Crystal City brings together the work of Asian artists alongside New Zealand artists of Asian descent. The works range from photography and video to installation and performance, showcasing recent developments in contemporary art. The artists are: Kim Beom (Korea), Pak Shueng Chuen (HK), Jin Jiangbo (China), Hye Rim Lee (US), Kerry Ann Lee (NZ), Tiffany Singh (NZ) and Cheng-Ta Yu (Taiwan)

PLEASE NOTE: TO EXPERIENCE PAK’S WORK, TRAVEL WITHOUT VISUAL EXPERIENCE, PLEASE EITHER BRING A CAMERA WITH YOU OR BORROW ONE FROM THE FRONT DESK.

Pak has taken the photographs in this work while blindfolded. He asks us to think about how we privilege sight over our other senses by requiring the images to be viewed only with the flash of a camera. In his video Breathing in a House, Pak rented a small apartment in Busan, 'Although I lived my daily life as usual there, I collected all my breaths in transparent plastic bags until they filled up the entire apartment. The process took ten days to complete and I felt as if part of my life was absorbed by this apartment.'

A central theme of Crystal City is what it means to live in a built-up urban environment, yet remain connected to the natural world and the world of imagination. It reveals the city as a site for wandering and exploring, but also as a place of meaningful connections. Many of the works discuss what it is to be a traveller. Strangers see the landscape with fresh eyes, but Crystal City shows that when we travel we bring our own experiences and viewpoint with us, reinterpreting the world we find ourselves in. Sensual and humorous, spiritual and philosophical, these works chart a geography of both familiar and unknown terrain.

 

The Artists

The exhibition takes its title from Hye Rim Lee’s Crystal City Spun, an animated cityscape with skyscrapers made of spinning fantasy toys. Into this exotic world journeys the character Toki and her mythical creature, the dragon Yong. The cyber avatar Toki has appeared in many of Hye Rim Lee’s films and photographs. Lee describes Toki as; “a highly stylised and curvaceous warrior-vixen who draws upon the Japanese tradition of manga, Korean anime and western ideals of sexuality and beauty. She exists in a fantasyland ripe with testosterone-driven energy.”

Tiffany Singh's work is across two galleries, the Dowse and Enjoy Gallery in central Wellington. The audience is invited to co-author and engage with this work. Please select a wind chime from the exhibition at Enjoy and make it your own, before bringing it to the Dowse to become part of the exhibition there. As you engage with the work, please record and submit an image or video of your chime onto Tiffany's website.

Listen to an interview with Tiffany Singh:

In Kim Beom's film, A Rock That Was Taught It Was A Bird, a rock is given lessons which are designed to literally transform it into a bird. A teacher, seemingly oblivious to the inanimate quality of his student, takes classes in the essential matters of birdlife — the physiology of a bird’s make-up, the culture of how a bird behaves and, most important of all, how to fly.  Despite his best efforts, the rock remains inert, even as we begin to believe in its capacity to understand and react.

Jin Jiangbo’s works explore the relationship of contemporary digital technology to traditional Chinese custom, particularly the painting tradition of Shanshui and the musical act of playing the Guqin. Shanshui is the historic art of depicting the mystical and spiritual phenomena of landscape, particularly mountains, traditionally viewed as the homes of immortals. Jin Jiangbo draws on the look and feel of Shanshui in his series of photographs, taken by the Shanghai and Beijing-based artist while traveling with his family around New Zealand. Jin has reinterpreted landscapes familiar to us as locals, so that they appear exotic and new. We rediscover ourselves through his unique experience of the New Zealand landscape.

Kerry Ann Lee’s digital montages take familiar aspects of the Shanghai cityscape and explode them into a series of futuristic vistas. In making these works Lee drew on not only her experience of the city, but the style and feel of vintage poster designs for expos and trade fairs. In Plan 9, titled after the science fiction film, the Radisson Hotel has been flipped and endlessly replicated, forming an army of buildings in flight. In Lilliput the Shanghai TV Tower collapses into a kaleidoscope of ramps and ladders and in The Lost Empire the Shanghai Museum has been extended upwards like an extravagant and surreal wedding cake.

Tourist guide publications are the inspiration for Taiwanese artist Cheng-Ta Yu’s unique audio-visual guide to Wellington. However, acknowledging the gaps and misunderstandings which can arise when communicating across cultures, Yu’s tour is highly subjective. Each segment is delivered in both Mandarin and English, filtered through an online Google translation device. In both languages, the final text is humorous, often wildly inaccurate, and at times bewildering

Crystal City is supported by the Asia NZ Foundation and the Wellington City Council through the Wellington Artists Residency Exchange Programme