The Way Home
Artist: Wen Shufan (School of Intermedia Art)
Instructor: Guan Huaibin
The graduation work traces the journey that overseas Chinese make as they make their way home. In the 1950s and 1960s, many Chinese from the south traveled further south to Nanyang, heading to Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia where they set up businesses or served in local governments. Unrest in China and abroad, coupled with difficult maritime travel, meant that many overseas Chinese never managed to return to their homeland. The artist's grandfather was one of them. All he could do was mail letters home from Hong Kong. In the piece, bellflowers symbolize Wen's longing, gratitude and well wishes as she attempts to retrace her way home, unable to reach the opposite shores. She walks past the old Luoyang Bridge and Wanshou Tower, uttering prayers as she gazes into the distant sea. The people of the Minnan region believe in fengshui and ancestral worship. Ancestral shrines and temples can be seen everywhere. Wen eventually offers the bellflowers as an offering at the altar to resolve the longing she harbors for her distant family.
Haze and Snow
Artist: Zhang Jiaming (School of Intermedia Art)
Instructor: Wu Qiong
This graduation work explores the idea of "ambiguity" in cinematography, memory, people's understanding of each other, language, and other aspects and, through such discourse, creates an atmospheric film that defies definitive definition. Through this film, the artist attempts to explore the innate tonal quality of the film and its relationship with its ambiguous narrative. A non-traditional form of storytelling was employed to tell a story that is centered on the mutual revelations that arise from an evolving relationship. The artist's memories and reflections punctuate the entire story, adding a poetic element to Northeast China's rugged, industrial landscape. The composite images of a vast desert, a protection forest, and snow were incorporated into the film, in which a metaphor for the growing gap between the characters' understanding of each other is shown through one of the characters slowly walking out of the forest.
Lanfang: Constructing Utopia
Artist: Wen Chenmin (School of Intermedia Art)
Instructor: Dajuin Yao
The word "Lanfang" in this artwork's title refers to a Chinese-dominated state that existed on the island of Borneo from the 17th to 18th century − an actual realization of their sudden desire to build a utopia. In this artwork, artificial intelligence serves as a "Greater Other" that uses the history of human civilization as its construction material while the artist attempts to depict the othered that has been hidden from sight in mainstream culture and history and uncover a Chinese historical sci-fi space within a Nanyang Chinese subculture. Humankind's transformation of its surrounding ecosystem is a projection of and a meditation on its cultural memories. Ones sense of reality is but a superficial element of "this world". The "real world" has been hidden under a "membrane" by artificial intelligence, the "Greater Other".
About BRAIN GARDEN
Brain Garden – The 5th Zhijiang International Youth Art Festival 2023 & CAA Graduation Season kicked off online and offline concurrently on June 1. This edition of Youth Art Festival is co-hosted by Zhejiang Federation of Literary and Art Circles, Zhejiang Provincial Department of Education, Zhejiang Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, Publicity Department of the CPC Hangzhou Municipal Committee, China Academy of Art (CAA), and Zhejiang Conservatory of Music under the guidance of the Publicity Department of CPC Zhejiang Provincial Committee and Hangzhou Municipal People's Government. The festival features a wide variety of online and offline artistic shows and activities centered on the future and the youth. It is a grand city-wide artistic feast in Hangzhou.
The Youth Art Festival is presented online on CAACOSMOS and West Lake Sky Screen and offline at six venues, namely Zhejiang Exhibition Hall, West Lake Art Museum, Zhejiang Art Museum, World Tourism Museum (1368 Xiangxi Road), Quan Shanshi Art Center, and Yichuang Town, with a total exhibition area of nearly 70,000 square meters. Over 3,000 works from more than 2,500 Class of 2023 graduates (including 1,766 undergraduates, 688 masters, and 97 doctors) are showcased. Over 2,000 young artists, designers, writers, and scholars have gathered online for this youthful art event.
Related news: https://en.caa.edu.cn/news/1039.html
