Following “The Other There, Gao Shiqiang's solo” in 2009, Iberia Center for Contemporary Art will  present his Century, another solo. As one of the "scholarly" artists in the contemporary art scene in China, Gao Shiqiang, born in 1971, now teaches at School of Trans-media, CAFA.

This exhibition will greet the audience with three art video works by Gao Shiqiang, i.e., Total Solar Eclipse, Qingbang, and Century. Following the artist's poetic logic of video, Total Solar Eclipse, shot in a newly built workshop abandoned soon after the economic recession, gives a spiritual portrait of contemporary Chinese people as a group; Qingbang, a three-screen video, focuses on how an age can finish and makes a place fall into oblivion; Century is the first experimental 3D video work in China, which, compared to 2D video, is capable of arousing strong sense of presence and immersion achieved through its overt graduation and spatial division. This modern technology in video-making greatly expanded human visual experience by isolating, alienating, or even creating a virtual video world. "The real" and "the unreal" of 3D video seem to be relevant topics, and are therefore potentially expressive in terms of practice.

Gao Shiqiang's art video works reveal that his review and recognition of the reality take place on a larger and more complex scale and form a certain system of knowledge and thinking. This exhibition is therefore an collection of his art practice and thinking in recent years, and also a brief summery of his understanding of art practice and video as an art form.

His experience in video making, stemmed mainly from the education he received at China Academy of Art and his passion for classical art, enables him to approach video making from the perspective of art video. His works therefore gradually find their way between "film and video art", which helps him to distinguish himself from those "common-sense" film directors. 

During the exhibition, Dong Bingfeng, curator of this exhibition, and Gao Shiqiang will compile a "film book", in which there will be a great number of film illustrations, latest stage photos, and more importantly, a long dialogue between the curator and the artist on different forms of art practice and various concepts, covering a wide range of topics, such as the history of film, video art and art video.