Simon Starling - Project for a Masquerade
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Starling discovered 2 versions of the same sculpture in Chicago and Japan by Henry Moore, which one is Called Nuclear Energy and the other called Atom Peace, then the Cold War era narrative it is crossed into a Traditional No play about creating double identities, a noble boy escaping with the help of a hat maker. The Story were told with the filming of process of making the masks of traditional No, which is also a precess of forgery and about masked identities. The famous real and fictionalised characters of Cold War era are turned into masks, they become the character of Uboshi Hat. The mask makers has hidden the no atomic bomb message underneath,
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Mutable, and happy accidents are important to Starling's work, where the work becomes a intriguing re-enactment, a extensive to Henry Moore's original work
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The Fish Story by Allan Secular intrigues me where the part how Hong Kong and Shen Zhen is mentioned, where I have wondered some of the same questions as well. Hong Kong have massive container sites, same with Shenzhen, I have seen abandoned containers around the mountains near the ports. There are enormous amount of trading companies that has its truck ran back and forth between Hong Kong and Shen Zhen, often outsourcing for other countries, from rural Guang Dong to Hong Kong. The Philippine domestic workers having picnic on the Central Port site of Hong Kong, on their only day off of the week from their employed families. People rarely realise the link of geographical position, trading relations, ideological battles into all the city scape. The propaganda paintings by Kobayashi Kiyochika are showed in the book, depicting a sunken Chinese ship by Japanese Fleet which the painter actually have never visited the site, is weirdly paralleling to the materials I found out on my tea project
The way Calle let others make decisions for her in her works fascinates me, the exchange of emotions and energy in the process is almost therapeutic to sad or hurtful moments in her life situations so as the others that participated, which is very similar to my approach of art work in those sense, I always due with the situation I have and think about how to exquisite the inevitable moments that might be bad in situations, and Sophie Calle is very poetic and smart in that way. The way she can blurrs the boundary of fiction and life is also very intriguing and help with my work too as I like to work with real life materials too.
Chorus from Box of Birds (2013)
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The photography series where the performer improvised on felt from psychiatric hospitals from the 1940s, and Ferran took pictures of particular movement. Instead of telling the story one way or other she focused on what has been left out through out her works, and the performative approach of the photo series is inspiring to my approach on photography.
Notes on Walled Unwalled (2018) by Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Using sound, projections of footages and sets to make an essay about walls and the passing through walls, at East Berlin. I remembered when I was a teenager I can listen to all the Hong Kong Radios in Shen Zhen, and how all the sound of my neighbours passes through and I get to know all their routines due to the thin walls of newly built apartments in Shen Zhen and also through the small and packed room I stayed in Hong Kong. This work also helped me to understand the properties and roles of sound at the same time, through history and legislation, and the very human concept of boundaries. It has opened up the possibility of different approaches that can be made in my own essays and performative work about the objects that surround me and affects my everyday life through their link to common concepts and political issues.
I really like Susan Hiller's approach to art, as she see things as it is, and she is interested in ambiguity in life, and how to gain some access to the un-understandable, or the nelgeted . The way she archives her collection is very smart and clean which is something I can learn from, especially from Stories from the Other side (2013), how the collection of stories is presented with sound wave looking like a heart beat, and the blue screens representing coma. Her way of use of sound also intrigues me, which is more linguistic, and I find that I am more interested in the voice and language in sound as well. In a lecture she mentioned how every art student from different countries all communicate in English, which make their discussion about art become baby talk, and it does no good to non English culture as well as English culture too. I couldn't agree more, just like the western homeware that are made in China, it does no good to both, and just dilutes everything over and over again.