Hasty Falling Time
A selection by Yang Fudong

2020 is an extremely special year. How do we continue to live in these challenging conditions? And to confront the new world around us? 

Thanks to Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for staging this selection of emerging Chinese artists’ works. Their practices are as always fueled with exuberance and creativity. — Yang Fudong

Tao Hui
Pulsating Atom
2019, 14 min 12 sec

Courtesy of the artist, Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Pulsating Atom (2019) presents a commonplace, middle-aged gala singer conveying fractions of everyday life to the rhythm of short movie clips. The work relates to the frenzy of social networking, more specifically the Chinese phenomenon Tiktok, an app that allows users to produce, reproduce and share short video clips. The gala singer and the clips have no actual connection, much like the bpeople who relate to each other via these shorts, building on each other’s contributions. As such, and as highlighted by the work’s title, it addresses the atomization of society as well as the dissonance between greater exchange and increased solitude.

Born in 1987 in Yunyang, Chongqing, and a graduate from Sichuan Fine Art Institute, Tao Hui currently lives and works in Beijing, China. With an initial degree in Oil Painting, Tao crossed over into the art of video and installation making, drawing from personal memories, visual experiences and popular culture to weave an experimental visual narration, the focus of which is often our collective experience. A sense of misplacement runs throughout his work vis-à-vis social identity, gender status, ethnicity and cultural crisis, prompting the audience to face their own cultural histories and living conditions.

Zheng Yuan
A Brief History of China Northwest Airlines
2018, 27 min 48 sec

In 1987, the Chinese government decided to carry out reforms in civil aviation and establish six major airlines under the principle of “independent operation”, “self-financing”, and“equal competition”. In 2002, another round of restructuring was carried out and three airline groups were constructed by the State Council of the Republic of China, while China Northwest Airlines

was acquired by China Eastern Airlines due to a long-term run in the red, bowing out of people’s sight.

This work traces the story of each and every plane following the airline’s bankruptcy. The particularity of passenger aircraft as a commodity, the uniqueness of the manufacturer serial number, and adequate data from well-established networks of international civil aviation organizations made these aircraft into traceable “archives” in global trade. Despite a frustrating attempt in China’s reform to separate functions of government from enterprise, this archaeological investigation into China Northwest Airlines suggested how the airspace had been controlled by policy, and how materiality and value wassegmented after a complete take-over by the neoliberal economy, impacting on the nature of air travel and aviation ownership .

Zheng Yuan was born in 1988 in Lanzhou, China and currently lives and works in Beijing. Working primarily with time-based media, his work often operates at the intersection of fiction, documentary, essay, and investigative studies. His practice focuses on identity and evaluation and it’s ever-shifting relationship with history, power and representation. By introducing archival material alongside found footage and situations Zheng’s work acquires a layered complexity within overlapping contexts.

Liu Yi
A Crow has been Calling for a Whole Day
2016, 11 min 30 sec

In November 2015 I went to India. It has been a year since I came back from there. The

influence of the trip wears off gradually. When in Hangzhou looking back, the regional boundaries seem to disappear, and at that moment I feel close to another city yet in my own body. The flowing images possess potential temporality and are full of imagination. The ensuing animation transforms these psychological changes into visual presentation. It’s like a very long painting and the painting provides potential clues to my experiences.

I’m very impressed by crows in India. They can be seen everywhere. They are not afraid of people or passing cars. The magic croaking of the crows runs through the whole city. There is a similarity between them and the people lying in the streets all around, with a survival attitude, acting as if there was nobody nearby. In Hindi, yesterday and tomorrow are the same words. Time does not move forward. All along the riverside people understand time through the flow of the river, they cremate bodies here, turning to ashes, returning to eternal life. After drinking they break the clay cups to pieces which fall to ground, into the dust. They serve their on with banana leaves, worship the rocks with transient flowers… — Liu Yi

Liu Yi was born in 1990 in Ningbo, China, she currently lives in Hangzhou. She graduated from the China Academy of Fine Arts’ School of Intermedia Art with a Bachelor’s degree and the China Academy of Fine Arts with a Master’s degree in 2012 and 2016, respectively. Her primary research interests are early Chinese art films and experimental animation. She deploys various media including animation and multimedia, as well as spatial installation to reflect her daily living experience and resonate with the subjects of her works. Audiences are invited to unearth a differentiated parallel world through her eclectic output.

