Four Chinese female artists of the 52th Venice Biennale
Updated: 2007-06-08 09:20
Kanxuan! Ai!
Video Time: 1 minute, 22 seconds
Year: 1999
Place: Beijing
Kan Xuan, born in Anhui province in 1972, Kan Xuan studied from 1993 to 1997
in the China Art Academy, in Hangzhou where she could follow the evolution of
video art at its very beginning in China. Although she also realizes
photographs, installations and performance, she mainly works with video, and is
now considered as one of the most important female video artist of China. Her
videos point out trivial elements, feelings, sensations of that we live
everywhere without sometime noticing them. She reproduces them in their most
direct way, with relevance and exactitude, but also with a lot of imagination,
playing with the senses: in one video she swallows mouthfuls of condiments, and
shoots her reactions. In another she breaks eggs one by one, filming the inner
liquid slowly sliding down. More recently she realized a video (Object, 2003)
showing small objects or ingredients (coffee, hair, apple...) dropping in the
water, accompanied by a voice describing the colors of the object, as the video
is shoot in black and white colors remain between white, black and grey. These
scenes, all incongruous, have a strong impact on the spectator, smiling as they
see two men tickling each other and laughing under a sunray, or feeling anxious
as they see Kan Xuan calling and running after herself in the underground's
corridors (Kan Xuan, yes! 1999). Would that be a metaphor of an artist searching
for its own direction? She has been participating to an artist-in-residence
programme from 2002 to 2003 at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam,
and has been living over there and in China since.
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