Walk-In-Progress

A dream I dreamt in a forest, 2014

mixed media from the urban forest

I slept for two nights in the urban village in Guangzhou, China.  While asleep, I caught a strange dream. I told people I met about the dream. They offered objects to help realize the dream. I paid them for their things. The dream materializes.

Three day weekend
Many people with a fork in one hand are making a column in the Restaurant
I drink at the end of the train with a friend.
There is window next to the bed. A monk suggests not to look in this window.
The friend is floating in the air over the frogs.
A white porcelain cow on the orchid.
Time passes.  Hanging in the room, something I do not know.
Numerous peanuts in the sky.
An man does not work because of the pain in his hip.
I do not want to hit my little toe on the foot of the desk.
Outside it is cold. Even to imagine hitting my toe is painful.
Another friend waits in the cold for two hours.
Quickly I run down the hill careful to avoid the approaching train.
A married woman goes outside two times a year. Now she to waits in the square of a castle.
The man scrubs the body of a naked woman.
Animals who are intertwined overlap.
Many gloves of two colors.
The dog runs away with the towel I throw into the road.
The cymbal is dropped from an airplane.
The cymbal rolls up the road.
It stops when hitting a tree on the other side of the road.

Asking Guangzhou, 2014

intervention

“Please, can you write down a piece of wisdom?” I was walking around with this little note written in Chinese showing it to people to find out about there knowledge and wisdom. Now it goes on in the exhibition space. Visitors can also leave notes there on the table.

Solo toma tiempo (it takes time), 2014

clay experiments

I understand this piece as a process of change. Everything changes and transforms constantly. Like 100 spheres made of white clay, every second in a moment of drying and every second the air inside finding a way out.

Just try, 2014

Performance in the outdoor market

At a market in Guangzhou, China.  It was Friday, and I went to the market for eight hours: four hours in the morning and four in the afternoon, waiting for some of the daily market visitors to come and touch the cucumbers that I made from white clay. Waiting for passersby to look into my eyes.

I understand my work as a reflection upon encounters about time—time to touch, time to speak, time to share.

Interconnecting Everywhere, 2012 - XXXX

ongoing work (no. 10), longitude + latitude

In the beginning of 2012 I dug a hole. The next time I crossed a border, I made another hole, filled it up with the soil from the first hole, and carried on with the new soil.

Melodic ending of spatial constrains, 2014

roof tiles

Melodic Endings is the sound of broken clay. Is the curved shape of traditional roof tiles. Is tiles flattend to broken shards as the spectator walks through the exhibition space. Melodic Endings deals with things; the dynamic changes of China’s urban planning; the architecture of such change. Melodic Endings is clay tiles leftovers; is remnants of demolished houses, bought on a sidewalk market. Clay roof tiles is an older time period today, a land value pulverized in continuous endings starting.

Untitled (City without ornament), 2014

fabric, 170 x 220 cm

The series of fabric works focuses on the absence of ornaments in modern china. The outlines of the few visible patterns (such as metal bars on windows or cobble stones) in the cities’ architecture are transferred into textile pieces.

Concrete Inverts, 2014

intervention in public space

Performed during the silence walk, the artist continues a series of work in which he fills and repairs potholes in the streets of Guangzhou. Applying one concrete layer over the other, he leaves untraceable marks of his performed rough labor.

Street poem, 2014

night performance

The poem is a collective sound work combining English and Chinese phonemes, activated through their simultaneous recitation by the participating audience.

钱不能吞食, 2014

web video

„You can’t eat money“ is the translation of the words Norgard Kröger writes on every piece of paper currency she spends. Entered into the search field of the nationally most popular, public video platform, this sentence pulls up a performance video. In the video, the artist and another performer eat 5€ notes. Installed in the working area of vitamincreativspace at an unoccupied desk where someone seems to have just left for a little break, a Yuan note with the sentence in Chinese rests in front of a computer with the video running on the website www.56.com. The installation is part of an ongoing project started in November 2011 whose presentation differs in response to local conditions.

search for 钱不可吞食 on http://www.56.com/

or

search for „Geld mann man nicht essen“ on youtube

Money for sale, 2014

performance

…says the sentence on the Box. The Box is a reconstruction of the most commonly used market boxes at the market in the neighborhood of Vitamin Creative Space. Originally, it contained various kinds of Chinese paper currency, neatly set in the box. The walk started at Vitamin Creative Space and continued through the market. On the edge of the market where it opens into a residential area, the artist sold the money with the handwritten sentence 钱不可吞食 out of the box for the exact amount of its original value. The silence walk participants encountered this action, and the action was absorbed into and continued with the walk. Upon returning to Vitamin Creative Space, the last notes were „sold“/exchanged with visitors of the exhibition. The box is now empty of goods but contains the earned money.

