| Translated Acts | The Exhibition | The Programme | dumb type | | Translated Acts | The Exhibition | The Programme | dumb type |
Artists from the East Asian performance art movement have been
working on new forms of expressing the body since the early nineties,
and interpret these in photographs, videos, documentary films,
digital art and live performances. The House of World Cultures
presents a selection of this new art in the exhibition "Translated
Acts": 29 multimedia works by artists and groups of artists from
China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The works are concerned with the perception of the body in the
context of East Asia's increasingly urbanised and technologised
societies. The artists of "Translated Acts" show the manipulated,
deformed or newly created virtual body as a projection surface
of social conflicts and new sexual identities, as a medium of
political protest and renewed spiritual arwareness. "Translated Acts" signifies here both the translation and extension
of the act of performance into the area of electronic and digital
media, but still more the penetration of the body into this networked,
virtual space. • So we see that the famous Taiwanese Chieh-jen CHEN's photographic essays are a digital reconstruction of his own body
in multiple and frequently ripped or shredded performative sculptures.
• The Japanese artist HIROMIX documents her everyday life and that of her teenage girlfriends
with polaroid snaps. Her "girl photographs" are reflexive portraits
and at the same time an expression of a fetishistic objectivisation
of young women and the things that surround them. Yuyeon KIM, the exhibition's curator, was born in South Korea.
She is an independent art curator based in New York and Seoul,
and is co-founder of the inernet art organisation PLEXUS. In 1997
she was curator of the exhibition "In the Eye of the Tiger", and
organised the exhibition "Transversions" for Johannesburg's 2nd
Biennial celebrations. In 1998 she assembled the Asian-Pacific
section of "Cinco Continentes y Una Ciudad" in Mexico. In 1999
she was awarded a research scholarship by the Asian Cultural Council,
and organised the Latin-American section of the 3rd Kwangju Biennial
2000 in South Korea. Her essays have been published in "Art Asia
Pacific", "Wolgan Missol", "Atlantica", "Flash Art", "Intelligent
Agent" and other journals.
Atta KIM
HO Siu-kee
ZHU Jia
Mariko MORI
Chieh-jen CHEN
Tehching HSIEH
Michael JOO
MA Liuming
Dumb Type
ZHANG Huan
Motohiko ODANI
Hiromix
Wenda GU
Hey-yeun JANG
Ja-young KU
QIU Zhijie
WANG Jian Wei
XU Bing
Young Kyun LIM
YUAN Goang-ming
Chiharu SHIOTA
Tian-miao LIN
Young Jin KIM
Gong-Xin WANG
Cun-chi Lin
Qi LI
WANG Xiaoshuai
Takehito
KOGANEZAWA
The curator, Yuyeon Kim, makes the changes that have taken place
in the artistic use of these media in Asia over the last ten years
clear: while photography, video and digital art had previously
been used mainly as a means of documenting performances, they
have now themselves become the object of the artists' performance
art.
• Mariko MORIS's digital pictures portray the cloned figures of the Japanese artist,
placed on top of one other in different moments of simultaneity.
Her work contains references to Buddhist and Shintoist ideas of
repetition and reincarnation.
• ZHANG Huans performance "My America", from the series "Hard to Acclimatize",
developed during his stay in the USA. As the only Asian performer,
the Chinese artist leads an event which is determined by apparently
ritualistic actions, and at the same time is an object of the
naked white participants' denigration.
• The Korean HO Siu Kee uses his video installations to develop a space whose proportions
orientate themselves to the artist's body. "Golden Proportion"
reflects the foundations of human existence and behaviour.
These and the works of the other participating artists clearly
show the power of East Asian Body and Performance Art.
| Translated Acts | The Exhibition | The Programme | dumb type |