Wei Weng — Antimapping: An Experiment of Cultural Synesthesia
1 — 30 April 2009
Labour Day Closing Event: 1 May 2009
CPU:798 is delighted to present artist Wei Weng’s Antimapping Project in the Gallery through April.
Due to the nature of Antimapping, there will be no Opening, but the Gallery space will be open to the public from 1 to 30 April and a brief performance will take place on Labour Day, 1 May 2009.
ANTIMAPPING PROJECT
The concept of Antimapping has played a major part in Wei Weng’s output to date, representing a theoretical structure as well as a narrative theme for her works: Antimapping is a working through and against the structures within which she finds herself.
Antimapping—as a methodology—addresses the gallery space as an interaction between the artist and the immediate surroundings (the public, the environment) by physically affixing a series of installations over the negotiated one month period. The artist embodies the intentions of curatorial mapping by imposing physical negotiations to investigate the scope of Antimapping.
The exhibition begins with an empty space, and the process of installation becomes incorporated into the viewing. On Labour Day the Gallery will shut its doors following the performance, Closing Event. Until the Closing Event performance the artist will present and analyse her past and future works on-site, and even in consultation with the audience, simultaneously developing the theme of Antimapping throughout the Gallery space.
The exhibition is complimented by an artist-designed brochure, featuring a brief text by critic and curator David Spalding. Based on a limited understanding of the exhibition—a visit to the empty gallery, talks with the artist and gallerist—Spalding’s text may be used by the artist in her ongoing explorations of mapping and anti-mapping.
ART AS DAILY EVENT
Antimapping’s first manifestation is through the website antimapping.com (produced with the support of CPU:798), which presents a collection of the artist’s photographs. Her writings (digital audios) are presented simultaneously with these, and form an evocative space for reflection on the intangible workings between text and image.
The artist’s experiments span through text, paper cut-outs and drawings. The ephemeral quality of Antimapping taps into an intentional-theoretical universe populated by objects, fictional characters and events. According to the artist ‘the absurd drive of human syndromes’ run parallel to and presage reality. This population vary their forms dramatically as the viewer’s relationships with them change throughout the show. Real and fictional attributes are characterized in a tense relation. Curator becomes writer, writer becomes gallerist, artist becomes audience, creative writing becomes press release, and cut-outs become clothing. Antimapping forecasts the site of display by presenting a much more radical perception contrary to curatorial logic: in the universe conforming to the precepts of Antimapping, all roles bleed into one other.
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