calendario eventi  :: 

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27/9/2011

Two exhibitions

EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki

Contemporary art from China
Yang Fudong - Utopia and Reality

Yang Fudong is one of China’s leading contemporary artists specialising in the moving image. In autumn 2011 EMMA will show four Fudong video installations – East of Que Village (2007) and three parts of the Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest series (2005-007).

Yang Fudong is considered one of the most talented representatives of Chinese video and film art. He is a brilliant interpreter whose camera work has a magic beautiful, specifically reflecting Chinese aesthetics which are, nevertheless, linked to western modernism. Fudong is known for his timeless and dreamlike interpretations studying human relationships and the stories behind these. Many of his works focus on the problems of the modern generation and the awareness of these brought about by China’s developing society and materialism.

Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest ( parts 3, 4, 5)

Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest is based on an old Chinese story of seven famous Tao artists and poets from the Wei and Jin dynasties. In Fudong’s work people are shown aware of the burden of traditions, values and the past.

The different parts of the work follow the life of seven 20-year-old modern Chinese intellectuals. The location of the first part is China’s Yellow Mountain which has played and important role in the history of Chinese painting. Fudong is interested in the formation of identity and shows this through myths, personal memories and experiences. In the second part of the work the group discusses love and sexuality. Parts 3-5, which will be shown at EMMA, leave the city and move to the countryside and the reality of manual labour. The group works during the day and rests in the evening (part 3). The journey continues to a small island (part 4). The group loves the sea and wants to live on the island, undisturbed and isolated. However, such a life is, perhaps, Utopia. With its new experiences, the group returns to the city and reality (part 5). It continues to be part of a youth collective but a collective which looks to the future and the unknown.

Part 3
35mm b&w film, transferred to DVD, 53 min, 2005

Part 4
35mm b&w film, transferred to DVD, 70 min, 2006
Part 5
35mm b&w film, transferred to DVD, 91 m in, 2007

East of Que Village, 2007
(6-channel, blackand white, 20 min. 50 secs)

East of Que Village focuses on the feelings of isolation and loss experienced in today’s China in different parts of the countryside: communities are crumbling, rural villages are merging into surrounding urban developments and the struggle for livelihood is gaining the upper hand. Fudong films the Chinese countryside and its everyday struggle for survival amid expanding urbanisation.

The work’s image world is the cold landscape of northern China, a village in the Hebei province, in which a pack of village guard dogs fight to stay alive. The wintery rural village is deserted and forbidding and forms the backdrop to the dogs’ life and death battle. The local inhabitants go about their daily work and their function in the installation is to reflect the struggle between the dogs.

The poetic work is a metaphor of the feelings of isolation and depopulation which the artist sees in contemporary society. The work calls into question the value of work in today’s China and brings to the fore the hopes people have for their own lives. East of Que Village is perhaps the most personal of Fudong’s works and draws on memories of his own childhood with its problems and emotions.

An inspirational, film-like narrative quality is fundamental to Yang Fudong’s art and his work has been compared to the films of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovski.

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A modern art classic
Anitra Lucander - Poet of Colour

The autumn 2011 exhibition, Anitra Lucander – Poet of Colour, forms part of EMMA’s classic series presenting foremost representatives of Finnish Modernism. Anitra Lucander (1918-2000) became known as one of the post-war reformers of Finnish art and a pioneer of abstract art. During the 1950s, through Cubism and collage technique, she developed lyrical abstract expressionism based on individual and rich shades of colour. As a woman artist Anitra Lucander was an exception in the then highly masculine Finnish art world.

A woman at the hub of Modernism

Lucander studied at the Free School of Art in Helsinki at the turn of the 1940s. From her first exhibition at the beginning of the 1950s Lucander was at the vanguard of Finland’s new, Paris-oriented modern art. She was an innovator of international post-war art who dared to challenge the established concepts of art.

In a career spanning more than 30 years Lucander’s interests followed a versatile path through the various fields of art. But it was colour that remained the cornerstone and foundation of her art. EMMA’s extensive retrospective exhibition, comprising more than 100 works, presents Anitra Lucander’s paintings, collages, fabric applications, murals, etchings and drawings. Through the artist’s work the exhibition also follows her travels to the Near East and India which had a significant influence on her art and, more specifically, on her colour world. For the intrepid and uninhibited Lucander travel was virtually a way of life.

The Anitra Lucander – Poet of Colour exhibition is particularly suited to EMMA since the artist has many connections with Tapiola and with the WeeGee building. Lucander lived in Tapiola in 1955-1960, then the only woman artist to do so. Her Nallenpolku atelier was her first proper studio and most of her major paintings and collages from the 1950s were created there. The artist also had close links with Hagalund Manor. Colour design connects Lucander to the architect Arno Ruusuvuori, the designer of the WeeGee building. Lucander acted as Ruusuvuori’s colour consultant as well as colour consultant for the building.

The exhibition curator is the art historian Sanna Teittinen, the subject of whose doctorate was the art of Anitra Lucander.

Image: Yang Fudong

More information
Communication Manager: Leena Joutsenniemi +358 (0)9 816 40544 leena.joutsenniemi@espoo.fi

EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art
The WeeGee Exhibition Centre
Ahertajantie 5, Tapiola, Helsinki
Opening hours
Tue, Thu, Fri 11am-6pm, Wed 11am-8pm, Sat, Sun 11am-5pm. Mon. closed
Admission: 10€ / 8€
Groups min 10 persons 8€ per person
Free admission for all on Wed. 6 pm-8 pm.
Visitors under 18 and over 70 are admitted free

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