LAND SEA SKY revisiting spatiality in video art

revisiting spatiality in video art

Editor Kim Machan

Design Paul Bai

Publisher MAAP – Multimedia Art Asia Pacifc Inc. and OCAT Shanghai www.maap.org.au www.ocatshanghai.com

MAAP Board

Zane Trow (Chair), Dave Allen, Christopher Meakin, Paul O’Kane, Naomi Evans, Jeffery Sams

MAAP Staff

Kim Machan, Director Ashlee Sang, Exhibitions Assistant

Davina Li, Research Assistant, China Project Support

Eunju Kim, Korean Project Manager

Rue Young-Ah, Korea Research Support

Catalogue Translation, Alvin Li, Esther Zheng

Supporting staff at host venues are acknowledged on pp 93 – 94

© 2015 MAAP – Media Art Asia Pacifc Inc. and OCAT Shanghai. All rights reserved

Published November 2015 Brisbane

Printed in Shanghai

ISBN 978-1-921858-29-1

LANDSEASKY has been supported by: the Australian Government through the Australia Council and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, Queensland; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, part of the Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts; the Confucius Institute at Queensland University of Technology; the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Australia Korea Foundation; the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; the Italian Institute of Culture Shanghai; the Consulate General of Italy in Shanghai; Australian Consulate-General Guangzhou; Suhe Creek; !topia Talent Serving The Arts; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. LANDSEASKY has also been supported by project partners: OCAT Shanghai, Artsonje Center, Lee Hwaik Gallery, One and J Gallery, Opsis Art, Gallery IHN, Gallery Skape, National Art School Gallery, Griffth University Art Gallery, Griffth University Queensland College of Art, Guangdong Museum of Art.

Jan Dibbets The Netherlands

João Vasco Paiva Portugal / Hong Kong

Derek Kreckler Australia

Paul Bai Australia

Barbara Campbell Australia Zhang Peili China

Yang Zhenzhong China

Yeondoo Jung South Korea Kimsooja South Korea

curated by Kim Machan

Lauren Brincat Australia

Craig Walsh Australia

Wang Gongxin China

Wang Peng China Zhu Jia China

Heimo Zobernig Austria

Shilpa Gupta India Giovanni Ozzola Italy

Sim Cheol-Woong South Korea

Kim Machan — Introduction 9

Jan Dibbets 14

João Vasco Paiva 16

金曼 — 展览介绍 18

Kimsooja 22 Paul Bai 24

Ingrid Periz — Looking seaward, and elsewhwere 26 Zhu Jia 30

Derek Kreckler 32 英格丽特·佩雷兹 — 看向海，看向别处 34

Yeondoo Jung 36

Giovanni Ozzola 38

Andrew McNamara — A short sketch of spatial visual art 40

Yang Zhenzhong 44 Sim Cheol-Woong 46 安德鲁·麦克纳马拉 — 空间视觉艺术简要梗概 48

Zhang Peili 52 Shilpa Gupta 54

Paul Bai — A brief introduction to the concept of Third Spatial Position 56

Barbara Campbell 60 Lauren Brincat 62 白浦 — “第三空间位置”概念简介 64

Wang Peng 68 Craig Walsh 70

Judith Blackall — LANDSEASKY: National Art School Gallery, Sydney 72 Wang Gongxin 74

Heimo Zobernig 76 朱迪斯·布莱科尔 — 《海陆空》－

Installation view of Shilpa Gupta’s 100 Hand drawn Maps of India at Griffth University Art Gallery.

