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)