Look at the news knows reporter Linlin Wang
2020-12-31 18:47
Since the invention of the Portable Camera Sony Portapak in Japan in 1965, artists from all continents have been given exposure to this global medium. Over the past decade, exhibitions on the history of video art have been held across Asia.
As these materials gradually accumulate to a certain extent, the depth and details of the history of video art in specific countries gradually emerge; these exhibitions and related research materials expand the existing history of global video art, and provide academic interpretations of the experimental practice and international exchange of video media, provoking people to more thoroughly reflect on the way video art is interpreted.
OCAT Shanghai presents the research exhibition "Refocusing on the Medium: The Rise of East Asia Video Art" from December 27, 2020 to March 21, 2021. For the first time, the exhibition will bring together heavyweight artists from Japan, Korea and China, pioneering video art experiments, aiming to re-examine the way artists approached video art at the time of the rise of video art in East Asia, and to contribute to the global history of video art in transnational contemporary art media.
This exhibition shows how East Asian video art has become a global hybrid art form conditioned on the particularity of video art in the context of post-media contemporary art practices. As a distinctive new technology and experimental art medium, video art has not been paved with cultural traditions, nor has it important artistic conventions or historical premises – but it has become a new global contemporary art tool.
"The rise of video art throughout East Asia represents the whole process of globalization, which is a process of evolution. For today's art, there are actually many issues worth exploring and studying, which can stimulate a lot of thinking. Zhang Peili, director of OCAT Shanghai and a video artist known as the "father of Chinese video art," said this view of the medium gives us reason to recalibrate the contributions of East Asian artists to this still controversial history. How East Asian artists have lifted up video equipment and experimented with this emerging global medium will change the way we look at video art history.
Beginning with Nam June Paik's global network of art in South Korea, Japan, Europe, and the United States, East Asian artists began to use this culturally non-specific medium to enter new points of exchange and equally complex cross-regional, cross-border networks.
For more than two decades, video art has connected artists from all over the world, especially Japan since 1968, South Korea since 1978, Taiwan since 1983, Hong Kong since 1985 and Chinese mainland since 1988. In a very short period of time, unprecedented video art experiments spanned continents and cultural territories, emerging in industrialized and developing economies, making video art the first global contemporary art medium.
Through a collaboration with the Paik Nam Joon Art Center in South Korea, Paik Nam Joon's most iconic video installation TV Buddha [TV Buddha, 1974 (2002)] will be broadcast live in the entrance hall of this exhibition. In the context of the exhibition, this projection provocatively questions the characteristics of the video medium — presence; the twisting of time and space; the tension between illusion, reality and real experience; while subverting the media's conceptual strategy and connecting the dynamic web of local and global expectations.
Although rarely exhibited outside of Japan, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi's CCTV interactive video installations since 1972 are enough to demonstrate his positive contribution to the emerging international contemporary art dialogue.
In this exhibition, Las Meninas (1974-1975), a work presented at the 13th São Paulo Biennale in 1975, will provide us with a complex artistic experiment. The work, which includes closed-circuit television, six video monitors, and two full-scale reproductions of Diego Velázquez's 17th-century painting of the same name, made possible Michel Foucault's analysis of the painting in The Order of Things (1966).
Other artists in the exhibition, such as Yoko Ono, who used closed-circuit television to transform the concept of sublime space in Sky TV (1966-2020), and Park Hyunki, who juxtaposes elements of nature and the latest technology in two important works of the video installation Untitled (TV Stone Tower, 1979-1982), raise philosophical questions about existence.
Wang Gongxin's CCTV video installation Two Square Meter Space (1995-2020) challenges traditional rules of perspective and perception by subverting and disrupting the sculptural space. This is also Wang Gongxin's early work in the 1990s, and another piece of art he brought this time is "Broken Stool".
"My experience was in the 1990s when I went to the United States, when video art was also a non-mainstream art field in the United States." Wang Gongxin said that after 20 years, looking back at the works of East Asian video artists, looking back at this way of creation, the medium of video has become so close to the lives of the public. "Nowadays, anyone can create through images, and the development of science and technology has changed people's lives while artists have also thought about art in this way."
Soungui Kim's work uses the portability, recording, and re-recording capabilities of video equipment to interfere with and deconstruct linear time in a way that only video can do. These works were chosen because they provide an exemplary exploration of the unique possibilities and media qualities of video art in the context of post-media contemporary art practices.
Artists such as Kim Kulim, Takahiko Iimura, and Yuan Goang-Ming deconstruct screen space while forcibly combining the reality of the material carrier and the illusion of the video medium to subvert the certainty of "reproduction" and emphasize the present. In most of the works, sculptural treatments of materials and ideas dominate, especially those of Keigo Yamamoto, Shigeko Kubota, Chen Shaoxiong, Zhu Jia, Geng Jianyi, and Ellen Pau, which give special attention to conceptual screen and display space.
Revisiting the rise of video art from some of the works of early East Asian artists, these works experiment with video art rooted in special environments and with unique media properties in the context of post-media contemporary art practice. After 20 years, the questions that artists have always been concerned about will be dialogued and reflected through their video media.
(Look at the news Knows reporter: Wang Linlin Editor: Shi Li)