“Cosmos Beuys: About Art and Life in the 20th Century” is a seminar given by Prof. Dr. Klaus Siebenhaar to the School of Art Administration and Education of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2021, and is part of the exhibition "Joseph Beuys and the documenta" curated by Professor Siebenhaar. The seminar and the exhibition are an extension of each other, forming an organic, academic, continuous and creative interpretation. The eleven Chinese students who participated in the seminar created eleven pieces of artwork and independently curated their own section of the exhibition, bringing the classroom to the exhibition and presenting a reflection on Beuys on the occasion of 50 years of diplomatic relations between Germany and China.
At the end of the seminar, the professor continued Beuys' idea by inviting each student to create a work as an artist, without any restrictions on form, content, or subject matter, the only requirement being that the work be based on an idea.
In the image, the three elements, red paper, bells and the sound of the Guqin represent three different time dimensions of my life. The elapse of time is the same, but it is recorded and perceived in different ways, and these feelings constitute the state and way of being of life.
The artwork comes from my recent visit to Yan'an. The image of the work is Baota Mountain, a famous scenic spot in Yan'an, and the sound is a breakdown KFC advertisement that I recorded in Yan'an. I want to show this wonderful atmosphere that other cities don't have through the combination of Chinese socialist revolutionary scenic spots and capitalist consumption and lifestyle.
In this photograph, I used selfie to record myself in every hour of a day. I see this project as a conversation with myself. Although there is only one hour interval between shooting each work, I found that the environment is changed, my identity is changed, and my mood is also changed. It can be say that every hour is a re-reflection and repositioning of my personal identity. I also want to use my selfies to bring a subtle narrative perspective to show a personal understanding of the world in front of us.
周可心Hermia Zhou: 我开心时的景象，我悲伤时的景象
The view when I was happy, the view when I was depressed
I spliced and edited the scenes recorded in happy state and sad state in my previous life. Maybe you will distinguish the mood of different scenes from some subtle differences, but I didn't use any symbolic expression. The real situation is that we can't distinguish my mood when recording scenes.
This art work is a ball made of clay, and with some moss and Davallia bullata on top, it’s a metaphor of earth. Among the things that has happened in 2021, I realize that humans are always in need of a constant and varied supply of vaccines to survive on this tiny planet. So I put some needles to stick into the ball, which is a comparison for the countless vaccine, and some red line binding it. It’s a symbol of the linked life on earth and also the repetition of the state of human history.
The most intuitive medium between the image era and the public is the screen. The real world has gradually transformed into a broken picture of "screen media". The value of screen media is not only a tool, but also a carrier of emotional companionship. The boundary conflict of real and false appears, and the social and psychological factors behind them are the truth to be understood. This work is a metaphor for the changes brought in this fragmented screen culture. As my work QR code shows, modern interactive technology and art are also the direction I have been exploring.
Band-Aids are a convenient but sloppy way to deal with wounds, just like the way we deal with our trauma. The four works in this series focus on the theme of " wounds and healing", showing the relationship between wounds, healing, time, pain and growth.
The illness made people realize the alienation of the body. The illness narrative intertwined the patient’s personal experience, facts and false beliefs about disease and life. Narrative medicine believes the narrative of illness could tackle the dilemma of understanding a patient’s experience, both physically and mentally. Thus, Fill in the Blanks is an “art-aided-medicine” proposal, aiming to visualize the illness narrative from patients as a method to present their experience.
This work focuses on the changing identity of one special space in present china, which is the living room. Young people who have just finished their college studies and live in big metropolitan cities, are facing one problem: the disappearance of living room. This video shows short slices of their actual life after their all day-long work. The VR clip simulates the interface of rental software. On one hand, the space and the social function of living room is disappearing; on the other hand, the noises from the other rooms never disappear.
权梓晴Neeko Quan：三招制胜法宝，教你如何做一个优雅的混子！
Three Tips to Live Life to the Fullest of the Full
I have felt the barriers of communication between different languages, by which I mean, apart from the language translation exercises in the exercise book. I made the rough video, whose audio in Chinese means completely on the contrary of the English transcript. I hope that such a funny situation can create a model to show the barriers and the obscures among different languages, and show that language, as a sort of media, is not as translucent as we might probably think.
The birth of modern idols is a collusion between capital, mass media and audience. Capital packages idols to make them shiny and ageless; sets their personalities and hides their real minds and hearts. Capital and media provide the stage for idols, deify them, and manipulate them secretly. Finally, the idol system turns the audience into similar data people and creates data traffic to complete the collusion.