钱不可吞食, 2014

performance

The monetary value of the 1 Yuan coins layed out to spell the phrase „You can’t eat money” in Chinese script is also the average monthly wage of a Chinese worker. Because it is not permitted to leave the coins on Tiananmen Square,  the coins will be strewn on the ground in front of a Swarowski store in Beijing.

Red thread, 2014

intervention, elastic band (150 m), print (70 x 50 cm)

A long red band is passed through the windows of a 32-story high-rise apartment building in the Tianhe district of Guangzhou. The ribbon flows through the interior and exterior of the building, intervening from one window to the next, floor by floor and turning inside-out through the monotone geometry of stacked flats. The action attempts to weave the isolation of contemporary Chinese urban domesticity with the exterior spaces of the metropolis – a minimal underline commenting upon the relation of the human scale to architecture as a form of poetic engagement.

Body Object Extension Ritual, 2014

video/ video intervention inside a internet café

Can we turn objects into extensions of our bodies? How similar is our spatial awareness of a tool to the awareness of our own limbs? Jackie Chan is a master at integrating everyday objects into his fighting choreography and turning these things into extensions of his body. But since they are used for fighting they get damaged. The need to be healed. Once an object has been integrated into the body, does it become interdependent with other parts? Could we use Chinese medicine to heal our adopted limbs? This video explores the boundaries between the body, self, and the “external world” and the interdependence of those parts.

Heilmittel, 2014 / (Artist’s Antidote, 2014)

medication to get rid of being an artist

The work Heilmittel (Artists Antidote) is part of a work cluster dealing with society’s definition of normality or rather with its anomalies. A performative installation, the work focuses on conceptions of being normal, being delusional and being an artist. Looking at the symptom descriptions for delusions in the ICD 10 evaluation (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems) and replacing the word “patient” with “artist”, one must feel more than concerned. The ambivalence produced by this action was the starting point for the idea to visit a doctor practicing traditional Chinese Medicine to get cured of the actual state of being. By abstractly describing to the doctor the symptoms of being an artist, or rather the artistic working and thinking processes, the doctor made a diagnosis and handed over a prescription for a cure of this “state of thinking and being”. The prescription was forwarded to a traditional Chinese pharmacy in order to receive all ingredients needed to create the artist’s antidote. The ingredients were prepared according to the given instructions in a performative act during the opening of the exhibition. The resulting mixture was then put in a glass beneath the framed receipt. The installation Heilmittel constitutes a drinkable sculpture that as idea and placeholder, inherently questions concepts of being based on normative ideals.

Time Machine, 2014

Press a button. Button pressed – 5 sec. Button pressed – for another 5 sec. Press as long as you want. The receipt of the total time is a work of art and a certificate of authenticity. Your time makes it work, makes the work.

(The machine has been installed at Vitamin Creative Space during the opening event on 17.1.2014) 

Celebration Phantoms (Frightening), 2014

mixed media; mirror ball, electronic firecrackers

Sketch For a Village, 2014

video

The work describes the intimate process of demurring, a moment of hard check in the development of an artistic project. In the context of a first encounter with an urban development zone in Guangzhou, China, where rapid acceleration of reshaping threatens grown and functioning social structures, the idea of hesitation enfolds the possibility to return from fantasies of the future into the present and to adapt the projection that came apart at the seams back to the feelings of the people who’s everyday reality it changes.

Twelve faces of China, 2014

video. sound: excerpt by Nick Land’s text „Circuits“, in „Fanged numena: Collected Writings 1987-2007“

Each face belongs to a process of disappearance, replaced by another face, it becomes a virtual pace through time.

