A Brief Introduction of J's Dream Universe 《J的梦境宇宙简介》 Chen Dongyan (Singapore) 陈东彦 (新加坡)
My works are primarily concerned with the realm of the unconsciousness and dreams, as well as the different process to discover and articulate the hidden messages embedded in them. After further research on dreams, psychology, and psychoanalysis, I get my inspirations from some mental illness cases such as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and Schizophrenia. I constructed a story based on the three persons who came from different parallel universes but share the same identity. When one of them get into trouble, the two others have to help the one to solve the problem. I am interested in how texts, images, and sounds work together in montages as a process of remaking and reconstructing our memory bank, approximating the way our dreams work. This project challenges the traditional way of telling a story, it involved a video clip, some writings, and drawings. The audience is welcome to works as the detective who is investing in this murder case, to find out more about the story between the three persons.
"Sitting Room" is a photographic project which investigates urban spaces, the way in which we use and transform public places into familiar spaces through individual and collective life stories. This series of photography portrays household effects which become "urban furniture" and explores the boundaries between the public and private sphere. Arranged outside houses and shop doors, these objects become the trace of a person's history. "Sitting Room" is a project about the character of an inhabited setting and temporary situations which become fixed moment in which we take our time and linger for a while.
Shadow On Concrete 《混凝土上的影子》 Théo KRIEF (France 法国)
I have always worked with architectural ruins. They are the scars of a past, space where time has eroded all traces of superficiality. I am struck by how new development in its early construction phase, with only a foundation and skeleton support, ironically resembles a ruin. The paintings in this body of work are a mental construction of imaginary places. These colored forms are built through an instinctive expression to capture the immediacy of a gesture in the manner of a child, devoid of ego. Metro 17 is a 40-minutes train ride in real time between Zhujiajiao and Shanghai. However the ancient town of Zhujiajiao embodies the past, Shanghai the future, and between the two resides the present. 《中》is a video that cuts into this continuous flow of time and extracts an isolated sliver of the present. By projecting the video on to the painting I am fusing the emotional impulse of creativity with the rational concept of development.
This series of ceramic Polaroid photos work as a documentation of the food I had during the residency. By recording these memories with the printing process and the long-lasting materials, these memories can be visualized and preserved. Unlike printed photos that faded over time, these ceramic pieces can hold the images permanently. However, ceramic and memory are both fragile. When a piece breaks, it represents a distorted memory, which cannot be fully restored. In terms of the process, finishing a ceramic piece and cooking a dish share the same notion. There are many steps that have to be followed in a specific sequence in order to complete the task. At its presentation, it is up to the public to interpret the final product.