Introduction

LANDSEASKY: revisiting spatiality in video art travelled to eleven venues in three countries. Often referred to as a touring exhibition, it is better thought of as an exhibition plotted across multiple locations confgured and reconfgured in the prevailing space. The plasticity of the exhibition through site and context is a leading characteristic of the project, as are notions of landscape and its elements, video1 and its sculptural attributes, contemporary art and its spatial approaches. These concerns were omnipresent as the exhibition developed over an extended period beginning in 2012 with OCAT Shanghai as our foundation exhibition partner followed by Griffth University Art Gallery, Brisbane and a subsequent curatorial residency at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon. As the project progressed a new spatial array in Seoul was brokered with the generous support of Sunjung Kim, to consolidate a cluster of six venues in the Samcheongdong cultural district. Two other institutions joined adding to the diversity of exhibition spaces and audience dimensions – the National Art School Gallery in Sydney and fnally, the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou.

A collection of essays by participants and collaborators are offered here to refect upon the exhibition. The artistic directors of the non-commercial host venues Mariagrazia Constantino, Artistic Director of OCAT Shanghai; Sunjung Kim, Chief Curator of Art Sonje Center; Naomi Evans, Acting Director of Griffth University Art Gallery (2012 – 2015); and Judith Blackall, National Art School Curator and Gallery Manager contribute commentary from their city venue and to varying degrees, the supporting context. Andrew McNamara offers a very specifc historical examination of early spatial experiments in modernist art in Europe through his research evidencing Erich Buchholz’s spatial experiments in 1922 that are prescient to Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau project. Paul Bai extrapolates spatial theory recounting Henri Lefebvre’s and Edward Soja’s perspectives before offering a progressive proposition to apply to contemporary art’s critical reading. Ingrid Periz writes as an observer, responding to the exhibition with her refections and insights, and acknowledging Alain Corbin’s historiography notes where ‘the Western seaside is a postEnlightenment, and specifcally Romantic project, underwritten by the new science of geology and the history of Dutch landscape painting’.

The curatorial project that is LANDSEASKY: revisiting spatiality in video art, was born of a desire to revisit, clarify and extend video as a fne art tool, a medium to be understood and expressed fundamentally as a sculptural experience rather than a cinematic narrative. By approaching video as an ‘object in space’ the aim was to offer a moment to pause, to recalibrate and attune the medium before us. By reintroducing one of the earliest Conceptual Art moving image works by Jan Dibbets, the tone of the exhibition offered a focused aesthetic counterpoint, addressing artistic problems that are international, able to be approached cross-culturally, and one that made the actual experience of the works in-situ of paramount importance.

Imagining an exhibition in Shanghai, Seoul, Guangzhou, Sydney and Brisbane naturally created geographical parameters that informed the exhibition. Thinking about these disparate cities, what do we share and what lies between us? We stand on the land with the sky above, and the sea between us. The components of landscape – land, sea and sky, inform our fundamental understanding of spatial relationships and go back to the beginnings of visual representation expressed in all civilisations.

The limitation of the image – sky and land or sky and sea – restricts the visual elements to reveal the artists’ conceptual approaches with the intention of exposing a medium-specifc analysis of screen space as an image with both sculptural and conceptual attributes. The curatorial approach is to bring to the foreground evidence of artists working with an analysis of screen space that demonstrates a variety of sophisticated approaches. This project attends to reinstate video as a medium to focus and draw upon its history within fne arts, and challenge the illusionist elements that we readily consume in screen culture. Peter Weibel summarily describes the Media Art of the 1960’s and 1970’s as being ‘anti-illusion’ and Media Art of the 1990’s onward as having ‘illusion and allusion tendencies’.2 Weibel, also an artist himself using flm and video in the 70’s, goes on to describe the dangers of both anti-illusion and allusory art. To revisit and potentially transgress these dichotomies, LANDSEASKY turns away from popular screen media references to face the elemental and phenomenological.