The land has been changed, the mountain has been moved, 2014

postcard set and interventions in public space

“The land has been changed, the mountain has been moved” is a collection of works, which arose on the way from Hong Kong to Guangzhou. During the exhibition opening, the distribution of the postcards to people on the streets of Guangzhou accompanied further actions and interventions, in public and within the exhibition space.

“The abstract moon. If he would know what’s going on down here.”

Hear Sea, See Sea, Cease Here, 2014

video 5:50 min, sound

In a structural experiment, the artist is exploring the relation of still photographs and running recordings of the sound of the sea. The first edition of an ongoing series turns to the far east coast of the Mediterranean sea in Tel Aviv, Israel. The sound of the waves form the basis of an incessant sound, punctuated by the clicking of the camera. Shoot and reload rhythmically parallel the hitting waves and the ebb of the water at the coast. The seemingly endless repetition drones on the borders of monotony, allowing the imagination to gather around this very basic setting of cinematographic exercise and the composition and re-composition of memory and place.

形成 The becoming

My dear friend who is getting ready to depart
-I had been longing to be your companion
yet I am tangled up with my routine
Now, I could only silently gaze at
your supposably returning path
Between the dawn and dusk
Between the brightest star and the dimmest soul
Between promise and betrayal

Prologue – to my friend who is getting ready to depart

1

Tunneled through a smoggy
motorway which lingers on the mountain
All at once I found myself nailed down my feet in front of a boundless, enormous dam
In that place there was tricolor waves swirling:
copper-ish sulphur
blackish auburn iron
grayish lead and zinc
as if the fissure and the rift etched on the earth
Wantonly meshing, coagulating
On the deserted land
land that deserted human

The village foregone
woven with the wild grass
prolonged blazing sunshine
Bamboo and musa basjoo have gradually found out
how to comfort the wounded nerve of the mountain range

In between the crease of time
Universe elongates
As if body’s stretching
—you slightly turn you back
What beyond the deserted land
startlingly an animistic land come into your sight:
It is almost a hidden garden under the cliff
The grace of labouring
has lighted up the flaring firewood, disperses the misty mountain mist
smoke rising up from the back of mud wall
Awaiting
Our descendants
Our descendants might could
 from the track of the circular time
have a new starting over
landing on your feet on the muddy puddle pavement

We still could not forecast
how long we still need to walk
just to witness the tremendous origin
And stratus slides
faulting peak floating upon
The destined lowering of night curtain stressed the melancholy of the land

2

Today
in the underground
everyone is phubbing
A girl had just broken into laughter
Leaning against you, a chubby woman
is transmitting tender signal to you
with her gently trembling body

The escalator the underground exit leads to
have been out of order for so long
Whilst the television commercial
Murmuring numerous declaration restlessly to people
You guess you could once again
continue with the daily recital in your mind
“Today I successfully touched the base of the Line 3 carriage
Today I could tolerate
suspending in the air
the spit and the bubbles of speeches and the plaza crowd
Tolerate the youths who stroke their mobile screens at all time
they are sending their warmest greeting to their buddies in illness”

In this manner
I guess I could sit on the pedestrian road
endure with the falling dusk
getting myself joining the homeless team

I clearly know I could not
become a starry night
But at least I could turn into
those inescapable
shadows of humans

3

I am on the plaza of the inverted time
seeing myself walking towards this life-changing tipping point:
Once again I squeezed few books
in the overloaded rucksack
I foresaw myself on my future journey
keep leaving books on the road I walked across
Expecting there would be someone picking them up
– In the soon be happened warfare
the existing books seem redundant

I just hope
The ignited thought by the flame of war
Could turn your crystalized existence
into red hot through smithing
Becoming the red hue of dusk
that human could not be wiped away

At this moment
I could get my Gardening book
left in the forest
The book of cookery
handed over to human
The book of geology
returned to the earth

(Translated from Chinese by Zoie)