Tang Chao
The Scales Flicker, Like Trees Skipping the Flame
2019, 3 min 19 sec

Scales are often used to describe insignificant things. Light passes through the cracks in the woods, and as we move, it flashes. It can be understood that such flickering divides and converts a moving image into countless pieces. By inserting a still frame in the gaps of each fragment featuring flowers, horses, a snapshot of daily life is created. A type of residual or piecemeal account of a person’s growth. In the twinkling of an eye, time passes by… Substance itself is constantly moving and disappearing, only the flow   is static and solid.

Tang Chao was born in 1990 in Hunan, China, he currently lives and works in Shanghai. He graduated from the School of Inter-Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts. The essence of Tang Chao’s work is focused upon suggestions on lightness in literature. For instance, he refines a whole script into one sentence, focusing on its tone and rhythm of the sentence, which he expresses through a camera, by varying thefocus, light and the scenes. The content of the words is not the most important thing; they are sometimes softly whispered, stuttered, or even topsy-turvy. He always tries to release some kind of illocutionary meaning into every blank space in a straightforward manner.

Zhu Changquan
Dark Beyond Deep
2019-2020, 17 min 40 sec

Courtesy of the artist, Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Dark Beyond Deep presents the process of how consciousness gradually develops and extends from the real world to virtual space through a raven named “Cyma”. “Cyma” redefines objects inside the ‘digital garden’ by comparing them with the logic of reality, opening a\ reflection between real life objects and the existence of itself (digital objects) in digital space.

Zhu Changquan was born in 1989, in the Shandong Province, China, he currently lives and works in Hangzhou and Shanghai. He graduated from the Experimental Image Studio in theSchool of Inter-media Art at the China Art Academy in 2014. Zhu Changquan engages in  an analysis of everyday life through artistic activities . He attempts to reveal the rules of daily life based on a variety of potential factors which influence the daily behavior of humans. Through his works, he builds new narrative relations between intangible images and tangible daily objects by means of different languages, such as drama, animation, installation, and painting.

Yuan Keru
Fleeting Strangers
2017, 27 min 10 sec

Fleeting Strangers virtualizes four parallel worlds and tells four soft sci-fi stories that happen at different times each in different ways. The leading characters in these stories represent the Test Item, the Administrators, the Survivor, and the Cyborg respectively. They are gradually infringed, deprived and assimilated in the development of science and the manipulation of the system. They lost their loved ones, freedom and ideals, like beasts sealed in the darkness of the world or on the edge of the universe. Between the dawn and dark of their fleeting lives, they struggled, trying to break through the cage of class and destiny and search for the barren homeland and self-salvation. Nonetheless, because of such contradiction, confusion, vulnerability and restraint on their awareness of being unable to act, they ultimately failed to escape the characters they have been cast as.

Yuan Keru is a visual artist and filmmaker born in 1990 in Hangzhou, China. Her artistic creation focuses on exploring the sense of painting, spatial rhythm and narrative in video, combining the ongoing events and emotions with history, mythology, dreams and so on. By drafting novels, breaking up the text structure, setting costume scenes and preparing semi-improvised performances and conversations, she endows video with a cinematic and dramatic sense. Her works always contains a strong taste of postmodern mysticism, and the seemingly melancholic, violent and dark themes are often immersed with warmth and poetry. By creating a surreal world of images, she reflects the loss of belonging and spiritual thinking with sensitivity.

Cast : Gao Yanqin, Sena Kilian, Sivan Griffith