CHAIR (2018)
MIX-MATERIAL INSTALLATION
LONDON GALLERY WEST , SEPTEMBER 2018
Chair is the first work of Xuefei’s research about spectatorship. It exhibited in the exhibition ‘The materiality of memory’ in 2018 in the London Gallery West in the Univeristy of Westminster . The exhibition integrates different media and materials, including film, photography, ceramics and installations to present a multi-sensory immersive experience for the audience. The Chair is a small installation which has been placed in the corner of the exhibition hall. Audiences can sit on the chair and watch the work displayed in the exhibition hall through the rectangular window formed by the wooden board in front of them. Chair is a hypothetical work which offers a seat for the audience to watch and think about the relationship between the displayed art works, between artists and the audience and between what we see and what we know.
The exhibited chair is a typical theatre seat designed in a 1990s style, which gives the person sitting on the chair a flavour of watching a film in a cinema, looking at the entire exhibition as a real-time video or movie.Through this work， It brought few questions aboout the relationship between spectators and spaces——How does our body connect with the outside world? How is such a connection presented? How do people recognise themselves through the connection with the outside world?
Installation, two-day performance, single-channel video
Shu Galley ,Shanghai, 2017
To explore time and space, and the complex relationship between the performers and the audiences, this performance was combined with the installation, which the image was projected on to the performer’s back through the real-time camera in front of the installation during her performance.
A documentation of an action
Film duration: 10 minutes 34 seconds
Palais de Tokyo,Paris,France,2017
In Historial Walk, Xuefei tried again to use this single and rhythmic expression that she has used in her previous work Cat’s Cradle. In this practice, she tried to record an action and re-edit by cutting the video of the movement in chronological order and then rearranged every part of it to produce a new ‘movement’. It turned out that the two videos are not different from each other in occurrence order from the visual perspective. She used the stone pillars in that space as a connecting point that can be objectively felt for the time and the space, while the human activity is disorganised and repeated in the interaction of the time and the space.
2015
Flocked brass/stone/wood/plastic, soil, steel utility cart
137 x 61 x 216 cm (54 x 24 x 85 inches)
In Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), an American former sailor related his trip down the Yangtze Kiang in a stream-of-consciousness narration. Not unusual, it presented the Orient as an exotic locale, filled with visions of cruelty, terror, sublimity, hostility and barbaric splendor:
“…Hair falling out and teeth rotting away… I saw the dirty yellow mouth of the river… the sea of yellow faces… millions and millions of them hollowed out by famine, ravaged by disease… chewing the grass off the earth… And all the while China hanging over us like Fate itself. A China rotting away, crumbling to dust like a huge dinosaur, yet preserving to the very end the glamor, the enchantment, the mastery, the cruelty of her hoary legends.”
And yet there was the historical Romantic ambition of a white revisionist, that the studying of the Orient, a world eternally elsewhere, and its culture, impossible to be fully comprehended by the West, might cure the cancer of Western civilization:
“One never thinks of China, but it is there all the time on the tips of your fingers and it makes your nose itchy… because in everything Chinese there is wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it with two hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it stick to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins.”
In Orientalism, Edward Said famously identified the links between linguistics and anatomy, specifying that a learned Orientalist’s attitude was often “that of a scientist who surveyed a series of textual fragments.” It’s often not the Orient that’s given on the page, but “a truncated exaggeration” of it. Utilizing this canonical approach in its most literal sense, Untitle culls textual objects from Miller’s texts. Restored textual fragments, framed by a scientific (and what Said would call celibate) structure, against what they initially represented, form a new reality. The previous imagination of the East becomes the material, and the East becomes a performed experience of the Western narrator himself in an almost comical way.