形成

即将启程的朋友

我曾那么渴望与你同行

却在我的日常中动弹不得

现在，我只能在日出与日落之间

最亮的那颗星和最黯淡的心灵之间

诺言与背叛之间

默默审视

你要回去的路

        ——题记_给即将启程的朋友

1

穿过烟雨迷蒙的
盘山公路

我突然停在一个漫无边际的大坝

那儿翻腾着三种不同颜色的波浪

红的铜硫

黑的褐铁

灰的铅锌

仿佛大地所受的创伤

尽情交汇

在这人类遗弃之地

遗弃人类之地

曾经的村落

和野草交织在一起

旷日持久

竹子和芭蕉渐渐懂得

如何抚慰山脉受伤的神经

时间的褶皱处

世界以另一种方式延伸

犹如身体的屈伸

——你稍一转身

荒芜的世界背后

竟浮现出峰回路转的生灵之地

这几乎是悬崖底下的秘密花园
劳动的欣悦

就像驱散山地湿气的柴火

在泥墙背后升起
等待着

下一代

下一代有可能

从时间的环行跑道上

重新踏上泥泞的路面

我们仍然无法预料

步行多久

才能目击起源的战栗

而云层移动

山峰浮起

即将降临的夜幕更显大地的深沉

                                            （胡昉）

跨时间纪念 (广州 Market Remix), 2013/14

video soundscape installation, public intervention; text by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes

„Could the atoms that are in my body right now also be part of other organisms in different dimensions?”

White Arsenic, 2014

intervention, 0,00003 mg white arsenic / 3,500,000 square kilometres Zhu Jiang River and South China Sea

A homeopathic dose of poisonous white arsenic was thrown into the Zhu Jiang River (Pearl River). The smaller the dose (or the bigger the medium it gets administered with), the stronger its contrary effect and purifying potency.

Moon (CN), 2014

photography

Documentation of the moon reflected in building facades in Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

Entfernung, 2014

action

China is the most gentrificated country in the world. All over China new high-rises arise without consideration of old houses which gets deconstructed on many places. The traditional and social chinese life (Hutong-life etc.) gets in many parts destroyed. For no one this gentrification is stoppable. The only chance for me as an artist “to take the power back” is to destroy an old chinese house by myself as a massive critic. While i was destroying the old chinese house i let these workers filming who would normally dismantle the house. So i changed the function of an artist and a worker.

Produced by Vitamin Creative Space, Zoie Yung, Xiaoyu
Location: Hualong, Panyu (Agriculture Wonderland), Guangzhou, China
Logistic Arrangement: Mr. Yeung
Camer Operators: Mr. Wong Hai Le, Mr. Wang Ping An (orginally workers at Falong construction site)
Photographs: Zoie Yung, Yuichiro Tamura

The autonomous clock, 2014

What time is it on the Autonomous Clock? Where does the time go? Gaining 15 minutes to its conventional time-keeping everyday throughout the course of the day. Travelling eastward – an hour every four days. Perhaps you’ll synchronize – perhaps you’ll overlap. Please embed and spread it. Let’s all view this simultaneously.

www.theautonomousclock.com

To sew the sweater while the wool is on the sheep, 2014

translating performance

Write a one line poem. Walk the one line poem around different cities asking people to translate the poem into their langauge. Ask what the line means. Use that line in talks or interviews or papers. Excuse me, what you propound sounds like your saying Quintillian is sewing the sweater while the wool is still on the sheep. Ask others to do the same. Make the saying flock real. And then find a knitter to try making a sweater on a real sheep. It can be a grey sheep.

能做好好的，为什么不站?, 2014

exhibition exercise, 326′

(English title: No. 2: What can a phrase such as ‘natural course’ mean anymore in a time of such intense production?)

Sitting down for the duration of an opening. Calling it a performance sets up a series of parameters for a willed physicality, passively received, curious interaction and a fixed perspective of concentrated observation, time withstanding.

øΩøΩøΩøΩ, 2014

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On Friday 17.1.2014 a silent walk, designed by Eric Ellingsen, Christina Werner, Joanna Warsza, led across downtown Guangzhou, spreading from the Xingang Middle Road, Chigang Market and Vitamin Creative Space featuring time-based works and interventions.

Silent Walk Manual

Silent Walk: With a group or alone, walk through part of a city without speaking for at least 30 minutes. While walking, give continuous and focused attention to the loudest sound you hear around you by looking in every direction in which you hear something.

The walk meandered on and ended up on a rooftop, morphed into a celebration, the celebration continued as a gathering inside Vitamin Creative Space with common dumplings cooking, drinks, actions and performances, followed by evening drinks at the near by street vendors, accompanied by further performances.