Jeffrey Shaw and Hu Jieming Twofold Solo Exhibition focuses on these two artists who have both developed individual approaches to new media art, and contributed each in their own way to the practice and context of this new art form as we experience it today.
Jeffrey Shaw is a leading figure in new media art and has been active since its emergence from the performance, expanded cinema, and installation paradigms of the 1960s, to its present day technology-informed and virtualized forms. Having moved away from traditional drawing, his early interest in making artistic experiences and possibilities liberated from objects such as paintings, led him towards a more radical approach. That approach is to focus on the relationship between the artwork and the viewers, especially the cinematic experience and the interplay between the virtual and the real, things for which he is best known.
Chronus Art Center will present this major retrospective of the AVIE (the Advanced Visualization and Interaction Environment) system since year 2000. AVIE is the world’s first artistically-conceived 360-degree stereoscopic interactive visualization and audification environment. Shaw created this and been conducting research with in efforts to embody new forms of creative content and new types of interactive and immersive experience and opportunities. The exhibition will feature a comprehensive collection of artworks that Shaw built for the AVIE in collaboration with other artists.
Set out as a twofold solo exhibition, the Chronus Art Center will simultaneously present a new art piece by Hu Jieming: Tai Chi with Overture. This has been created not only as a response to the influence of Hu’s old master, but also to Hu’s own artistic achievements over the past years.
As one of the foremost pioneers of new media art in China, Hu started to experiment with new technologies in his works in the 1980s. Constantly concerned with subjects such as time, human history, and cultural memory, Hu intended to illuminate the boundaries between the ‘passing-by’ and the ‘going-on’ and by doing so he set viewers free from the chronological way of seeing historical events, onto a more accidental reconstruction. The newly created artwork Tai Chi, will be unveiled for the first time to the public at CAC, in the form of a bipartite narrative with the artwork Overture, the former launched on May 9, while Taichi is launched on August 8. Taichi will be both a review and an extension in the artist’s journey of historical reflection.
Li Zhenhua, Art Director of this exhibition, says: “This exhibition of Jeffrey Shaw’s collected works marks a farewell to the field of international new media art which arose in the 1960s, and film is the link. Like any other farewell, art revives itself after the end of each media and concept, to gather and extend itself into its future. Hu Jieming’s project is evidence of this revival, exploring the existence of “humans” by intervening in reality, contemplating history, body and time, and pursuing a perfect system and an innovative technique.”
Visitors will for the first time see all the major works created for AVIE in one location, featuring collaborations with artists from diverse backgrounds and disciplines. In addition, visitors are also invited to look through and play with two individual timelines for each artist, Hu and Shaw, by operating a touch-table placed on-site, to discover how their practice intersects at certain points amongst a web of different artistic categories.
The exhibition will be accompanied and expanded upon by a series of seminars and round-table discussions on the weekends, on various artistic, technological and academic topics encountered and inspired by the artistic works showcased in the exhibition.
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© Chronus Art Center
