imagery and imaginative form. The exhibition re-imagines how the local and overseas artists stitch up experienced reality and futuristic imagination, to reflect on their comprehensive thought and insightful responses to the urgency of urban shifting. And in the end a new Silk Road vision, be it pluralistic or unitary, revolving around the curatorial frame-work, is presented. The exhibition features a variety of contemporary forms, such as space construction, installation, 3D projection, interactive sculpture and oil painting; it incorporates some 30 (33) individual and collective works, comprising the intense, dynamic new media in sound, moving and still images. Media art hinges on our inevitably entering into a new media age working with refreshing artistic notions. It conceals the enormous power of looking closely at “reality”, embodying a new historical function: to produce a new or delirious spot for “imagination”, and to become a content carrier for “imagination”, which drives art to go beyond a defined border and/ or freeze a moment in time. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai discusses how “localities change through actual and imaginative work that affords us further insight” and such “imaginative concept” as “New Silk Road” is enacting new media to recreate a space, or many spaces inside out the institution. They are totally different from our living reality, being more ‘real’ than the life materialistic or non-materialistic. The exhibition, on the one hand, invited a number of artists who are currently living in the cities of Silk Road, to submit their conceptual video works; on the other hand, invited several cultural workers who live across the border/ belt, to share their views on the “Silk Road” journey, that reflect their personal values on aesthetic experimentation. This involves issues such as urban planning, ecological surroundings, aesthetic environment, and local|global contacts; based on social ideal, cultural values, tangible and intangible culture and other situations, and inquire all kinds of imaginative, hypothetical subjects that are beyond the historical logic, and overriding the mainstream perceptions. In the selection of 30 Chinese and overseas international artists, they represent a new generation of artist who has great or inspiring concepts, and with skilled expression of ideas. Before the opening, there will be an international art forum, to explore the phenomenon of a city’s cultural revival. Furthermore, there will be an environmental theater and image performances that interact with the exhibits, in order to enrich the Xi’an citizen and overseas audiences’ “exceptional imagination” towards the Silk Road