A Yellow
Box in Qingpu: Contemporary Art and Architecture in a Chinese Space
Opening date September 6th 2006.
“Yellow Box” is a project initiated by the Visual Culture Research Centre of China Academy of Art. Its purpose is to investigate issues about contemporary art, creativity and culture of connoisseurship in response to the modern “white cube”. Over 40 artists and architects was invited to create and display works of different media including architectural models, paintings, photography, video, installation and experimental mix media productions. The artists have been invited to interpret and respond to this quarter of wood-frame vernacular space that is laden with cultural definitions
During travels in China in January and May 2006 we met with the gallery owner, professor and curator Chang Tsong-Zung in Hong Kong and in Shanghai. Shortly after these meetings Intravision Group was invited to take part in the exhibition “A Yellow Box in Quingpu” opening in September 2006.
Production of our technological installations are normally time consuming process starting with development of concepts which are being realized through the process of mould making, production of sculptures and light systems, integration of technology, on site installations and finally computer programming of the multimedia interactions. Executing this process in only two months time, and in China, definitely seemed a challenge. However, by coincidence we had a version of our “Animal Shape” sculpture almost ready for production in Shanghai at the time.
Beautiful earth and beautiful sun…
The Xiao Ximen (Minor West Gate) is a (new) reconstructed area in old Chinese Style built under the auspices of the Qingpu District Government. As the conceptual idea for the “Yellow Box exhibition” was to make responses to these unique old style Chinese buildings, we decided to bring some of our own Norwegian heritage with us into the concept. The Animal Shape sculpture is a conceptual Multilanguage installation where we play with computer programmed interactions between written texts compositions (emerges through the green skin of the sculpture) and human voices samplings which Bjarne has made into music compositions. Bjarne had recently finished his ballet music for the outdoor stage ballet JUV (link), which is based on the famous play and literate character “Peer Gynt” by Henrik Ibsen. We decided to used extracts of the play text, and also some of the songs which are sung in a traditional Norwegian folk tone style (by singer XXX Groven) link), and mixed this into our contemporary sound picture. With help from the curators we then got a Chinese translation of the “Peer Gynt” text developed into beautiful Chinese calligraphy, which again were made neon light tubes shaped three dimensionally to follow the floating curvatures of the “Animal Shape”. In the end we had the verse starting with “Beautiful earth and beautiful sun…” written with computer controlled neon tubes in Norwegian, English and Chinese, combined with the same text sung in old Norwegian folk tone style.
The process of producing the “Yellow box” installation was executed in roughly 14 days, and with invaluable help and assistance of Xu Ninghai, Wu Francis of the Jinli Composite Factory, and especially Zhu Junwei and his people at the Shanghai Zhongya Neon Scientific Co., Ltd who both made all the special neon and also installed the sculpture in The Xiao Ximen.