February 2015 Red Gate Residents
Feb 01,2015
TJH403
Lieve DE CLERCK, Belgium, Writing
Being fascinated by Chinese history and Chinese culture and having travelled for more than 20 years along all wind angles of the country, I diligently write and lecture about China.
Fiction and non-fiction, descriptive, sometimes poetic and emotional as well as realistic writing is a most personal and passionate project.
My epic novel "The Mild Perfume of Peach Blossom" has recently been published (Dutch language). The English manuscript is ready for publication. My intended (English) writing project during the Red Gate Residency will intertwine contemporary and 'old' life by entering in the myriad existence of Chinese families. I will definitely look for the philosophy of present-day social and cultural life in enchanting and provocative Beijing.
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Susan Fang, USA, Drawing\ Collage\ Video
Susan Fang b.1985 currently living in New York.
“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
While never answering Kundera's question, "What the shall we choose," the works, ranging from collage, drawings, to videos, are playful and personal musings on the ideas of weight or lightness, dark or light, East or West. Two recurring motifs are; the torso, symbolizing man's burden, is a nod to Plato's notion that all wars and conflict arise from discomforts of the body, while the landscapes, symbolizes man's lightness. is a personal reflection on how one loses ones sense of self when immersed in the grandiosity of nature.
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Joshua Lue Chee Kong, Trinidad and Tobago, Sculpture\Graphic Design
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Joshua-Lue-Chee-Kong/316577655092547?ref=aymt_homepage_panel
The Red Gate Residency would provide me with the opportunity of gaining the experience of life in a residency, where I will be exposed to a different culture and immersing myself in the process. I want to be in this program as I will bring a unique prospective of being born in the Caribbean and of Chinese decent. Being in this position allows me to finally resolve my personal identity and perhaps determine whether or not I am more Chinese than I perceive coming from Trinidad and Tobago, or the fact that I am more Trinidad and Tobagonian than Chinese or a mixture of the two. I am hoping this residency will not only help me to resolve my own identity, but give me the confidence and clear focus to achieve what I wish to in my future projects.
I cannot determine whether or not if I have the right qualifications for this residency but I can say is that I do have the right qualities. With my drive and hunger to feed my curiosity, to create ideas and, if given the tools, the expertise, I intend to accomplish a lot with this program. What I can bring to the table is my experience of being from the Caribbean and my experience of working in the creative field that can be put to use in the development of my art.
My main aim is just to be a part of a residency and to reflect on myself in another country.
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Anne Hastie, Australi, Painting/photography
I am a regular visitor to Beijing - it is a very creative place for me. My most recent solo show, Going, Going Gone... (Melbourne, May 2014) included paintings that reflected my specific responses to place and time - to being in Beijing in the depths of winter while it continues with its mindblowing unstoppable transformation into a mega-city.
My paintings explore the dynamism of Beijing; its many textures, its order and chaos and its many colors - from washed-out-winter, to bright lights and strong hues in the built environment and peoples’ clothing.
I also explore the nature of paint itself. Through intricate layering, I exploit the interplay between paint, varnishes and Chinese inks.
My photographic activities often inform my painting practice. I reference the world around me, especially to urban landscape, and I have a particular interest in the inner city environment, and aerial photography.
The work produced whilst participating in this Red Gate residency will be exhibited at the Kreisler Gallery, Melbourne in May 2015.
TJH108
Enrique Lanz, Mexico( D.F., 1992), Mixed Media
His work is based on different media such as video, drawing and performance. The basis of his projects are always supported by the drawing, as initiator of ideas. The conceptual themes of his work are: leisure, domesticity and chance; Using this to create and change different situations of the ordinary life.
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Wolfgang Obermair, Germany, Sculpture/Video art
http://wolfgang-obermair.glazprom.org
The starting point for my work is quite often an interest in the material itself or constructive characteristics to trigger sculpturalor pictorial processes. Technical aspects I never see detached from the social environment. During my residency I want to open my work practise in a sense that it can create dialogues within a cultural context that is totally alien to me.
Jagrut Raval, India, Photo/video/installation
My academic background in Interior Architecture and Photography allows me to understand Art within a context. The context could be the public space or a gallery space or any place where the work exists. Each of my projects is repurposed according to the space in which it is presented. I believe art is an academic process, where research is an equal component of the entire art making process. I am interested in the idea of Time in philosophy, theology and as History. While in Beijing, I will mediate series of performances in which visitors from underprivileged parts of the city will eat various food items placed in the shape of a world map. These performances will be documented through time-lapse videos.
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Stewart Ziff, USA/UK, Photography/Installation/ Sculpture
As an artist I explore the ways in which we see through an interest in the relationship between what we see and how we see. My ideas reflect on the phenomenology of sight, the space we occupy and with notions about perception, knowledge, history, memory and vision.My recent work concerns itself with exploration and journey, in both the literal sense of travel to places of absorbing interest to make observational study, and in the metaphorical sense with which the large scale panoramic compositions I make seeks to engage the gaze and imagination of the audience.
With an approach to documenting a scene of high spatial resolution that occurs over a period of time that allows for decision and choice in photographing changes of action and event from which a stitched composite is later constructed, temporal shifts in the physical environment, movement and transition in the state of objects, the circumstance of people in some activity or situation of social interaction, are all potential details of narrative content that can form part of a final composition. My interest is to arrest the attention of the viewer directing their sight inward to depiction of scene and circumstance, immersing them in contemplation of the multiplicity of accumulated detail that forms the entirety of a scene of some visual and narrative complexity.
