Chen Wei, Chen Xiaofeng, Fan Xi, Lisa Chang Lee, Jiang Zhi, Kobie Nel, Qi Yafei, Wenxin Zhang

Curator: Li Beike

Producer: Tian Kai

Exhibition director: Zhao Mengyuan

Public relations: Wang Jing

Opening: 4.30-8pm, 28th October 

2017.10.28 - 2017.12.10

Hongkun Museum of Fine Art, No.42 West Dawang Rd. 

Chaoyang District, Beijing 

In his Landscape and Power, W.J.T Mitchell considered “landscape” in painting as a verb, not simply as an object to be seen but as the evolution of social identities. When photography replaces landscape with scenes, both indoor and outdoor, both real and virtual, artists took “staging” as a way to structure space, which adds to the subjective dimension of staging. Ever since photography became more than an on-the-spot report, artists have been empowered as a film director when dealing with photos, enjoying lots of freedom to make adaptations of the original story or create new reality.   

Contemporary video art is the marriage of staging and photography making, and a combination of human ingenuity and technology. After dismissing grand narrative, artists began to break the limitation of time and space at will, manipulating in the world of video both the micro and the macro, the pastand the present. When cities became over-exploited and was turned into a place  of artifacts, people began to load it with illusions and imaginations about their living space. The playful way of life seems to offer us the answer to the question whether there is poetic dwelling in our reality built by photos and videos. Living in a world flooded with images and man-made landscape, we find ourselves in a very big club.   

In this exhibition photography and video build scenes that belong to different time periods and different places. A staging artist can produce modern cities, big and open space, rooms, scenes of crime, as well as our future dwellings in our mind’s eye.