Words and dreams
dal 24/3/2011 al 11/5/2011
Segnalato da
24/3/2011
Words and dreams
18Gallery at Bund18, Shanghai
Where technology meets dreams and vice versa. What are words about ? What are dreams about? Can the two collide sometimes? As we have entered the 21st century what has become of writing? This show invites artists to come and answer in installation to the question in unexpected ways. Yet their answers do shed a light on how in the past decades the simple fact of writing, and conjunctly of dreaming, has been deeply transformed.
with : aaajiao, Yang Yongliang, JonOne, Vuk Vidor.
What are words about ? What are dreams about? Can the two collide sometimes? As we have entered the 21st century what has become of writing? This show invites artists to come and answer in installation to the question in unexpected ways. Yet their answers do shed a light on how in the past decades the simple fact of writing, and conjunctly of dreaming, has been deeply transformed.
As Yang Yongliang puts it: “More and more people have become accustomed to a virtual network brought about by the way of life of the virtual world, we interact with each other through the video or online chat. But what you see is only the words transformed by digital transmission. More and more people are accustomed to shopping, watching movies, reading novels, writing mail, playing games even living virtually through the internet…”
How does the fact that our world now is highly computerized makes it totally different to write, read, share, communicate, remember. As media artist aaajiao perfectly depicts it, it is now more about 0s and 1s than letters or words. The content of a book is not anymore about the number of pages but the number of octets the file is. In order to draw our attention on this aaajiao presents the Gfwlist installation where words are crypted. In a second installation BlogArchaeological aajiao keeps all the data and has them show their data weight. In a third installation Cloud data, an ipad displays dreams one can write from the tip of his fingers. A new way of writing and dreaming at the same time.
Calligraphy by its figurative strength is, way more than western writing, prompt to let the mind dream. Yet even calligraphy has been challenge in this pixel era. Graffiti artist JonOne shows with one of his large painting that writing can be approached as calligraphy.
As written in aaajiao’s catalogue : “Calligraphy starts with the perfect dot, the beginning of the artistic creation that it is activated by the precise gesture. it is the restrained copy and the action of re-copy that deepens into the gesture of somebody else (the previous master) somehow the final freedom lays in the perfect copy.” Thus copy art is also an interesting movement to be documented and explored.
Close from the digital phenomenon shanghai artist Yang Yongliang makes his usual digitally made landscapes come to reality, as if out from a dream. The Landscape is in a giant installation taking shape and the digital encoding of a photograph comes to life. Made of paper and light here the line is getting at the same time abstract and very real to anyone who steps in the gallery space. Yang Yongliang admits : “Concerning the question of” embracing new technology both in content and form”in my works, it may attribute to my previous experience as a designer, which armed me with capability of new technology and methods. But for me technology is always an approach, never be the goal. In my sense there is no difference between traditional Chinese writing brush and new techniques, only I am good at using it, and also in keep with “in-time” characteristic of contemporary art.”
Opening 25 March, 2011
18Gallery Shanghai - Bund18
18 Zhongshan East Road (E1), 4F, Shanghai
open everyday from 11AM-11PM