While researching the notion of the horizon, the work in photography and flm by Dutch conceptual artist Jan Dibbets’ fgured prominently. His Perspective Corrections dating from 1968 transformed the way we

think about photography as an art medium. His calculating and conceptual approach to photography contributed to a particular aesthetic canon that is analytical, disciplined and reductive. In 1970 and 1971 Dibbets made a series of 16 and 32mm flms that employed the movement of the camera as an editing technique to record systematically smooth sweeping pans up and down, side to side and diagonal movements across land and seascapes. These works simultaneously force the illusion of space and the reality of space into one plane. While the moving image can be read as a depiction of a sea horizon by the recording of sea and sky, the rapid reorientation of the horizon line insists that this is an abstraction, a fat image that is projected through light and space.

Short excerpts of the Horizon – Sea series were available online at the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NMAI)3 website where I saw these works moving for the frst time. Through Jan Dibbets’ support and consultation with the Stedelijk Museum, all three works were made available for the exhibition and shown simultaneously for the frst time since they were originally created in 1971.4 This fact is a rich point to savour in the history of the moving image. Before the advent of data projectors assembling seven 16mm flm projectors in one space would have been a sizeable achievement in itself. It took just over forty-three years for Horizon – Sea series I, II and III to unite in an extended installation at the fve venues in an accumulated viewing period nearing 200 days.

Dibbets’ work sets an anchor point into the Conceptual Art movement and spatial experiments with the moving image of the early 70’s. From this launch point, the art works in LANDSEASKY turn to an investigation of video space, revealing a wide range of approaches. The art works are constructed more than edited in appearance. Each work, notwithstanding single channel projection works, is situated as an ‘image object’ within the gallery’s architecture grounding them within the site rather than onto it. In several instances this was achieved by forcing the projection image to meet the foor (João Vasco Paiva, Giovanni Ozzola, Derek Kreckler, Craig Walsh, Zhu Jia and in one venue Lauren Brincat) thereby constructing another curious horizon proposition – where the wall meets the foor

Three works in particular break into the gallery space through varied screen projection strategies. Heimo Zobernig’s Untitled Nr 23, 2005, single channel projection slightly exceeds the assembled six portable screens allowing the edges to slip past to the wall directly behind. Through the use of chroma keying, the real and the projection of the projection screens are further confused, resulting in waves of liminal and reconciled spatial experiences. Addressing a similar artistic problem, Paul Bai’s Untitled (Wind Charm), 2013, employs two white fat timber sheets that lean against the wall to catch part of an intense bluesky projection in which a spinning wind charm meditatively performs. His projection of the sky is in fact a recording of the sky, projected through the sky, albeit sky that is surrounded by gallery walls. The projection of the sky breaks open the interpretation of the space before us to question where the work, or for that matter the sky, begins or ends. In another work Littoral, 2014, by Derek Kreckler, the never repeated visual experience is articulated through a custom-made sliced paper screen that is randomly disrupted by an oscillating electric fan. The image of waves rolling to shore, spilling through the screen, extends the projection through the uncertain space between the wall and the screen creating a tentative and unstable territory.

Another sea horizon features in João Vasco Paiva’s work Forced Empathy, 2011. In contrast to Dibbets’ analogue image manipulation, he uses computer programming to switch the orientation of the horizon. By upturning the laws of nature between the sea and the inanimate buoy, the image proposes an impossible view where the ocean buoy remains steady and the sea compensates to take on the natural movement of the object. The juxtaposition of these works separated by forty years celebrates Dibbets’ prescient work that was often mistaken in this exhibition as a recent work using software flters to add the appearance of scratched flm footage.5

Kimsooja’s seascape in Bottari - Alfa Beach, 2001, is reminiscent of Dibbets’ camera orientation strategy by employing a 180-degree inversion. The low resolution of the digital image creates fattened areas with less detail, subsequently becoming painterly in effect. The ominous dark sea and clouds, reminiscent of romantic painting, are infected with the closing text revealing the signifcance of the site. The geographic and historic external information change the reading of this horizon to evoke the dimensions of modern globalisation that also resonate in the works of João Vasco Paiva, Sim Cheol-Woong, Lauren Brincat, and Craig Walsh. Each of these artists’ work refers to a specifc geographic location or city with histories that impact upon the reading of the site of the horizon. Whether that be in a sacred site for Australian Aboriginals in Craig Walsh’s work, the uses of the Tempelhof Airport in Berlin within Lauren Brincat’s work, or the reframe of imagery of the Han River in Seoul portrayed by Sim Cheol-Woong.

