Image of Desperation and Hope
 
Na Risong
 
In the realm of contemporary art, the expression and presentation of image works are more and more comprehensive and multimedia-oriented.
Since its foundation, Inter Art Center/Gallery has been dedicated to presenting image works of various styles from different countries.
This time we are greatly honored to have Swiss artist Beat Kuert here to display his new works. The exhibition will display Beat Kuert’s photography works since 2009. As a crossover artist, Beat Kuert first achieved great success in the field of experiment films, then he devoted himself to the expression of his feelings about existence and life through the form of video art. In 2000, Beat Kuert started to try the means of photography to interpret his views. He believes that “picture is the motion of the highest level”. In the body photography of women full of desire and fear, we can feel the power and sense of motion that each picture brings us. The visual impact and emotional complexity lead the viewers from the initial confusion to a mixed feeling of hope and desperation.

The exhibited pictures by Beat Kuert are stills of videos or pictures from his video camera, laptop, mobile phone or digital camera. After being re-processed by the artist, these raw pictures display an ambiguous and distorted effect. The omnipresent prime colors of red, yellow and white combined with the conflict between black and white as well as the contortion of human bodies, give the picture a dangerous tension. The contortion and overlapping of bodies, the stunning and even abhorrent red lips, they all directly express the piquancy of death and the arrival of hope after breaking everything. In this amazing process of transformation, Beat Kuert connects life with death, as well as the inevitability of desire, vanity and existence.

The exhibition “Kan” is named after a trigram from The Book of Changes, a Chinese ancient classic. According to the book, “Kan” has the meaning of “fear, danger and rebirth out of desperation”. Perhaps the mysterious Chinese ancient “image” exactly matches Beat Kuert’s questioning and reading of the significance of life.