SHANGHAI.- The K11 Art Foundation presents Image Core Sample, a selection of video and photographic works from the personal collection of Adrian Cheng, Founder and Honorary Chairman of the K11 Art Foundation, expanding on the dialogues and topics explored from historical and sociological perspectives in contemporary cultures.
The collection illustrates Adrian Cheng’s motivation to collect in response to current sociocultural trends, such as the ongoing fusion between technology and art, and a prevailing exploration into academic topics such as media-archaeology, which is implied in the title of this collection. Featuring works by Chen Wei, Cheng Ran, Guan Xiao, Li Ming, Liu Chuang, Qiu Zhi jie, and Yang Fudong, this special showcase of the collection offers an insight into the role of image making in the Chinese contemporary art scene and reveals the sizeable shift in mentality of Chinese communities over the past two decades.
Image Core Sample explores photography and moving image as two lens-based mediums which are sensitive to the ongoing transformation of digital ecologies, presenting works created in China since pre-internet era, exploring the human conditions and its transformations at present.
The versatility of these two mediums allows artists to blur previous disciplinary boundaries and make reference to popular forms of mass media. Yang Fudong’s two photographic works, Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, Part V and Don't worry, it will be better… No. 7 depict his signature group of young adults, in both a hotel setting and a bamboo forest, evoking Shanghai cinema of the 1930’s and establishing historical narratives in a dreamlike fashion. Chen Wei’s work, Idol Behind The Curtains, freezes a cinematic moment of a seated man, his face hidden by a curtain caught in the wind, blurring the line between photography and cinema and emphasising human finitude.
The diverse possibilities for the representation of motion are explored in Li Ming’s video series, Movements, where bodily movements are captured and transferred onto moving images, and also in Qiu Zhijie’s Copy Orchard Pavilion Preface 1000 Times documents the artist’s performance of repetitive movements.
Adrian Cheng, Founder and Honorary Chairman of the K11 Art Foundation said: “We live in a time when images are endlessly produced, reproduced and disseminated to communities at a local and global level. These kinetic cultural boundaries have always informed my collecting practice so it is my pleasure to be able to present a selection of my personal collection of Chinese photography and video art, spanning the past two decades, complimenting .com/.cn an exhibition that illustrates our commitment to the exploration of artists reaction to the changing global digital ecosystem.”