Unique approaches exploring sculptural qualities in the moving image were proposed in new works made for the exhibition. Wang Gongxin’s The Other Rule in Ping Pong, 2014, integrates two projections and a small monitor through perfect triangulated synchronisation. The unexpected and humorous volley between the three image surfaces, complete with precise audio cues, implies a small ball is travelling through three dimensions. While we understand the illusion, the artist forces our eyes to uncomfortably read within a void between the three positions. Another new work, Barbara Campbell’s close, close, 2014, introduced an interactive experience where the viewer’s body in space revealed a partial view of the landscape with corresponding audio zones. A motion sensor detected the changing distance between the viewer and the projection wall enabling the landscape ‘slither view’ to be tentatively explored up and down by moving back or forward in space.

Moving through space was also at issue in The Distance of a Kilometre, 2010, by Zhang Peili. The work sandwiched the viewer between two large projections that revealed the one kilometre journey, walked in real time, from opposing ends of a street. As the two camera views approach a particular area, the image increasingly degrades as electronic interference increases and then subsides to reinstate it agian. Standing between the two screens, the illusion of distance is created and destroyed through the documentation of the walk and the subsequent fat abstraction of the digitally degraded image.

With hundreds of square meters to consider as exhibition space, Zhu Jia chose to create a work for this exhibition that was small and discreet. It’s beyond my control, 2014, projects a recording of a hand delineating a corner with a pencil. The image in 1:1 scale was forced back in a corner of the gallery demonstrating an irreconcilable tension between the representation and actual space. While Dibbets forced the real and the abstract into two dimensions, Zhu Jia chose to consider the problem in three dimensions. The contradiction was well exposed in the projection that resulted not in a rectangle, but an irregular heptagon splayed across the walls and foor. Lauren Brincat also used the juxtaposition of projection and geometry in This Time Tomorrow Tempelhof, 2012 in which a ceiling high timber isosceles triangle supported the rectangular projection screen. The triangular support that referenced the vanishing point in the video, acted as an elemental monument to perspective in actual space.

Moving through the many exhibition venues, some works found quite perfect ready-made situations to be installed such as Yang Zhenzhong’s Passage, 2012. The work was projected on the landing of the main entry staircase in the Guangdong Museum of Art where the architectural lines dramatically emphasised single point perspective adding to the dizzying effect of the camera’s movement forward through space. Yeondoo Jung’s screen monitor diptych Handmade Memories - On the Dividing Line Between Body and Soul, 2008, also explored single point perspective in a complex theatrical construction of space, an illusion built through layers of projection and mixed media, paired with personal commentary

Wang Peng’s screen monitors in his triptych Beyond, 2014 invokes a quite different approach to space where the concept of distance is poetically used as the creator of space: distance between a man and a woman; distance between the land and the sky; distance between seeing and not seeing. Giovanni Ozzola’s Garage - sometimes you can see much more, 2009-2011, is another visually poetic and sculptural work that plays with light, seeing and not seeing, to heighten and transform our spatial awareness. A garage door methodically rolls up to slowly reveal a sparkling bright ocean horizon that flls the gallery space with an expansive view. The door’s inevitable descent transforms the gallery to semi darkness and the reality being an unoccupied space. It was the moments of transition and the uncertainty of that experience that urged the viewer to look harder and stay longer.

