CPU:798 supports the 3rd Nanjing Triennial
The 3rd Nanjing Triennial opened last week at the Nanjing Museum and CPU:798 is proud to be one of the supporters of this important event.
Through the inevitable chaos of the opening a very strong and engaging show shone out. The treatment of the overall curatorial theme, ‘Reflective Asia’ provided an interesting contrast to the other Triennials and Biennales opening around this time in China.
CPU:798’s artists Zheng Yunhan and Wang Yuyang are included in the show and have produced major new pieces especially.
Zheng Yunhan at Nanjing Triennial
Zheng Yunhan has produced a large-scale photographic piece from his new series of works, ‘The Sunflowers Project’. The works from this project record the planting of a landscape of sunflowers near his home town of JiXi, in Northern China. JiXi has been the subject of many of his previous works, but rather than focusing on the inhabitants' working lives within the landscape, this time Zheng is looking to the surroundings as a record of history and it's effects on the future generations living in the area, in particular the effects of the Japanese occupation of China during the Second World War.
The piece for Nanjing, entitled ‘Sunflower Plan’, is a digital composite image made up of several hundred photographs of the field of sunflowers, resulting in an ultra high-resolution image. This amount of data allows the image to be printed at large-scale, as can be seen in the installation photo below. Standing in front of the image, you feel you are becoming lost amongst the physicality of all the information presented to you.
Zheng Yunhan, Sunflower Plan, Digital photo installation, 2008
Wang Yuyang at Nanjing Triennial
In a darkened room Wang Yuyang has created the installation ‘Tonight I Will Consider Who I Am’. This follows on from ‘Moon-Landing Programme’ of 2006. The astronaut and his craft are now subject to some unknown disaster, set adrift in the cold and pitch black of space, the only source of light (and potential hope) being the intense flame of a welding torch, flickering amongst the wreckage.
On the CPU:798 website we have added two texts about this piece, the first by one of the curators of the Nanjing Triennial, Li Zhenhua, and the other by myself. These two responses to the piece reveal very different approaches to artworks and I hope they will serve as a suitable entrée into the piece.
Wang Yuyang, Tonight I Will Consider Who I Am, Installation, 2008