Travelling In Shanghai Without Moving…
Aurelie Duval
Leaflet for "Like Moon," at the Expat Art Centre (EAC), Shanghai, 2005, courtesy of Bizart, Shanghai.
In May, Beijing is the center of activity for the Chinese art scene, with the openings of the annual Dashanzi International Art Festival (DIAF) and the China International Gallery Exposition (CIGE). For those who stay in Shanghai there are two opportunities to keep their eyes opened.
The first one is ”an exhibition of time with no date, of place with no space”, curator Mathieu Copeland says of his exhibit "Like Moon," at EAC, the Expat Art Centre. The idea is to fill the space-time gaps between the closure of one exhibition and the installation of the next. Copeland invites Pierre Huyghe, Brian Eno, Ian Wilson, Claude Leveque, Olivier Mosset, Dan Walsh, Ben Kinmont, Shimabuku and Didier Marcel to create an exhibition of permanent movement: an exhibition of a moment of time, as well as an exhibition in a moment of time. Each of these international artists’ task is to interpret the "fragility of an exhibition simply defined by two moments in time."
The artists use different tactics to fill emptiness with traces and remembrances. With This Isn’t It (2004), Ben Kinmont leaves the art institution with only a trace of evidence that an event has taken place. Huyghe accumulates the front covers of newspapers indicating all the shows’ subsequent venues, keeping, finally, only names and indications of dates. For, as the curator states, the goal of "Like Moon" is ”to simultaneously be everywhere, travelling the globe, becoming an exhibition happening everywhere, at all times, with all people.”
The recently-opened but very active Duolun Museum of Modern Art presented an exhibition that also explored states of dreaming and travelling: Dominic Man-Kit Lam’s solo exhibition, "Vision of the Mind." This Hong Kong-based artist, scientist and entrepreneur, is the inventor of a new painting medium, the "chromoskedasic painting."
Lam-who holds advanced degrees in mathematics, physics and bio-physics-discovered this new method of painting some 20 years ago, while printing some black-and-white photographs for his vision and ophthalmology research. He discovered yellow and brown patches on the pictures; by playing with different varieties, concentration and times of exposure of the photographic solutions, as well as submitting black and white photographic paper to different lighting conditions, he managed to control the silver particle growth.
He explains, "These tiny particles produce colors, not by reflecting or absorbing radiation, but by scattering light. Particles of different sizes scatter different wavelengths of light, thus yielding various colors." Lam plays with nature to generate abstract images. He has found a delicate and beautiful way to serve art with science and science with art.
Space and time, science and memory?"Like Moon" and "Vision of The Mind" transport us to new landscapes, where we can feed on black holes, traverse new universes and discover universes not yet invented.