The association of body and awareness of scale were evident qualities in Shilpa Gupta’s 100 Hand Drawn Maps of India, 2007-2008. Gupta utilised a small custom-built table replicating the original drawings’ size to capture the down projection. The experience of peering onto the small glowing tabletop with the steady fow of fade-in fade-out hand drawn maps, conjured the one hundred people and their interpretations of constructed territorial space. The work deftly alerts us to the conceptual foundation of space, that being, an artifcially constructed concept that does not exist independently or universally

LANDSEASKY: revisiting spatiality in video art was an extraordinary opportunity to bring together a collection of works that emphasised and indeed insisted, the phenomenological and sculptural experience was of paramount importance to critically explore video as a fne art medium rather than a cinematic narrative that could be delivered through any number of interchangeable screen sizes and formats. The brief descriptions of the artists’ works offered here demonstrate the key concerns of the project. However, the brevity inevitably restricts more complex commentary on the individual works and also on the ways the

works were presented, venue-by-venue, in different countries and galleries. The opportunity to present this exhibition in fve cities, in so many different situations and confgurations, was not only a satisfying challenge it was an immense pleasure that would not have been possible without the strength of our partners.

It would not be complete without speaking of the many additional activities that complemented the exhibition and the excellent exhibition support, press conferences, television and media coverage, artists’ interviews and hospitality shown by our hosts at OCAT Shanghai, Art Sonje Center and SAMUSO, The Guangdong Museum of Art, Griffth University Art Gallery, and the National Art School Gallery. Thanks also to the SIVA – Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, Fudan University which hosted the LANDSEASKY symposium, as well as the vast network of artists and galleries in Seoul that contributed and explored many possibilities! An extensive page of thanks is included in this publication to name many other people that contributed to the depth and quality of this project.

It was a privilege to work with the artists and I thank them all sincerely for their artistic contributions, long discussions, suggestions, good humour and support that was so generously offered over the extended three years of development and presentation.

Kim Machan Artistic Director/Curator of LANDSEASKY exhibition

Notes:

1. ‘Video’ and ‘media art’ are terms used in this essay to refer to moving image and screen-based technologies in general. Video was chosen to evoke the origin of the moving image in contemporary art.

2. Peter Weibel, ‘A Genealogy of Media Art’, in Fan Dian and Zhang Ga eds, Synthetic Times,. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 112-116.

3. Due to government funding cuts the NMAI closed. The web site no longer supports the hundreds of artist’s videos that were once available to preview.

4. Horizon II – Sea (3 channel flm projection) was shown in the solo exhibition ‘Jan Dibbets’, curated by Rudi Fuchs at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands in November 1971.

5. One of the ambitions of this exhibition was to attune viewers to read the medium before them. Dibbets’ work acted as an important reminder of the frst experiments in moving image produced and the sign post back to analyse what we see.

Below: workers installing Heimo Zobernig’s Untitled Nr.23 at OCAT Shanghai. 下图：工作人员在OCAT上海馆安装奥地利艺术家 黑默·佐伯尼格的作品《无题–第23号》。

Horizon II – Sea

Horizon III – Sea

Jan Dibbets

Horizon I – Sea, 2 channel video projection, colour, no sound, 4’:39”/ 4’:39”, 1971

Horizon II – Sea, 3 channel video projection, colour, no sound, 0’:20”/ 0’:29”/0’:7”, 1971

Horizon III – Sea, 2 channel video projection, colour, no sound, 3’:25”/ 3’:26”, 1971

Jan Dibbets (b.1941, Netherlands) was one of the early pioneers to use the camera as a contemporary art tool. He has worked across photography, flm and video, but is best known for his photographic works that transform natural landscapes into geometric abstractions through shifts of angle and perspective. These seminal works are exemplary of Dibbet’s early moving image experiments, and demonstrate three approaches to framing the sea to produce different spatial effects. This is a rare opportunity to see the complete series presented in one space to create a dynamic shifting portrayal of the horizon abstracted by the camera’s point of view. Each work in the Horizon series tips and alters the camera’s frame so that the horizon line dissects the screen and in doing so both disrupts the illusion of realism of the video and fattens the pictorial space denying the illusion of depth.

