Trip to Yangjiang

3 hours away from Guangzhou by bus, in a small seaside town (at least for Chinese conditions), Zheng Guogu is living and working. The artist graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art in 1992 and invited us to visit his hometown Yangjiang.
Today Zheng Guogu is one of China’s most respected contemporary artists. His work has been shown at many international exhibitions in recent years. In 2006 he received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA), the most important art prize in China. Since the mid-1990s the artist has been known for his experimental photography, scrolls, large installations and public projects. Zheng Guogu is a representative of a very individualized, unconventional subculture and he is difficult to be categorized: artist, interior designer or architect? He uses all kinds of media - photography, painting, performance, video, sculpture and installation - in his works. The concept of his work also goes to very wide range and covers f.e. artist's identity, consumption culture, history, urbanization development and the global art market; during the last decade he has been inspired by the rapid shifts and the socio-economic transformations taking place in China.
Many of his art projects emerge from his local and personal environment. Zheng Guogu and his friends are purposefully reconstructing residential space in Yangjiang:
1. My home is your gallery
The artist’s home is crossing boundaries between art and life. Zheng Guogu bought three apartments in the constant three floors, then demolished all the floors and built another architecture inside of these apartments: "It is architecture which grew up from inside of the building", Zheng Guogu said. There is also mini garden with fish pond, trees and a waterfall inside of the architecture. Ultimately the whole space is an integrated piece of work by Zheng Guogu.
2. Studio
Secondly, Zheng Guogu showed us the studio of the Yanjiang Calligraphy Group, which he joins. The group tests the boundaries of calligraphy in a contemporary context, often extracting the characters from their traditional setting and turning them into sculptural objects. With calligraphy as the point of departure, the members of Yangjiang Group (Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin) also work with performance, installation, video and photography.
3. Empire
Last but not least Zheng Guogu presented “his empire” – a huge area near the city, it’s architecture inspired by a computer game.
(Claudia Elm)

Chinese copy of Mona Lisa better then the original

The GAFA owns a really big museum, mostly for the presentation of students and professors works. Its an own building on the Campus, three stories tall and several thousand square meters big it's a real giant. Most amazing in the current exhebition, a copy of Mona Lisa.
Actually we think it is even better then the original. Can you see how it seems to follow you with the eyes when you move from your computer? And this smile....
(Klaas Hübner)

First Meeting at GAFA

Even tough the people say that the GAFA has a very traditional aproach in the art education, having a closer look, you will discover a lot of modern art works behind the atelier doors. We were lucky to get in touch with Videoartist Xiaopeng Huang a Professor at the painting department. Xiaopeng is opening up the painting department to conceptional ideas and video works and like to critically lead the students, so they find their own way of artistic expression. After short introduction he showed us around the campus, where we saw a lot of clay sculptures at the foundation classes, student painting models in the ateliers and several works of the higher classes in the hallways. Finally we had a talk with some of his students about our project topic "copying" and exchanged opinions and ideas.


We decided to meet again the next day for a presentation, to show each others work. We all spent the whole day looking at german and chinese, drawings, paintings, videos, sound pieces and sculptures and also Xiaopeng Huang and Thomas Adebahr presented some of their last projects.
After this very intense presentation it was quite clear that at least the students which are around Xiaopeng are trying to find their own expression and some create some outstanding works which are by no means traditional and sometimes very similar to our own approach. If asked they say that they don't have an easy position with these works since people still prefer more classic art even in school.
(Klaas Hübner)

GAFA walk around

Some impressions from a walk through the GAFA studios.

GAFA

The Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts has a new enormous Campus in the "Higher-Education-Mega-Center" where several big universities with more then ten sports stadiums where build just during 8 month in 2005 on an Island in the Pearl River. It is a own

city theoretically able to keep 400.000 to 500.000 students. Even tough all this sounds and looks pretty crazy the campus is very much in order. Students like to go out to the neighboring villages to catch some food, play cards and billiard or sing karaoke at weekends.

It seems the campus allways stays in a calm and quiet mood and students do a lot of sports like table tennis and basketball when they take a rest from the studies.

(Klaas Hübner)

going east