The River Knows All Our Story 《河流知道我们所有的故事》 Charlotte Chin (Singapore 新加坡)
The ancient body of water surrounding Shanghai is a silent witness to the constant change and renewal of its bustling metropolis. Flowing through the quiet Yangtze estuary, through sleepy water towns and into the glistening lights of the Huangpu River, stories of blood, sweat, and toil are steeped in its veins.
My work captures the shifting moments where towering skyscrapers wrestle one another to optimise the best views. Everything moves in full throttle and Old Man River reacts violently to the altered states. The blue waves in my painting are reminiscent of embroidery used in traditional garments, and it is contrasted with grey blocks and construction in background - all three are jostling with one another to establish its own rite of passage and identity. Where is the old amidst the new, and can one do without the other?
Between a rock and a hard place 《在石头和坚硬的地方之间》 Divaggar (Singapore 新加坡)
The city of Shanghai is host to entire districts of massage parlors, wellness centers, and spas, engaging in both the most wholesome and healing to the more salacious aspects of therapy. Negotiating the necessary existences of these services, the performance venue stages both in subject and performer, the unifying notion of care.
Created within unstable former military barracks in a quaint river town, a seedy, make-shift massage parlor occupies a room within the compound. Once utilized for rest and recuperation, Between a rock and a hard place investigates notions of comfort, trust, and intimacy through conversation, fragrance, and massage with people in the vicinity.
I found red and blue colored wool and plastic baskets at the traditional markets near the space. The appealing materials let me make something. While I did a performance to make a video, I was very interested in my movement with the objects because I was wearing blindfolded baskets with two bold colored wool. Based on my own personal experiences, memory, and learning, I engaged my videos and objects through a process of immersive performance bound by society, history, relationship, and metaphor.
Flesh and stone 《肉与石》 Jae Youl Jeoung (South Korea 韩国)
The artist Jae Youl Jeoung concerns about the invisible and intangible phenomena and variations according to environmental human conditions. Explore the materiality of object and subject relation to weightiness. The sense of weight here refers to at least minimum movements from surroundings such as gravity, tension, and other atmospheric conditions.
As individual memories of object and subject are all different, between the ideality and the reality we think are a continuation of the encounter to sealed or unsealed fragments of our own memories. The memories also apply a little bit of regeneration pressure through silent regeneration. They are similar to those shown on the ground and to those exposed on the surface or being in the air.
According to his understanding of sculpture is a standing form object. And his paintings are recognized as reminders of a corner of the memories. He maximizes the properties of materials and objects that are subtle elements and sensitive to peripheral motion, making them feel they are incapable of measurement as lingering imageries in physically and mentally. Also, he addresses the possibility of invisible and intangible matters to be another form of the language.
Aren't You Local? 《你不是本地人吗？》 Kenn Lam (Singapore 新加坡)
This body of work seeks to capture the feelings of an outsider in a foreign land, namely, Displacement. It is based on my self-consciousness as an ethnically-Chinese foreigner in China. Displacement is a feeling known to many but its subtleties are often experienced at a personal level; the intangibility of those emotions may invite an unwelcome sense of loneliness to a person. With this series, I endeavor to visualize displacement through characters and narratives; creating a kind of mythology through the pieces. The ethereal nature of the illustration allows the viewer to fill in the blanks with their own unique experiences of displacement.
