COUNTRY OUTING
ART ON DISPLAY IN A ROOFLESS VENUE
On the first day of May, the project Art at Fuliang officially raised its curtain in Fuliang county, Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province.
Twenty five artists from five countries brought 22 art works and turned the 7-square-mile county into a roofless art museum after more than five months of intensive preparation.
The art works were made with local resources, built by local workers, and tell stories about local people.
Fuliang is famous for the quality porcelain and tea it produces. It used to export these two products overseas through the Maritime Silk Road in ancient times.
The tea trade in the county started in the Han-Jin period (220-280), and flourished in the Tang Dynasty (618-907). According to documents from ancient times, Fuliang’s tea attracted people from across China, and the place “produced 7 million packets of tea every year, contributing a tax of more than 150,000 guan (the unit of currency back then)”.
Bai Juyi, one of the most famous Chinese poets of the Tang Dynasty, wrote in his renowned work Song of the Pipa Player: “The merchant cared for money much more than for me, one month ago he travels to Fuliang to purchase tea; leaving his lonely wife alone in an empty boat, shrouded in moonlight, on the cold river I float.”
The history of porcelain firing in Fuliang can be traced back to the Song Dynasty (1127-1279). The raw material for porcelain is a clay mineral called kaolin, named after Gaoling village in the county. Nature’s gift made the place famous as “the capital of porcelain”.
Art at Fuliang is the first regional art festival held by Art Field China, and Fram Kitagawa, a celebrated international curator, took on the role as consultant.
“We sincerely hope that a regional art festival takes root and flourishes in Fuliang, growing more abundant with higher quality, and leaving a legacy,” the Art Field China team said.
Xiang Yang, an artist born in 1967, and who graduated from the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University in the early 1990s, has exhibited works at venues including the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the Painted Bride Art Center and Art Alliance in Philadelphia, as well as Today Art Museum and the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. This time he gave new life to two abandoned houses.
He collected images of Jingdezhen and Shiziyuan village, both past and present, from which he selected figures and carved their silhouettes into the walls of the house. The scraps of paint and lacquer peeled off during the carving process are collected in a small transparent bag under each figure. The figures on the walls and the scraps in the pouches become the visual narrative of the image itself.
People see the history and process of ceramic making, the migration and construction of the village through the carved images on the wall. At the bottom of the window facing a stream are silhouettes of people washing clothes by the water. Lift the hanging bamboo basket and you will find rice-sized carved chickens.
“If you fill the fallen scraps back in, you are supposed to get the flat wall back like nothing happened,” Xiang said.
“The idea is to preserve and show everything — the trace of the past time, and the memory of these two houses.”
The work is part of the old house, part of time, and tells the viewer who walks into the house a little bit about it; they exist in another form in the memory of the village.
Wu Jian’an, who introduced his work as representative of Chinese artists at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, brought art pieces involving efforts of residents to the event.
Since 2016, after Wu completed a public art project named Free the Monkey
King for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he has been creating a series of works themed 500 Brushstrokes.
Wu invited natives to choose the size and type of brushes, color or ink, dry or wet, and leave traces on the rice paper. Then he cut out the collected brushstrokes and assembled them on a blank paper. The random brushstrokes are like the subconscious projected onto the rice paper, revealing the creators’ character and style.
Wu said that single stroke is boring, and together they create dramatic tension on the paper, showing the fresh vitality of Fuliang. “People here are more introverted because their brushstrokes are narrow and clear,” he said.
Shen Lieyi , 52, a sculptor from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, presented his way of integrating natural and daily elements into the material, space and concept of sculpture arts through his work — a bamboo woven nest.
The nest stands tall on relatively empty ground, many holes are left all over the nest, like open windows. Visitors are permitted to climb up on bamboo ladders or walk around on the nest, overlooking the tea fields from above.
Shen calls the work Traveling in the Clouds; he wishes the nest could carry people to reach the sky like the clouds.
Shen also made a seesaw crossing the drilled wall of an idle tool shed, blocking people on two sides of the seesaw from seeing each other.
The inspiration comes from the artist’s fascination about “walls”; “some walls are visible, but some are not, such as the ‘wall’ between different cultures and civilizations”.