【新世纪】特邀沈瑞筠、杨北辰为基金会特约研究员

Guest Researcher: Ruijun Shen

Artists’ creative works can not be separated from the background of his or her time. This ‘time’ includes both the actual epochal environment and the cultural context. In a pluralist society, how do artists as individual subjects in concrete environment receive, digest, respond and convert epochal information through artistic language, forming distinct and individual voices? ‘Making with Time’ hopes to situate artists in the above contexts to discuss their practice.

Cultural traditions influence people’s ideas and ways of dealing with life. It is like an invisible hand that sculpts the social reality. Besides their contemporary art practice, many contemporary Chinese artists are strongly interested in traditional Chinese culture. How is it related to their creative activities? What are the elements that they have absorbed and utilized in their practice? Contemporary China is in a phase of drastic transition. In face of issues like capital, internet, consumption, economic inequality, globalization, social and urban reforms, how are the artists inspired and stimulated by China’s social reality? Can we provide effective solutions when reflecting upon the problematics sprung from modernism? Can artistic practices extract creative languages and cognitive methods from the genes of our culture and reality?

In the spirit of the Foundation’s aim – the promotion of a positive development of contemporary art in China, the project ‘Making With Time’ set out to investigate, with specific concerns in sight, creative trajectories of 30 artists through interviews that took place over 5 years, thus to gradually unlock and clarify their creative thinking. Based on research, we will also formulate thematic talks and conversations to further develop questions that we truly concern. We will then purposefully precipitate art’s happening through project-sponsoring and exhibitions. Through further and deeper collaborations and publications , we also hope to accumulate more artists and professionals to promote artistic practice and cultural productions.

Guest Researcher: Yang Beichen

Moving image art is one of the most important, active and diverse fields in contemporary art. On one hand, it belongs to the broader category of media art, maintaining an inborn relevance with the classical video art. On the other hand, it has deep aesthetic connection with other art categories (especially film), thus fostering possibilities of compelling extension and constant expansion. To a certain extent, moving image art today has already constructed a kind of ‘platform’ or ‘infrastructure’. Due to its openness and the multiplicity on the level of display, it has become an inescapable choice of media for artistic creation. However, in the context of mainland China, neither critical writings nor academic systems has carried out relevant researches at a matching scale. The in-depth discussion of topics about the display and collection of moving image art are especially urgent.   

To launch this research, Chinese moving image art since 2008 provides undoubtedly good resources. This period is not only the decade of the medium’s outbreak and progress but also a phase when the younger generation of Chinese artists created extensive works in the medium and achieved outstanding results. Taking this period’s practice as the foundation, through organizing and reconstructing the materials, the research investigates and discusses artists’ works in concrete terms, looking for intrinsic logic and tendencies while bringing out the unique history of Chinese moving image art at the same time. This unique history then makes contact with the global aesthetic context. Delving deeper at the local level on one hand, and expanding outwards on the other, this sustaining process of unearthing and communication will certainly bring this field’s research into a new phase.

The entire research project lasts 3 years and progresses through writing/publication, talks/seminars, exhibitions and etc. concurrently. It goes into the issues surrounding the history, curation, specificity of the medium, collection and circulation, its relation with other mediums and etc. While inviting relevant artists, critics and curators to participate, the project also aims to bring in more academic trajectories and vision, to make itself a perspective for reflection and the point of application for penetrating the whole of contemporary art in China.