João Vasco Paiva

Forced Empathy, single channel video, no sound, 7’:29”, 2011

João Vasco Paiva (b.1979, Portugal) has been based in Hong Kong since 2006. Using installation, video, sculpture and bi–dimensional objects, his practice challenges representation and medium specifcity. In Forced Empathy (2011) the artist captures a buoy foating in a Hong Kong seascape. However, through computer editing, Paiva disciplines the sea, anchoring the buoy in the centre of the frame and subsequently forcing the surrounding seascape to move in compensation. The point of view has remained intact though the behaviour of the elements that construct space has essential attributes re-assigned. The unnatural movement is unsettling though the environmental order is modifed in a way that is not diffcult to accept. 《强制移情》，单屏录像, 7分29秒, 2011 周奥（出生于1979年，葡萄牙）自2006年以来一直生活工作于香港。他的创作以装置，影像，雕塑 和平面物体为主，对媒介特性和艺术表现进行挑战。在《强制移情》（2011年）中，艺术家捕捉了 浮标漂浮在香港的海景。然而，通过电脑编辑，艺术家控制了海洋，把浮标固定在画面中心，然后 让浮标周围的海景相对运动起来。视点不变，但空间构建元素的基本属性得到了重新分配。虽然不 自然的运动还是让人感到不安，但环境秩序的改变方式并不让人难以接受。

Above: stills of Forced Empathy

Left: installation view of Forced Empathy at National Art School Gallery.

Kimsooja

Bottari – Alfa Beach, single channel video, no sound, 6’:18”, 2001

Kimsooja (b.1957, Korea) works in video, installation, sculpture and performance practices. Kimsooja’s work is highly meditative, achieved through the mindful repetition of actions, imagery and materials drawn from the everyday. The video work Bottari – Alfa Beach (2001) examines the notorious Nigerian beach of the work’s title, a site used to ship slaves off the continent, bound for colonial destinations around the globe. The artist has described the horizon she saw on Alpha Beach as ‘the saddest and most shocking line I’ve ever seen’. The inverted horizon, rather than the trope of optimism or romance, is now uncharacteristically negative and an enduring link to the site’s horrifc past. The infusion of history to an otherwise anonymous view into space dramatically expands our perception and conceptually animates the landscape.

Above: installation view of Bottari – Alfa Beach at the National Art School Gallery.

Paul Bai 白浦

Untitled (Wind Charm), single channel video projection, timber, audio, 10’:00”, 2013

Paul Bai (b.1968, China) proposes a spiralling wind charm as an image to contemplate and reconcile. What is the reality of its orientation? Is it spiralling left or right, up or down? As the split projection suggests a physical orientation of the spatial context, the image that is separated by two leaning wall panels also introduces the projection space into the physical space of the gallery. To this extent, the blue sky, the gap between the panels, and the wall panels’ casually leaning position all demonstrate a spatial status that is temporal, indeterminate and liminal, and doesn’t adhere to the conventional binary tensions, or as the artist would call it – the Third Spatial Position.

Looking seawards and elsewhere

Ingrid Periz

I saw LANDSEASKY on a wet and blustery winter’s day in August 2014, when the exhibition was installed at the National Art School Gallery in Sydney. Housed in the old Darlinghust Gaol, the gallery is part of a campus clad in Sydney sandstone, or yellowblock, a Triassic period sedimentary stone that undergirds the entire Sydney area as well as marking the city’s colonial architecture. Inside the gallery however, all markers of location and of history large and small, seemed temporarily abandoned. As orchestrated by curator Kim Machan in the gallery’s large upstairs space the show’s confuence of video images of waves and water, shifting shorelines, and tilted or reversed horizon lines marked out a site where orientations changed and few points appeared fxed. The one fxed point, digitally produced in João Vasco Paiva’s Forced Empathy of a buoy resolutely stationary in Hong Kong waterways served to heighten, by contrast, this illusion of disequilibrium.

