Berlin Beijing Visual Exchange
Two months long exhibition at Museum für Fotografie in Berlin
June 24th, 2019
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the city twinning between Berlin and Beijing, the Society for German-Chinese Cultural Exchange in cooperation with the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin is showing works by young artists from Berlin and Beijing at the Museum of Photography.
The participating artists studied at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, the Universität der Künste Berlin and the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. In addition, Berlin-based artist He Xiangyu was invited to participate in the exhibition. He Xiangyu, who commutes between Berlin and Beijing, is a conceptual artist who deals with a wide variety of media and topics. Currently, his works can be seen in the Chinese Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. In his contribution to the exhibition, he confronts a minimalist wooden sculpture with a photograph that can only be recognized as an image of this object at second glance. This work connects him with that of Yala Juchmann, which expands her photographs into space and object. Juchmann also incorporates the most diverse media into her concepts - she moves between photography, sculpture, installation and performance.
Despite their very different cultural background, the artists proposed by their universities have more in common than one might expect. They all live in big cities and they move naturally between their own origins and traditions as well as a global lifestyle defined by architecture, consumption and the media. For the artists Ye Funa, Li Binyuan and Chi Peng, who grew up in China, as well as for the Japanese-born Rie Yamada, another field of tension opens up: that between strong, own artistic traditions and one to two decades ago dominated western modern and contemporary art. In her engagement with social role models and sexual identity, Ye Funa plays in her videos and photographs with possible roles in her own family and in art history. Rie Yamada tests different roles and family constellations in her photographic self-staging. The work of photographer Chi Peng, who often plays the main role in his dream-like productions, is an expression of the search for one's own position - also that between East and West.
Jannis Schulze, on the other hand, is never to be seen in his own pictures. His rather casual photographs reflect his subjective attitude to life in poetic images, which he associatively combines in books and exhibitions. Thomas Koester, on the other hand, uses his black-and-white photos to create strict tableaux in which the inhabitants of big cities such as Moscow or Seoul merge with their urban surroundings. On the other hand, Li Binyuan, who recently showed his video works in the MoMA PS1, reacts directly to his natural and built environment in film and photographically documented performances.
The exhibition comes about on the initiative of Prof. Yu Zhang, President of the German-Chinese Cultural Exchange Association and is supported by the GeKA, the Berlin Senate Chancellery, the Wemhöner Collection, the Mart Stam Gesellschaft, the Karl Hofer Society and WALL AG. The exhibition is curated by Prof. Stefan Koppelkamm (Weißensee Academy of Fine Arts) and Prof. Miao Xiaochun. The exhibition will be held from 28.06.2019 till 25.08.2019 in Museum für Fotografie in Berlin.
