Four emerging artists grapple with the pervasiveness of digital media and the Internet as technologies of representation in Chinese Art: From Painting to Digital at Migrant Birds Art Space. Interacting on a personal level with materials of recent technology that otherwise evince uniformity—through knowledge that transcends cultural and geographical borders—Feng Chen, Huang Siying, Liao Wenfeng and Shi Zheng encapsulate the interchange between traditional representational modes and those currently generated through experimentation in the digital realm.
Liao Wenfeng: ‘A Match Man in the Darkness’, 24 x 32 cm, Watercolor and Indian ink on MDF
Representative of the prevalence of video, sound and multimedia in contemporary art discourse, their work reveals impressions of the ‘traditional’ embedded in the theoretical foundations of new technologies—ultimately complicating definitions of newness and conventionality.
Video and multimedia artist Feng Chen was born in Wuhan and graduated from the China Academy of Art (CAA) in 2006. His work explores the manipulative potential of media by reconstituting images of the familiar and destabilizing techniques of representation. Framing incongruity through desynchronization, he engages the senses and diverse temporalities to examine effects of simultaneity and processes of influence and exchange.
Portrait of Feng Chen
Melding various scientific theories and the philosophical concepts of Gilles Deleuze, artist and designer Huang Siying’s new media work spans traditional and recent methods of pattern visualization and mapping. Emerging from a multidisciplinary approach, her imaging techniques disclose current processes of digitalization—not only at work within the production of images, but underlying the human gaze that perceives them.
Portrait of Huang Siying
Berlin-based artist and curator Liao Wenfeng was born in Jiangxi Province and graduated from the China Academy of Art (CAA) in 2006. He has exhibited in China and Europe, and has held Artist-in-Residence positions in Zurich and Helsinki. His work interconnects art and scientific study, developing visual traces of the systems of circulation operating within natural phenomena and everyday processes.
Portrait of Liao Wenfeng
Exploring the interrelationship between sensory experiences that manifest in the topography of virtual space, Shi Zheng employs an experimental approach that traverses video, music and performance. A graduate of China Academy of Art’s (CAA) Institute for Intermedia Art (2014), he has exhibited his integrative digital sound and landscapes internationally, probing audiovisual phenomena to structure digital spaces outside defined geographies.
Portrait of Shi Zheng
Exhibition
MIGRANT BIRDS
Group Show: ‘Chinese Art: From Painting to Digital’
Exhibition: Apr. 28 – Jun. 18, 2016
Koppenplatz 5, 10115 Berlin, click here for map