LANDSEASKY has appeared in different iterations with an occasionally variable roster of artists. In addition to Sydney the exhibition traveled to Shanghai, Brisbane, Guangzhou, and Seoul, where it was hosted across six venues. As several of the texts gathered here point out, each location produced its own effect. Sunjung Kim likens the experience in Seoul of strolling from one venue to another to a promenade in a scroll painting. Judith Blackall, National Art School Gallery manager and curator, recalled in conversation that some students regularly spent their lunch hours in front of favourite works and Naomi Evans, writing of the two venues hosting the exhibition in Brisbane notes the potency of interstitial states alluded to in both the title and a number of the works.

Central to any experience of the exhibition was Jan Dibbets’ Horizon – Sea (1971) Series I, II and III, a work comprising seven projections, shown simultaneously for the frst time in the exhibition. Installed as a three-part suite of paired, tripled, and fnally paired projections, the work shows a series of maritime horizons, aligned vertically, horizontally and diagonally. In the frst pair, vertical waves roll horizontally into the center of the screen; in the second triptych, horizontal waves roll vertically to the bottom of the screen (much as they appear to do at the beach); and in the fnal pair, diagonal waves on left and right roll into the center diagonally. Complicating this is Dibbets’ use of a pivoting camera. Thus, the vertical horizon lines of the frst projected pair shift horizontally, the horizontal horizon lines of the centre group shift vertically, and the diagonal horizontal lines of the last projected pair move diagonally. While the camera movement is uniform within any single one of the seven projected “views,” the speed of movement varies from view to view.

Confronting the work of course, any spectator probably intuits Dibbets’ procedure in less time than it would take to read the above description; nevertheless, one of the initial pleasures of the work is the mental recreation of this process. (1) Dibbets’ work arrests, in large part because the sideways and oblique movements of the horizon line disturbs the assumed verticality of the viewing body. To this extent the work is anti-illusionistic; the screen space is fattened, treated in the frst and last diptychs as a surface for a series of what look like cinematic wipes. Horizon – Sea extends the investigation into the nature of perception and representation that Dibbets initiated in his Perspective Corrections, begun in 1968. Here he photographed a series of lawns, studio foors and walls onto which a single trapezoidal shape had been drawn. The perspective of the camera confronting the surface made this shape look like a square in the resulting photographs. In subsequent series Dibbets collaged together photographed land- and seascapes to produce a uniform horizon line, showing how the latter is both a structuring principle of photographic representation as well as a subjective element in viewing.

Dibbets has called the horizon a straight line in three dimensions. Horizon – Sea brackets the horizontal in the experience of the horizon: the seas run sideways, the breaker line appears to bounce up and down. That this is not a discomfting viewing experience may be due to the Newman-esque zips in each of the work’s three sections, the interstitial vertical lines marking where the edge of each image meets the next. (2) These zips provide a vertical orientation point. In Sydney,Horizon – Sea was fanked by Derek Kreckler’s Littoral (2014) which projected footage of breaking waves onto a regularly incised screen, the resulting curtain of strips nudged gently by an oscillating fan placed behind it. At times the swells of airborne strips echoed the waves’ breaks and swells, their gently regular unpredictability undoing the projected image on the fapping screen to reveal a second, intact one directly behind. A little joke on illusionism with its homely apparatus of fan and strip curtain, Littoral’s apparent simplicity recalled the appeal of early cinema’s plethora of images of waves and seashores.

