Coronavirus may have temporarily shut down many museums and galleries all over the world for the time being, but the pandemic also prompted many institutions to find new ways for visitors to explore art and exhibitions.
The 2020 China and USA Technology and Innovation in Fiber Art Exhibition, for example, was moved to a virtual space in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdown. The Academy Arts & Design, Tsinghua University (AADTHU), in Beijing recently developed a 2.5D virtual platform that allows to visit the exhibition online at this link (23 November - 24 December 2020).
Presented by the Beijing Culture & Art Fund, together with the University of the Arts (UArts) in Philadelphia, and the Academy Arts & Design, Tsinghua University (AADTHU) in Beijing, and curated by Mi-Kyoung Lee, UArts professor, and Yue Song, AADTHU professor, the exhibition presents a selection of fiber artists who explore in their textile researches innovative approaches, methodologies and technologies. This edition features twenty artists from China and twenty from the United States, divided in two virtual pavilions.
The starting points for all the artworks included in this event are traditional techniques passed on by craftspeople century after century, such as weaving, sewing, knotting, coiling or dyeing, but they are combined with cutting-edge technologies, including scientific and digital technologies, to create an innovative intersectional art genre.
The possibility of combining science and technologies with traditional crafts allows to come up with new pieces, but also to develop new researches in the educational and industrial fields.
The evolution of crafts and technology illustrates the relationship between spirit and materiality, as well as soul and body," co-curator Yue Song states. "Unlike the evolution of nature, the provocation of technological evolution, particularly digital technology, comes into the world with such a short history. The effects of digital technology and software usage in society are often unpredictable, especially when we talk about the new revolution of technology in the Information Age."
Yet this degree of unpredictability combined with crafts and advanced technologies, allowed the artists involved to explore in innovative ways themes that go from gender and intimacy to environment, politics and science. Going through the various projects on the exhibition site is an exciting process of discovery that virtual visitors from all over the world will find engaging and intriguing.
"While contemporary arts and crafts adopt the ancient cultural and historical crafts, the technological evolution has influenced not only the advancement of technology but also the change of aesthetic values in the creative visual field," Lu Xiaobo, Dean of Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University states.
If you visit the virtual event, you will easily realise the future of textile art will be very different on the aesthetic and the material level from what we may imagine. Stepping into the China pavilion will allow visitors to discover Gao Jing & Lu Qi's embroidered flowers that bloom thanks to a deformable memory alloy that turns the static tapestry into a dynamic artwork with a movable frame.
Themes such as mutability and transformations are also tackled by Guo Yaoxian's works based on systems and variables: when viewers pass in front of the woven pieces, a sensor is activated and starts a motor that, changing the wefts, creates a new combination of colours.
As every intervention creates a random result, the continuous action generates endless images and meanings. The artist uses this system for coloured pieces and for black and white pieces, the latter ("Code's Text") are very clever as the warp and weft change and compose a morse code image, ending up creating a new woven semantics composed of basic symbols of Morse codes that change constantly.
There's beauty in fragility as proved by Gu Yue's works slightly reminiscent of Ruth Asawa's structures, costructed from chemical fibers melted and cut, metaphors for women blooming, or in Li Hui, Yang Yitong and Zhuang Xiafen's PLA cloud-like structure made with a 3D pen, a piece that symbolises the linear language of today's vast and rapid flow of information.
Shi Jindian's X-ray like sculptures of vehicles exploring the complexity and beauty of machinery, look very fragile, but they are actually made with stainless steel wire.
American artist Warren Seelig also works with the theme of ethereal structures: his translucent textile installation made of hundreds of monofilament nylon threads that can stretch for about 8 metres across the circumference of a room, the abundance of threads accumulating in the centre creating an illuminated floating ring. Jayoung Yoon usually transforms fragile hair into geometrical sculptures, but her "Umbilicality" project featured in this exhibit consists in a live performance with two dancers connected by a funnel shaped organic web made of human hair.
Nature is a great inspiration for some artists: Hong Xingyu & Luan Xinyu's wool fiber tapestries are inspired by natural colours; Jiang Yunge's landscapes recreate mountains in felt and flowing streams of water with gorgeous threads, while Tali Weinberg materialises climate data with plant-derived fibres and dyes in her tapestries.
Some artists focused their projects mainly on textiles for the tactile and visual pleasures they can provide us with: Yang Jing and Li Na's thermochromic/photochromic yarn hand-made abstract paintings change colour when exposed to heat or light, while Zeng Qiaoling projects digital images on her intricate three-dimensional tapestries allowing them to become dynamic pieces.
Other artists use their works to develop narratives around social issues: Jia Zijian employs industrial gloves as a medium and a rust staining technique to create textures and prompt visitors to ponder about the connections between people, cities and industrial processes. Wang Lei's military parade armor of Emperor Kangxi in the Qing Dynasty, recreated with Liberation Army Daily newspapers, assumes a new meaning, reuniting in itself a series of dichotomies - war and peace, force and culture, fragility and hardness.
Architecture is the main force behind Jin Ansha's installation in which she employs plastic to create urban landscapes that activate a dialogue about pollution, but it is also present in Liz Collins' crowd control and traffic barriers transformed from urban elements into giant looms.
Annet Couwenberg's origami patterns (engraved on laser cut buckram and then hand folded) and the structures supporting them designed in Rhino, a 3D software program, hide some architectural principles. There are more references to architecture in Anne Wilson's "Errant Behaviors" a video combined with Shawn Decker's sound composition, a frame-by-frame animation that calls to mind the structural development of lace and that features a series of fragile and odd cytyscapes.
Errant Behaviors from Shawn Decker on Vimeo.
Quite a few artists are drawn by the possibilities of optical fibers and LED lights: Li Wei intergrated this technology in her screens inspired by Chinese ink paintings; Yue Song's tree blooms with optical fibers celebrating the connections between ecology and information; Lin Lecheng, Li Guangzhong and Lin Yuehong's Pavilion of Light combines bamboo segments of different lengths witn LED lights programmed to create gradual transitions between colours, while Wang Jian's silica gel bags and plastic snap buttons statues integrate inside them sensor lighting systems.
Very contemporary themes such as cyberbullling, Internet addiction, online sexual abuse and over-sharing personal information are tackled by Xie Yong's statues of kids protected (or maybe trapped...) in cocoon-like structures, while Lia Cook worked on data visualisation in her 32 woven images of the same face translated differently through the weaving process and incorporating data and neural connections to trigger different emotional responses in the viewers.
But the event is not just about visiting the virtual pavilions of China and the USA and passively admire the various installations. Lin Lecheng, Professor of Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University, and member of the exhibition Advisory Committee thinks indeed that the Technology and Innovation in Fiber Art Virtual Exhibition is a great way to get inspired and push the boundaries of textile art even more. "I do believe it is essential and meaningful for these two countries' fiber artists, educators, and scholars to continue to exchange their artistic, educational, and cultural research and investigation to support and prepare for the future of the
Fiber Art field," he states.
The programme of this event also features an international symposium online via the Tencent 腾讯 conference platform ( VooV Meeting ). Taking place from 9 to 12am CST on 5 December 2020 ( 8 to 11pm on 4 December EST ), the discussion will bring together six fiber artists to share their perspectives on the history of fiber art, as well as details of their practice. Art professionals, students, and other interested audiences are all welcome to participate.
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