Dreams and imagination are the source of art and the highest form of self expression. This is true for artists and for those who are just discovering their own potential. Have you ever seen a pen which can flow as it “draws” music? Or the amazing changing reflections of numbers in a mirror? A symbolic goose in the hand of a man without a head?
Elevated World, an exhibition including drawing, video, photography, installation and performance is now on show in the CEAC at Xiamen University Art College. The name of the show refers to a world with high-rise buildings, an elevator world that needs a little help from artists in order to be lifted. It is the first combined work of six art students from the Sandberg Institute in the Netherlands (Yasser Ballemans, Jurrian van den Haak, Tom Hillewaere, Marinke Marcelis, Linda Pijnacker and Richtje Reinsma) and seven students from Xiamen University Art College (Yang Jian, Wei Na, Cao Minzhu, Liu Fang, Wang Lihong, Min Lan, Chen Wei). In the space of just one week, these young artists put together the exhibition of their individual pieces and completed a collaborative drawing here in Xiamen.
In soft and comfortable lines you can really feel good. The artists used ink, pencil, acrylic, crayon, charcoal and marker to make a collective image.
Richtje Reinsma introduced her The hard pencil performance as a technique for drawing. The group started the workshop by discussing a starting point to make sure the drawings would become a whole and not a just collage or collection. They used the contours of their bodies as a basis. Each of them chose a spot and a pose, and then they drew a line around each body similar to those sinister silhouettes that are chalked on the road to mark the exact position of victims of traffic accidents. Once they all had their contours stamped somewhere, they started to draw. Everybody was free to draw whatever he or she liked, and they moved around from drawing to drawing, reacting to and continuing each other's lines.
Numbers, are merely plain mathematical symbols for calculation or recording. But what if we were to study their transformation through different angles? Yasser Ballemans shows fascinating changing images in his Beautiful times 24 hours (DVD) and Create your own beautiful time. Wooden numbers can be moved and fixed to small wedges on a board and change their shape according to your imagination. One can freely place the numbers on both sides of a red column in the middle, but the two sides should be different in their sequence or shape. The numbers can be transformed by counting up or down, reflecting, turning or repeating.
Looking at Wang Lihong’s Internet provides a vibrant sense of modern life. With a computer cable connected to a man’s belly-button, the sculpture alludes to the state of generation Y, living on the internet and hardly able to survive without it. It is the placenta which supplies them with what they need.
Tom Hillewaere from Belgium shows a more dreamlike freely moving pencil. The pencil draws randomly, blown by soft currents of air from all sides. Sinuous curls of music by Tchaikovsky and other classical composers seems to flow from the tip of the pencil.
A sketch of all the 13 students is in Wei Na’s production My video recording is my work. Random poses in front of the camera and video recorder form spontaneous portraits of these young artists. They each greet the camera in their own language, and the combined noise of their repeated hellos brings a certain chaos to the space.
“We are experimenting with a combination of modern and traditional ways of creating art. Like the different voices in the background and the big collective drawing by students from east and west, there isn’t any boundary or limitation to imagination and exchange,” explains Marjo van Baar, leader of the Dutch delegation and assistant dean of the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program at the Sandberg Institute.
The exhibition will be open until October 22. The Sandberg Institute will invite the Chinese students to Amsterdam to visit their friends on their home campus and to find more opportunities to work together.
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