Group Exhibition Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts, Nanjing
It's not simply a matter of who dies and lives, but rather, how the act of fighting for life and death becomes an "aesthetic activity." Why has the scene in Way of the Dragon featuring Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in the Amphitheatrum Flavium become a classic among action films, a source of constant reference for much of moving image production – whether it is film industry products or "video art" created by artists, or today's mass social media. Can it be there is some general, universal, charismatic, essential, aesthetic and ethical DNA embedded in this performance?
Action movies are only a prominent case of a certain type of performative act and gesture. It seems that the project's retrieval of this "act" in artists' video works is at the level of general representation of the human's acts. However, it is an attempt at describing and contemplating a core moving image – "The Act as a Gesture" in the first exhibition and screening attempts to cover various "acts" as "moving images created by artists": labor and its rehearsal, physical discipline or development, motions as ideology, performance, competition, life management, etc. Among these "acts", the more orderly one is: as a moving image created by the artist, its shooting itself is also a kind of act, a general action as a gesture. A question of the action about an action?
The initial context of The Action as a Gesture stems from the judgment that "general" encompasses the demands on aesthetic education in the current era. However, the current era in the culture, art and film industries does not really reflect this "general" requirement, or at least does not take up the function of creative aesthetic education, does not take up the task of leading and transforming people. They excavate and mobilize the general potential and vernacular of contemporary people, either indifferent and passively backward, or deliberately concealed. When it comes to our current mass appeal, it fails to tell a story of the masses.
As an imaginary, public, educational program of the college and its extended exhibition activities, Action will attempt to continuously cover: 1) Films/video works and fragments in the general intellectual sense of archives, teaching materials, knowledge, etc.; 2) "Artists' films/videos"; 3) Mass (film) moving image production as "non-art" production (such as social media moving image production and consumption, Douyin and Kuaishou, etc.), and so on, trying to extract and summarize their "generality".
At the same time, the gaps between the industries of knowledge production and academia, contemporary art and culture, and popular culture become the focus of this project: Is it possible to take the practitioners and products of a certain industry with its own limitations, and bring them into another industrial context, to attempt to release its creative potential and value?
Wang Yamin
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