2009 Shan Xuan Shui Cang
Shan Xuan Shui
Cang
Shan
means mountains
Xuan
means up and down
Shui
means water
Cang
means storage
Shan Xuan Shui Cang is a digital
installation project with a series of silk-screens in a physical space. Four
silk-screens make a group in parallel with three other groups as a whole
screen. Behind those screens are installed four of the same type of projectors
that play as a flow scale on a DVD player.
Elements of the video projection are appropriated from “Ta Ge Tu”, a work of the
famous Chinese painting artist MaYuan. Generally speaking, Chinese landscape painting is not a simple
image of the natural landscape but has a profounder meaning in ancient Chinese
literati landscapes; they drew a picture, but it was not entirely copied from a
natural landscape scenery but came out of their feelings. Artists drew their
own perceived landscape from scenic mountains and rivers; in some of the
mountains and rivers, they capture nature, but some were fictitious. Artists’
re-combinations of mountains, streams, hills and trees set up new
visualizations of landscape structures.
The
creation of animation in the video, Shan
Xuan Shui Cang, and the insert looming 3D lines, are an interpretation of
the mountains. In this animation the difficulty of design relates to exploring
the meaning of 3D computer lines and painting ancient mountains- considering
the lines as the destruction of the traditional landscape or imagining the
result as a mutation of the ancient landscapes.
In reality, the recent 2010-2011 Fall-Winter
ready-to-wear Chanel fashion show steals from nature a real iceberg to stage a
fabulous party in Grand Palais, Paris (Fig. 18. & 19.); in contrast, it
seems as if nature rebels: the earthquakes in Haiti and Chinese Sichuan causes
untold casualties almost instantaneously. In this installation, the 3D lines
give a vacant mysterious visualization, but in reality, they are not as they
seem. In the video, viewers can take, steal or borrow the natural resources in
the panels as a physical celebration, but like nature, the 3D lines can rebel,
moving or damaging existing structures, creating transparent mountains even as
some are disappearing.
The
constant advance of technology and society are continuously ruthless and keep
people actively enjoying their greedy needs. How long will nature’s sympathy
last? In the background of those issues, an artist designs a new
digitalized landscape from her imagination. In this piece, all
graphics address the concept of change: value for dynamics and variations of
landscapes; and variability means evolution and destruction. Within
the cultural context, it is worth considering how the meanings shift in this
narrative.