OPERA Video Art from China and the Netherlands
One of the highlights of the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing
was a duet performed by a western tenor and a classical Chinese opera singer.
The Video Exhibition Opera is a selection of Chinese and Dutch video makers,
who have in common that they all have worked in each others country.
They sing similar songs with different voices, intonations and nuances-about longing,
based on collective and personal memories. How to adapt to this crazy Global World.
How to keep your identity, values and traditions.
And ... which ones?Opera is a special program compiled for the Opera Video Meeting 2009 at Sea Palace Amsterdam
by SaE (Sino and Europe Cultural Interaction Foundation).
Participating Artists:
* Liang Shuo
* Wu Junyong
* Zeng Tu
* Tiong Ang
* Sonja Wyss
* Paul Donker Duyvis
* Jerome Symons
* Meiya Lin
* Marnix Goossens
* Zhifei Yang
Program / Short Descriptions
Zeng Tu (Chong Qin)
1- Life is drunk,death is a dream (00:6:00 min)
from last place to here
from last second to now
from last breath to this...
between last door and next one
there is my drunk life and my dreamy death
existing in continuing continuing is the only way
continuing to the end I exist by continuing...
2- No news is Good news (00:5:34 min)
seriously,no joke,
watch TV seriously,
cause people made it
very seriously.
Meiya Lin (Amsterdam / Xiamen)
1- The Times are Summoning 2007 (00:02:40 min / loop)
"The times are summoning" is personal memory from the artist's childhood.
By filming a bunch of kids who do the morning exercise every single morning.
Presenting a matter of fact: strikt rules and simply obey.
Conceptually it is a heavy issue to deal with.
Moreover there could only be one action, one thought after all.
But It happens to the generation nowadays, a completely different, unusually light reaction.
In the video the background is taken out – no specific context anymore-
and and a cut loose from any individual contact between the students.
Like in the video Lost Paradise the space lacks any reference to the
normal world and becomes a kind of Nowhereland
2- Lost Paradise 2007 (00:03:00: min / loop)
"Lost Paradise", the background sound is mainly the key word for this video
which is based on a very popular communist song in China.
Singing for the beautiful flower and the nice blowing spring wind.
The tone of the song is bright and communistic cheering up.
The general meaning is about how joyful to spend the time outside
in the perfect communist society, and how bright our future will be.
Basically the artist chooses most of the elements that are participating in the song for
the structure of this video. The background was transferred artificially to create
one non-existing environment in a nowhere space, a space of lost paradise.
Liang Shuo (Beijing)
This Movie contains 3 real life episodes of the life of a Young man: in his room waiting,
drinking, smoking, doing nothing and everything. Fifteen minutes precise slow motion acting
reduced by high speed play back to one minute normal movement. The second part is
a walk over the local market and the third a close up of a meditative exercise in making fire.
Total playing time 15 min.
1- Fifteen minutes behaviour 2007 (00:1:08 min)
2- Fifteen Colors (00:11:00 min)
3- Physical Material study (Lighter) 2006 (00:01:00 min)
Wu Junyong (Hangzhou)
Opera (Animation 4 parts)
Wu Junyong (HangZhou) makes hand drawn animations with simple contrasting colors. Red is the dominant element. He depicts complicated social and political behaviour in simple images.
Not a soft poetic view, but an ironical, raw, sharp and sometimes cynical analysis
of the people around him. The play with the red flags and banners is a direct political statement.
Jerome Symons (Arnhem NL)
The compact video's of Jerome Symons are often critical, always poetical.
With sober means he handles subjects like elections in Beirut, Indian workers in Dubai or,
like here, women's protest in Tehran and the expansion of China.
Above all the video's explore the endless space of a short timeline (that's life!).
1- Paradise Regained 2000 Guilin, China (00:01:56 min)
Exploring new territories outside the workers' paradise.
2- Silk Road 2007 Kuala Lumpur, Tehran (sound) (00:01:42)
Tribute to the brave ladies demonstrating on International Women’s Day.
Sonja Wyss (Amsterdam)
Die Krähe“ (the crow) 2002, 00:07:00 min
In „Die Krähe“ (the crow), Sonja Wyss lets a number of elements interact with each other.
