Solo Exhibition Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, Bldg.18, No.50, Moganshan Road, Shanghai
Time: May 9 — 28 November, 2014
Venue: Chronus Art Center, Bldg.18, No.50, Moganshan Road, Shanghai
Art Director: Li Zhenhua
Curators: Richard Castelli, Edward Sanderson, SenSend, Art Yan
Artists: Jeffrey Shaw, Hu Jieming
Jeffrey Shaw and Hu Jieming Twofold Solo Exhibition focuses on these two artists who have both developed individual approaches to new media art, and contributed each in their own way to the practice and context of this new art form as we experience it today.
Jeffrey Shaw is a leading figure in new media art and has been active since its emergence from the performance, expanded cinema, and installation paradigms of the 1960s, to its present day technology-informed and virtualized forms. Having moved away from traditional drawing, his early interest in making artistic experiences and possibilities liberated from objects such as paintings, led him towards a more radical approach. That approach is to focus on the relationship between the artwork and the viewers, especially the cinematic experience and the interplay between the virtual and the real, things for which he is best known.
Chronus Art Center will present this major retrospective of the AVIE (the Advanced Visualization and Interaction Environment) system since year 2000. The AVIE is the world’s first artistically-conceived 360-degree stereoscopic interactive visualization and audification environment. Shaw created this and been conducting research with in efforts to embody new forms of creative content and new types of interactive and immersive experience and opportunities. The exhibition will feature a comprehensive collection of artworks that Shaw built for the AVIE in collaboration with other artists.
Set out as a twofold solo exhibition, the Chronus Art Center will simultaneously present a new art piece by Hu Jieming: Tai Chi with Overture. This has been created not only as a response to the influence of Hu’s old master, but also to Hu’s own artistic achievements over the past years.
As one of the foremost pioneers of new media art in China, Hu started to experiment with new technologies in his works in the 1980s. Constantly concerned with subjects such as time, human history, and cultural memory, Hu intended to illuminate the boundaries between the ‘passing-by’ and the ‘going-on’ and by doing so he set viewers free from the chronological way of seeing historical events, onto a more accidental reconstruction. The newly created artwork Tai Chi, will be unveiled for the first time to the public at CAC, in the form of a bipartite narrative with the artwork Overture, the former launched on May 9, while Tai Chi is launched on August 8. Tai Chi will be both a review and an extension in the artist’s journey of historical reflection.
Li Zhenhua, Art Director of this exhibition, says: “This exhibition of Jeffrey Shaw’s collected works marks a farewell to the field of international new media art which arose in the 1960s, and film is the link. Like any other farewell, art revives itself after the end of each media and concept, to gather and extend itself into its future. Hu Jieming’s project is evidence of this revival, exploring the existence of “humans” by intervening in reality, contemplating history, body and time, and pursuing a perfect system and an innovative technique.”
Visitors will for the first time see all the major works created for AVIE in one location, featuring collaborations with artists from diverse backgrounds and disciplines. In addition, visitors are also invited to look through and play with two individual timelines for each artist, Hu and Shaw, by operating a touch-table placed on-site, to discover how their practice intersects at certain points amongst a web of different artistic categories.
The exhibition will be accompanied and expanded upon by a series of seminars and round-table discussions on the weekends, on various artistic, technological and academic topics encountered and inspired by the artistic works showcased in the exhibition.
Mediating Cultural Memory
Seminar: New Media, Cultural Heritage and Museums
Time: 14:00 – 16:00, May 10 (Sat.), 2014
Venue: Chronus Art Center (Bldg. 18, No. 50 Moganshan Road, Shanghai)
Speakers: Jeffrey Shaw, Sarah Kenderdine
Moderator: Hans-Georg Knopp
Language: English (with Simultaneous Interpretation)
How can media art practices help conserving our cultural patrimony and making it accessible to the public? How can they help museums to represent intangible cultural content?
Jeffrey Shaw gives an in-depth description of the creation process of Hampi for the immersive display system AVIE. Sarah Kenderdine examines how these new technologies can transform the experience of museum visitors and enable them to have a more sensorial and experiential experience of museum exhibits.
Moderated by Hans-Georg Knopp, who has a long standing interest in cultural heritage and politics, this panel illustrates two innovative projects: PLACE-Hampi and PLACE-Ruhr, using media art strategies to convey a new dimension to archeology and cultural heritage preservation. The audience will not only be able to see cultural patrimony in an enjoyable way, but will also be inspired to investigate new forms of representation of cultural heritage in our media-driven era.
Mediating Cultural Memory
Round Table Tour: Information Walls, Media and History
Time: 14:00 – 16:00, May 11 (Sun.), 2014
Venue: Chronus Art Center (Bldg. 18, No. 50 Moganshan Road, Shanghai)
Speakers: Hu Jieming, Shi Yong，Lu Leiping，Richard Castelli
Moderator: Zian Chen
Language: Chinese and English (with Simultaneous Interpretation)
Using new media as his means of artistic expression, what Hu Jieming has accentuated is not so much the newness of mediality, but its gilded datedness that one can perceived from the materials he applied, whereby the length of time itself is brought to the front by the contrast. From Witness·Game in 1994 to Tai Chi this year, Hu’s vast body of work was rendered with his play of forms and is enriching by the converged attention to the sense of history, and from personal impulsive led by chance towards a collective cultural aspect. The meaning of Hu Jieming’s oeuvre is, in many ways, multiple and has to be deciphered in a dynamical reading. This round table creates an intellectual entrance for Hu Jieming’s latest solo show by the discussion about the new media and the consciousness of time and Hu’s singular approach of his enthusiastic quest for an image to come.
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