ART-PRESENTATION: Guan Xiao-Weather Forecast
In a Chinese contemporary art scene long dominated by political Pop or by art that tries to define a unique Chinese identity, Guan Xiao belongs to a new generation of artists who distance themselves from this heritage. She is a selftaught artist who has created her own world and her own set of references in an idiosyncratic way.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Jeu de Paume Archive
Guan Xiao presents her three-channel video “Weather Forecast” at Jeu de Paume as part of the 9th Satellite Programme. “Weather Forecast” visualizes the personal change that someone who travels goes through, a process with a volatility that she compares with the fluctuation of the weather. She reflects on the conditions for this change: is a geographic expedition necessary, or would a series of perceptions, experienced while staying in the same place, have the same effect? The introductory work “How To Disappear” tests the reliability of exactly this experiential cognition in order to prepare the visitor for sensory immersion. Guan Xiao refutes the idea that things are fixed and knowable, and she inserts a doubt between what is observed, recognised through a surface, and the consequential definition of what something “is” and will forever be. When she works with her collection of images, she mixes a wide range of phenomena, relying on her own logic and instinct, and disregarding the cognitive distance between the images. This mixing of various categories in the world is reminiscent of Chinese traditional cosmology, in which heaven is sacred. The expression “The 10,000 Things Under the Sky” is applied to everything that is non-sacred. Compared with Western tradition, this view de-sanctifies the human, placing it on the same level as all worldly matters. Throughout her artistic career, Guan Xiao has developed a specific way of seeing. In the work “Reading” (2013), she explains her methods of perception in six chapters, while in another earlier work, “David” (2013), the subject of the video is Michelangelo’s sculpture David, which she does not approach through the sculpture itself, but through images of the sculpture that she finds online, fascinated by the way people have photographed it and how they define how the sculpture represents itself online to the world.
Info: Curator: Heidi Ballet, Jeu de Paume, 1place de la Concorde, Paris, Duration: 7/6-25/9/16, Days & Hours: Tue 11:00-21:00, Wed-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.jeudepaume.org
