Yesterday, we brought you a review of Fat Art‘s opening-weekend madness, reported from the trenches of TT Girls Club by Mr. Ben Houge. Today, a run-down of the festival’s visual arts offerings, which you can check out until May 3 if you happen to be in Beijing:
- Hangzhou’s Sun Lei 孙磊 used ambient music by Dead J to underscore his Colorful Gyroscope, four channels of elegiac animations, faceless figures in muted colors endlessly playing childhood games.
- Wu Ershan 乌尔善 had previously worked with Dead J and Sulumi on remixes of the Eight Model Operas, and I guess this music was further reworked to provide the soundtrack to his star-shaped, mirrored Club Revolution (where gallery visitors can also manipulate the decks under a disco ball to change the output).
- Yan Lei’s 颜磊 Backstage recreates a club backstage area, and I guess music from his pals Brain Failure is supposed to be playing from a stage monitor, but the piece never seems to be working properly. Someone said it’s supposed to give you the rush of playing a live set, but with all the mirrors, it’s more like singing into a hairbrush in the bathroom.
- Xu Ruotao’s 徐若涛 I See It, I Hear It is a painting consisting of a bunch of doodles drawn with a computer mouse superimposed on an appropriated photograph of some space nebula, and Ge Fei 格非 (I assume from milk@coffee) did a 5-minute piece that was somehow derived from an analysis of the painting, which loops next to it. (This cool, Autechresque piece is included on the CD accompanying the Fat Art magazine.)
- Pei Li’s 裴丽 Something Missing? is a catchy, high-speed video that flaunts her draftsman’s skills in a steady stream of graffiti, endlessly applied to a wall and erased. The soundtrack is pretty noisy, with a bunch of radio speakers mounted on the walls. She said she was using some kind of radio transmitter to play her soundtrack, but it comes across as a steady wall of static. I think she said there was some Pink in there, or maybe Pink just happened to come on the radio.
- Wang Bo’s 王波done a nominally interactive piece based on his Kuangkuangkuang 哐哐哐characters. He’s rebuilt a funky old Chinese classroom out of cardboard, but with an endlessly repeating Flash sequence projected on the chalkboard, portraying a monster/teacher growling at the students, who cry out in endless, rhythmic succession. There are also life-sized figurines of the characters that emit a cry when you hit them.
- Say what you will about Liu Ye’s 刘野 paintings (and I’d say they’re little more than cute illustrations), his piece here can hardly be called an installation. He’s done portraits of Mozart, Teresa Teng 邓丽君, and Chet Baker (allegedly going for about $170,000 USD), and a song from each loops in his little gallery.
- Zhou Yue’s 周越T3 video piece was shot from a swinging camcorder while walking around the new Terminal 3 of the Beijing International Airport. It’s mostly ambient sound, with additional audio provided by saxophonist Liu Yuan 刘元.
- Mathieu Borysevicz’s Channing District Orchestra is an eloquent 3-channel short film revolving around Shanghai’s migrant recycling community, its soundtrack comprising ambient sounds of the city, with additional underscore from his brother Kristian.
- The aim of the Xinjiang abstract painter Aniwar 艾尼瓦尔, according to the show’s catalog, was to create “a realm complete and utter silence,” in which the only sound would be “the rise and fall of the breath, the pounding of blood in the veins, the roar of silence in the ears,” which seems a bit optimistic, given that he’s surrounded by a bunch of raucous sound installations. It’s a room with rolls of felt applied to the walls, and you can definitely appreciate a change in acoustic response, but it’s pretty subtle. The bolts lying near the entrance suggest he kind of gave up on the piece.
- Then there’s the kaleidoscope room that Chen Hangfeng 陈航峰 and I put together. If you want to know all about that, check out the in-depth synopsis on my blog.”