Images of a screaming girl, black crows against a blue sky, and a snow-covered woodland
landscape are edited together in slow-motion. With this sequence of images, fragments of the song
of the same name (Die Krähe), from Schubert‘s Winterreise, can be heard. This music reinforces
the heavily fraught tone of doom and desire, the more so because the sound has been manipulated
and creaks and falters, as if the needle has got stuck on the record.
The atmosphere on this video is one of vagueness; suggestions of innocence, violence, love and death,
intermingle and are played off against each other. These are the snippets of a possible story,
but there is no beginning and no end. It is as if we are in the girl‘s own world,
where the laws of language and logic do not apply, but where, as in a dream,
images and feelings mix freely with each other.
What she really feels is not defined, and ultimately remains a secret.
2- Hoch-Zyte 2002 (00:06:00 min
"Hoch-Zyte" ("weddings", but also: "high times"), shows in a dreamlike setting three women
and their fantasies and yearnings about marriage. An 11 year old girl is knitting a weddingsavingsock
(Hochzeitssparstrumpf), and it is getting longer and longer, since a wedding is not in sight.
She is dreaming and waiting for her prince, but he is not coming, not yet. A woman, she could
be the girl's mother, dreams about her wedding long ago. A young maid, she could be just an illusion,
but could also be the bride, dances with a man in a wedding dress through some scenes.
Pictures of the conscious are mixed with symbols from the unconscious, parallel to reality
there is a dream world, illogical and absurd. The goat, dead crows, eggs, which are being bred
under a table, a dancing couple and a girl, who is lying on the ground like sleeping beauty:
these are symbols, which remind one of fairy tales and legends or ghostly dreams.
Actors: Janneke Albers, Andreas Scharfenberg, Lona Tulinski, Dieke de Vries
Tiong Ang (Amsterdam)
Two Women Drinking 2008 (00:01:03 min)
On the morning Pim Fortuyn was murdered in The Netherlands, I was having a cup of
coffee in my friend Roelandt’s kitchen in his apartment in Kunming. His wife Weili suffered
from eye problems and she was drinking some herbal medicine from a bowl.
My friend Diego took me to a rehearsal of an experimental theatre group in East London.
I watched all actors having a good time, also during lunch break, although they didn’t speak much.
Paul Donker Duyvis (Amsterdam)
The two video's form a diptych: an old serious woman slowly moving
and young girls full of laughter jumping around
1- Candles 2001 (Europe) (00:07:30 min)
An old generous woman, dressed in black, performs a daily ritual in a church.
She does it with devoted gestures and creates a happy atmosphere
She is always the only one in the church.
If she disappears this friendly space will vanish with her...
2- Guilin Girls 1996 (china)
A Story of an Encounter without Words about watching each other with curiosity.
The beautiful music comes from a cassete given to me by a traditional Singer living in Inner Mongolia.
I heard the woman singing and I was moved. She saw it and gave me a cassete with her songs.
A few days later these Guilin Children jumped upon me with a generous smile.
I decided o combine these two precious gifts to memorize these moments of communication without words.
Listning to them still makes me feel good and than I wonder what happened to the young girls
and the Mongolian woman singer.
Marnix Goossens (Amsterdam)
Airpacker 1999 (00:06:00 min)
A space fully packed with transparant balloons filled with air.
Watching the room through the window from outside give us a view of hundreds of frozen milky soap balls.
Spaces within a space.
Then suddenly a hand comes with a sharp pin and lets the air free...
Zhifei Yang (Shandong)
1- Untitled 2007 ( 00:04;20 min)
A repetition of similar shots of a sleeping girl dressed in white.
Zoomed in the camera shows an innocent young woman sleeping in a long white dress on a
clean white cushion and sheet. When the camera zoomes out the cushion is enormous...
and the background becomes more and more prosaic
2- Day dream 2007 (00:07;15 min)
A white bed in a dark space.
The sound around tells that we are outside in a garden or parc.
Slowly a white creature approaches through a long soft yellow tube and climes in the bed.
Loud noise of airplanes flying over...fadeout...black
Streaming Video Festival 2008
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