For the MPA-B Month of Performance Art Berlin 2014, MOMENTUM reprises its month-long program of Performance Sundays entitled WORKS ON PAPER. WORKS ON PAPER II inverts classic assumptions of paper as a medium, inviting performance artists to approach paper not as a static blank canvas, but as a dynamic source of conceptual and performative possibility. This year’s WORKS ON PAPER takes place parallel to MOMENTUM’s exhibition PANDAMONIUM: Media Art from Shanghai. PANDAMONIUM is the collision of Panda Diplomacy – China’s longstanding practice of sending cute fluffy mammals into the world – with its most enticing cultural export of the day: Contemporary Art. WORKS ON PAPER II focuses on China, where the painting of calligraphy, from its very origins, has a performative aspect. The WORKS ON PAPER II performance series explores how artists from a culture with an ancient artistic tradition of works on paper transform this medium through performance. Engaging all aspects of performance, the outstanding artists in this series use sound, installation, lectures, workshops, and video to work on paper and with paper to activate all the possibilities of the medium in unexpected ways.
QIU ANXIONG (b. 1972, Chengdu) was born in the capital of Sichuan province in the southwest of China. There, he studied under the progressive artistic practice of Ye Yongqing and Zhang Xiaogang. Qiu and his friends collectively founded a bar which became a hub for the blossoming underground music and art circles in Sichuan, and his colleagues included He Duoling, Zhou Chunya, and Shen Xiaotong. In his animated films, Qiu co-mingles the classical and the contemporary, using the traditional Chinese ink-and-wash style to transpose contemporary social and environmental issues onto traditional Chinese landscapes. A friend and neighbor of Yang Fudong, Qiu has exhibited broadly internationally, having studied contemporary international art and traditional Chinese culture at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany. In 2004 he began teaching at Shanghai Normal University and currently lives and works in Shanghai. Qiu received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award in 2006 and has exhibited widely, including a recent solo-show, titled Qiu Anxiong, The New Book of Mountains and Seas II at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj, Denmark (2013) and group exhibition ‘Ink Art’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2013). He is one of the artists undertaking the PANDAMONIUM Residency, and will be producing new work for this show.
Finite Element (2014)
Especially for MOMENTUM’s ‘Works on Paper II’ series during Berlin’s Month of Performance Art, PANDAMONIUM's artist in residence Qiu Anxiong embarks on an experiment to explore new, uncharted territory in his artistic practice. For the first time in his oeuvre, Anxiong will combine video with live performance and animated paper cut-outs, all overlaid to create a surreal contemporary re-invention form of the traditionally Chinese art of Shadow Theatre. Projected onto a screen resembling the form of classical Chinese scrolls, the traditional medium of paper is here re-imagined and animated with moving images and moving bodies.
PARALLEL WITH:
