Media Accumulation – Archiving Hu Jieming's Tai Chi
Launch Ceremony
2014/12/20
16:00-18:00
Duration
2014/12/21-2015/01/11
11:00-18:00（Closed on Mondays）
Over his entire artistic career, Hu Jieming’s work has dealt with the image – it’s possibility of holding meaning, its life within its media environment, and its extended ideological treatment. The meaning of an image within the world can be a direct commentary on the contemporary situation, as well as a reflection on the way that the contemporary situation itself has developed through the portrayal of historical or fictional events. In Chronus Art Center over the past half year, Hu has presented two large-scale installations,Overture and Tai Chi, which develop these ideas, and in themselves link together as a series of investigations into the nature and reception of images.
China’s recent history has provided Hu with a wealth of imagery (both ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’) from which to draw the movie clips that made up the ‘raw material’ of the first installation,Overture, which opened in May 2014. The myriad filmed sequences, ripped from the continuum of world- and cinematic-history were presented through perforations in the rough brick walls of the exhibition space, forcing the audience to peer through this facade to see the filmed sequences beyond. Overture was superseded in September 2014 by the installation Tai Chi, the skeletal framework of which was controlled by motors that allowed it to slowly walk around the space. In Tai Chi the films left their refuge behind the bricks and became embedded into the boned structure of the machine, projecting their visions out onto its body and onto the surfaces of the room around it. Where Overture was reticent in its presentation of filmed imagery, Tai Chi explodes with enthusiasm – however this enthusiasm may be tainted by the traumatic nature of the bodies and the history that the images bear.
Now, accompany Tai Chi , this archiving presentation creates a moment to review its life – the initial inspiration for the piece, developed by Hu Jieming in his studio many months ago, through it’s development in discussion with engineering companies and fabricators, the many hardware and software tests that had to be undertaken, the shipping of all the individual elements from Switzerland to Shanghai, to the final installation in the Chronus Art Center in M50. This archive presents the remnants of all these activities, laying out the life and structure of Tai Chi for our analysis.
