Shot and edited by Valentina Ciarapica

ISAAC CHONG WAI
Website – See the photo gallery

Isaac Chong Wai is a Hong Kong artist and MFA student at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in Germany and received his BA in Visual Arts (Hons.) from the Academy of Visual Art in Hong Kong Baptist University. He works with diverse art forms, including performance, site-specific installation, public art and multimedia. He is perceptive and insightful in expressing and situating exquisite concepts intuited from living space and the surroundings. Chong’s video, Equilibrium No.8 Boundaries, received honorary mention at the Award of the 2nd OZON International Video Art Festival in Katowice, Poland, in 2013. He was awarded the first runner-up prize for the 2012 Hong Kong Contemporary Art Award. He participated in IAM (International Art Moves) in Dresden, Germany in 2012. Chong has also been shown in a solo-exhibition at the Academy of Visual Arts Gallery in 2011.

Equilibrium No.8 – Boundaries (first performed in 2012)

The body extensions which generate traces and symmetrical balance unconsciously create a dialogue with one another by means of body language. The movement of the arms creates boundaries in geometrical forms and explores the human form and the boundaries among people. We were quiet and paying attention to draw the area that we could reach and meanwhile, we were listening to the combined sound made by the drawings. By the movements and the instructions that the artist gave, a record of our bodies was marked. This performance was done on a large-sized paper and the place of each performer was determined by the artist. In this sense, the form of the human shape was lightly deconstructed by the overlapping drawings. The instruction is: the artist counts from 1 to 5, then all participants start drawing. There is no limit of time, however, the only limit is that of the material, the charcoals. Once the charcoals cannot be used anymore, participants stop drawing. The artist listens, when there is no longer any sound of drawing, he counts again 5 times and then everyone leaves.

Shot and edited by Dian Zagorchinov

CAI YUAN & JIAN JUN XI (MAD FOR REAL)
Website – See the photo gallery

Born in China in 1956 and 1962 respectively, CAI YUAN and JIAN JUN XI have been living and working in the United Kingdom since the 1980s. Cai Yuan trained in oil painting at Nanjing College of Art, Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art. Jian Jun Xi trained at the Central Academy of Applied Arts in Beijing and later at Goldsmiths College. They started working as a performance duo in the late nineties with their action Two Artists Jump on Tracey Emin’s Bed (1999) at Tate Britain’s Turner Prize Exhibition.

Mad for Real are renowned Chinese artists known for their pioneering performances and interventions in public spaces. Their work acts as a dynamic dialogue with institutional and cultural power structures, taking the idea of the ready-made and transforming it within contemporary, everyday situations. The duo also creates installations that reflect on globalization and on the role of modern China in the 21st century. Mad For Real’s oeuvre has continually questioned the relationship of power to the individual. Using a position of resistance, Cai and Xi have consistently produced work which is necessarily oppositional, yet its warmth and humor also acts to draw viewers in. Their performances have taken place as radical gestures, calling to mind notorious artists of earlier radical art movements, though the historical, linguistic and political context of their practice is often related specifically to their origins: China.

Scream (first performed at the Venice Biennale, 2013)

Inspired by Edvard Munch’s most famous painting The Scream (1893), Mad For Real’s eponymous performance reactivates this iconic picture into a live, vocalized expression of contemporary angst. Whereas Munch’s screams came from the madhouse or the abattoir of the 1890s, Cai Yuan and Jian Jun Xi’s Scream invites participation 110 years later in a globalized context of economic and social uncertainty. Resonating with well-known texts of Chinese modernity since the May Fourth movement, such as famous author Lu Xun’s volume Call to Arms (吶喊) of 1922, Mad For Real’s Scream reaches across time and culture into a single, communal burst of humanity.

Shot and edited by Dian Zagorchinov

QIU ANXIONG
CV – Website – See the photo gallery

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)

A work-in-progress developed specially for MOMENTUM’s ‘Works on Paper II’ performance 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 of the traditional 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.