Exhibition Title: Any Thing Going Away, Where Ever Remains
Venue: Canton-sardine
Exhibition Date: Feb 5 – March 26, 2022
Curator: Steven Dragonn
Artists:
Amy Li-chuan Chang
Wei Cheng
Steven Dragonn
Lixiao He
Judy Jheung
Ella Mievovsky
Rui Min
Alina Senchenko
Abi Sheng
Fabien Villon
Anne Watson
Pongsakorn Yananissorn
Peili Zhang
Statement
Are we humans shaping ourselves into what we would like to be?
Yes, perhaps, no. We work hard to be what we think we would like to be. Sometimes, we really make it happen as wish, but other times, things turn out to be different and then we trick ourselves to believe that the undesirable outcomes are simply by-product, a necessary sacrifice due to what we really want to achieve. While humans have “ruled” the world for a “long” period of time and dinosaurs had “presided” even longer, yet on the scale of our planet’s history, both periods are relatively short spans of time. Are we under- or over-exerting ourselves?
In the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) Sarah Connor says at the end of the movie: “The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it for the first time with a sense of hope, because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”
Some people claim that the conception of posthumanism may be just a hypothetical proposition. Some people say that whether it is expected or not, posthumanism is already on its way. In this exhibition, the curator does not announce a certain theory or perspective. If possible, we may hope to re-examine human nature from the anticipated status of posthumanism: May we recognize the reality of human nature, scrutinize its existence, and re-think what we are only when we disappear?
Firefly / Amy Li-chuan Chang / Ceramics, Led bulbs, wires / size variable / 2021
Firefly is one of Chang’s new pieces in a series titled Artificial Intelligence. This group of work plays with the idea of how new technology could manifest in our daily lives. Artificial intelligence transformed the firefly into a flying light bulb, which criticizes the world we live in without insects. Amy Li -Chuan Chang 張麗娟 is a Taiwanese Canadian ceramics artist based in Vancouver. She received her BFA at The Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2007. Amy is a studio artist focusing on contemporary ceramic sculpture.
Essentialist Portraiture / Wei Cheng / Ceramics / size variable / 2021
Inspired by Essentialism, the Essentialist Portraiture series intends to evoke the questions about the preset attributes of human social identities. Born and raised in China, Wei Cheng 成瑋 now lives and dedicates her art practice in Vancouver, BC. She earned her art education from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where she learned to appreciate the ceramic medium. She has been a resident artist at Alferd, Jingdezhen and Yixin pottery center, and her professional practice has also taken her to the States and Europe.
The Future is Our Fault & War is not over! / Steven Dragonn / Fake bullet holes on the wall, Inkjet print on papers / size variable / 2021
This conceptual piece is Dragonn’s response to Yoko Ono and John Lenon’s famous conceptual public art piece War is Over, which expresses the threat of war in our current time. Steven Dragonn 龍邃洋 is a visual artist based in Vancouver and Guangzhou China. Graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art in China with a BFA and from University of Paris East in France with a MA, he is director, curator and founder of Canton≠sardine. He is a beyond≠Conceptualist and Neo Hyper≠real Pictorialist across communicatics and personal visual experience. Specifically, he dedicated his work to examining political and social injustice, while his main curatorial interests include individual experience, migration of minorities, minor gender, personal identities, and social political sufferance.
The 45th day / Lixiao He / Video / 5’51” / 2014
The 45th day is He’s performance video piece in the series of The continuation of 100 days, in which He made 100 performances during 100 days. This performance expresses the Artist’s childhood memory with the quick change of rural hometown without environmental consideration. Lixiao He 何利校 is a performance artist graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art and now based in Shenzhen China. His works always reflect the problematics of body mechanism, human/ inhuman behaviors and the resistance in contemporary urbanism society.
Love is in the Air_plastic moment / Judy Jheung / Thousand of plastic cups collected by artist during years / 12x11x2ft / 2000-2015
Love is in the Air_plastic moment is a multi-component installation that explores issues of our contemporary world that are increasingly similar and borderless, through globalized consumerism and consumption. The work project distorts travel narratives by presenting an accumulation of airline artifacts. Judy Jheung holds an MFA from Pratt Institute, New York and a BFA from University of Calgary. From 2012 to 2014, she conducted her PhD studies at Simon Fraser University. She is a recipient of numerous grant awards for her experimental projects. Her artistic practice focuses on experiential & global issues in the context of social urban movements.
Praying for Time / Ella Mievovsky / ink and oil painting on plaster, painted wood shelf / 120x6x22cm / 2022
This work is showcased as a timeline where elements of time have been fixed in several places of the world during the same day and the same hour. Using surveillance cameras that record places and humans in a random way, the artist composed a score with plaster supports that give a different rhythm and underline the event that is inscribed. Praying for time is the uncompromising look of a machine on the human and the world. Will the traces we leave be readable for future generations? What to read of our time? Ella Mievovsky is a French/Russian artist based in Moscow and Lyon. She graduated from Rodchencko art school in Russia in 2019. Her work has been mainly seen in several group shows in Moscow, Paris and Lyon. She questions our perception of images through new technologies.
Old waste land / Rui Min / Video / 4’40” / 2020
An Old Waste Land eliminates the popularity of video-type social apps such as Tiktok and Kwai with the right of speech in the underclass society. Enabling the shout out of their own voice, the random square-dancing, the occasional unreasonable behavior in the public space, have formed a real but mysterious. Rui Min 閔睿 graduated from Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts, China. He focused on the relationship between photographic and non-photographic media, and integrated, processed and re-presented existing information. He also reinvents established fields, visual forms to show a continuum of data.
Fireworks look better from a distance / Alina Senchenko / Video, artist book / 4x8ft / 2022
The work navigates experiences of witnesses of fireworks and missiles using amateur video clips, audio and storytelling highlighting the blurry lines between excitement and horror. By juxtaposing the experience of war and celebration together with the personal stories related to the occasions the work questions the notion of spectatorship and war in the 21st century in light of rising conflict in particular in Ukraine. Alina Senchenko is a Ukrainian born visual artist. With photography as the foundation of her practice she has sought to explore contemporary events and representations of Ukraine. This work at times involves photography, the appropriation of mass media images, found historical photographs, video and text.
Quantum Paradox / Abi Sheng / Video / 1’54” / 2021
What is essential to you is your computational configuration…Once the body is a transformative form, we are free and will be united in diversity, in the feed, the cosmological consciousness. Abi Sheng 盛欣瑜 is a body engineer whose work is devoted to rebuilding the identity system and constructing a utopia for equality by offering a system for customizable, transformative physical appearances and body modifications through fashion. Graduated from Royal College of Art in London, UK with a MA, she is developing the idea of re-engineering bodies with generative design, combing anatomy, and mechanical engineering.
I Do / Anne Watson / Video / 7’56” / 2010
This video, filmed in 2010 at the Great Salt Lake in Utah, symbolizes the marriage of air to water/earth and the artist to her own death. Anne Watson is an American/Canadian installation and video artist. Her work has appeared in over 30 group and solo shows in North America and Europe. She received her MFA from New York University in the US. Her works express the elasticity of time, considerations of place and self, reflections and transparency, and the connections between earth and air and our place in it all.
Fruit / Fabien Villon / Latex mask of the artist face with metal and pigments powders, glass sculpture made with Ferrari Testarossa gas emission, stainless steel hooks / 23x28x25cm / 2021
Chocolate / Fabien Villon / Copper, gold, silver and pigment powders on blanket, glue, varnish, stainless steel hooks / / 180x130x7cm / 2021
Fruit is a kind of self-portrait of the artist’s face and a glass sculpture blown with exhaust gas from a sports car instead of human breath. Pollution replaces human breath in a random man / machine confrontation – full and empty, soft and hard, a bubble of dreams and nightmares. Chocolate belongs to a series of experimentations with several techniques borrowed from the scientific police to sublimate damaged windscreen prints. Fabien Villon is a French artist, curator and teacher. He graduated from ENSAD Paris and UDK, Berlin. He mainly experiments with the passing of time and accident as a reflective and elastic substance between material, imagery and environment, a way to question our relationship to progress, technology and nature.
Tale of Ten Suns / Pongsakorn Yananissorn / Video / 7’ (multiple videos), metal, golden foil, tv screen / 2022
Tale of Ten Suns is a non linear narrative on the human conquest of time. From water clocks to satellites, mythology weaves with scientific colonialism to tame the concept of time and thus control the flow of progress. When all possibilities cannot be exhausted within daylight, we ought to create our own suns. Pongsakorn Yananissorn is an artist and curator based in Bangkok,Thailand. He is a member of Chareon Contemporaries collective as well as curator of Speedy Grandma art space. He works around configurations of systems and tracing narratives of histories through languages. Additionally, he is committed to instigate and create different modes of living and working together through employing shared fictions.
A live broadcast that may last for several years / Peili Zhang / Video of live streaming / 2021-
A live broadcast that may last for several years questioning the sustainability of human power, ideology, and the domination of nowhere or anywhere. Renowned as “the godfather of video art in mainland China”, Peili Zhang 張培力 is a pivotal artist in Chinese contemporary art and a critical figure in video art worldwide. He received an MFA from China Academy of Fine Arts, and was affiliated with the ’85 New Wave movement. His work is based on a critique of the ideology and the methodology that perpetuate systems of social representation, especially language and meaning, and time as the most basic fact of existence.
CANTON-SARDINE 