Chen Quilin

Now that I have sought some clarifications on what "art" could mean to various people, I can go back to what prompted the relevant questions in the first place: some of the works of art I saw at Art HK 11. One of the artists whose works caught my attention there was one Chen Quilin. I stopped by her booth and started taking pictures when I was approached  by a European lady from behind. She was France Pepper, the director of arts and culture program at the China Institute in New York. She curates the discussion series Art Salon: The Culture of Contemporary Chinese Art. She explained to me a little of the style of the particular artist and when I asked her what prompted the artist to produce what she did, she told me that the artist was sitting right behind her and if I liked, I could talk to her. What a golden opportunity!

In my broken putonghua, I managed to carry on a  brief conversation with her. I told her I found her work interesting but a bit intriquing  and asked her why she took the photos of herself in a white bridal dress amongst what appeared to be the dark chaotic rubbles of a ruined old town by the earthquake of May 2006 and why her figures always appeared in pairs some facing each other and some away from each other and some on certain rigid tracks. I was told that she passed by that old town completely razed to the ground by the earthquake and felt the urge to do so because the sight of those ruins suddenly prompted in her the desire to do so as a record of her feelings. To her human beings are always torn by conflicting desires. We often find our minds or our emotions split in two, each pulling in a different direction. We often thus feel the need to seek some kind of compromise, some kind of reconciliation, some kind of com-mingling, some kind of convergence, perhaps to maintain a kind of balance.

I checked through a flier written by France Pepper as part of the Hammer Projects, " a series of exhibitions focusing primarily on the work of emerging artists". According to the flier, Chen came from the small town of Wanxian on the Yangtze River, Sichuan which was destined to be submerged by the rising waters in connection with the Three Gorges Dam project and started work painting film billboards because her mother worked in a film company and only went to Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chonging in 1995 at age 20, where she learned traditional Chinese woodblock printing and after graduation in 2000, returned to the film company to continue painting billboards before moving to Chengdu where she encountered performance art for the first time. "Chen has since created a unique fusion of installation, performance, photography and video, producing works that address the rapid urbanization of of China's provincial areas and that toll that has taken on society. " It is said that her work simultaneously capture "the nostalgia of how life used to be and confusion brought on by the fast pace of change and the hope for a new and improved standard of living." She has already produced three videos titled 別賦 (Bie Fu or Farewell Poem) commissioned by Agricultural Museum of in Beijing in 2002 for the exhibition called Harvest: Contemporary Art

in 2002, 江河水

(Jiang He Shui or River, River) in 2005 and 花園 (Hua Yuan or The Garden) in 2007.

In the following photographs, do we not see the contrast between the old the new, destruction and creation, the past and the present, and in the case of the children, between the present and the future? Do we not see the demolition of the old and the construction of the new? Do we not see the weight of mental anguish in the posture of the men struggling in each half of her sculptures?  Do we not see "nostalgia" in her face as a performance artist? Do we not see "hope" in the rather mechanically "wooden" or "masked" faces and body postures of what appear to be the young school children all neatly lined up in their bright uniforms led by an "angel" but on a stage against the background of the Tianmen Square without the portrait of Chairman Mao?  Do we not see the "desires" of the two identical looking figures each with identical postures and each absorbed in their own thoughts, problems, crouched down but with their hands extended without however looking at each other in one of the sculptures and in the second, the three pairs approaching each other, one with a sword, another with an axe in his hands and in the third their desire for some kind of rapprochement signaled by the two figures each absorbed in making a butterfly with the same flimsy gauze ribbon ? Do we not see that some of the the figures in the relevant pairs are in black whilst the others are in gold? If so, do they not suggest black despair and golden hope? Do the figures suggest one and the same person or two different persons?