Machan’s idea of a universal “looking to the shoreline” was given very specifc infections in work by Shilpa Gupta and Kimsooja, installed in Sydney with the work by Dibbets, Kreckler and Vasco Paiva. Gupta’s 100 Hand drawn maps of India (2007–08) shows the coastline of the Indian sub-continent drawn and redrawn by 100 adults, the boundaries of the country changing, its coastline in its particularities almost as elastic as its eastern and western-most boundaries. Shorelines are borders too, marking cartographic boundaries, and with them constructs of national identities. Gupta’s work suggests both the fantasmatic dimension of this ideological operation as well as its bloody working out in imperial and post-imperial history. Kimsooja’s Bottari—Alfa Beach (2001) is an inverted view of the eponymous Nigerian beach from where slaves were shipped. As sombre in its historical reference as 100 Hand Drawn Maps of India, the work’s reference remains invisible. The horizon line produced by the inversion of sea and sky yields nothing now except perhaps a kind of abyssal space of horror. (3)

Dibbets’ “straight line in three dimensions” operates in historical time as well as space, as Gupta and Kimsooja make plain. Indeed the initial placelessness of that large Sydney room, it might be argued, was the result of specifc aesthetic strategies rather than any universal meaning of the horizon line, particularly the maritime one. As Alain Corbin argues in The Lure of the Sea: The discovery of the seaside 1750–1840, the shoreline and with it the sea has a history of meanings, produced through a range of aesthetic and discursive practices. (4) Corbin shows how the Western seaside is a post-Enlightenment, and specifcally Romantic project, underwritten as well by the new science of geology and the history of Dutch landscape painting. In his account the meanings accruing to the practice of looking to the sea–girt horizon are inseparable from this web of discursive and aesthetic representations. Thus, when we speak now of the spaces of LANDSEASKY, of the different forms of spatiality that are “revisited” in and by the works selected, as Paul Bai and Andrew McNamara’s deeply suggestive essays make clear, we do so through the languages of modernist aesthetic practice. (5)

Outlining what he calls the Third Spatial Position, an “other than” to the familiar binary of inside/outside, Bai alludes to the phenomenologically–infected thrust of Minimalism’s interest in the spatiality of the viewer. He writes of minimalism making the ‘spatial turn’ to ‘connect artwork to its surrounding space,’ a project undertaken in a different register by Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau as McNamara recounts in his history of spatial art and early modernism. McNamara writes of Schwitters’ debt to artist Erich Buchholz who planned a spatial art of mobile screens and imagined the possibility of walk-in pictures. That these goals might be realized in “immersive” technologies, let alone the more prosaic bounds of a video installation, seems in this instance beside the point; as McNamara notes, a perennial theme of spatial art was movement.

Bai asks: What would be the precondition of spatial construction, the “no space” that exists, unmarked by up/down, left/right, inside/outside, before space? Perhaps amniotic space offers a model for this kind of ur-space, a space also experienced from within the movements of the sea. Corbin hints as much when glossing Novalis’ Disciples at Saïs. He writes of diving into the sea and “experiencing the coenesthetic harmony that exists between the movements of the sea and those of the original waters carried within the human body.” (6)

Untitled (Wind Charm) (2013), Bai’s installation in LANDSEASKY, suggests a different way of fguring this space. Instead of a sensory combination, the work proposes an analysis of sensory terms in Bai’s deceptively simple doubled projection of a spiraling wind chime. The chime’s movement is ambiguous; structured like a screw, it is diffcult to establish whether it moves up/down or left/right, an effect that helps destabilize a viewer’s orientation in front of the work. In addition to this suspension of the viewer’s compass bearings, Bai de-realizes the illusion of the screen surface which leans against the wall behind it. (Leaning is itself a minimalist trope, a way of intruding into the viewing space so that space becomes experiential, while emphasizing the weighted materiality of the viewed surface.) In spite of these interventions, the apparent regularity of the chime’s turn makes this a meditative work that invites a lengthy, stilled contemplation.

By way of contrast Barbara Campbell’s interactive close, close (2014) retains the shoreline orientation, showing footage of migratory shorebirds in their habitat, and demands activation by the viewer whose movement to and from the screen controls the aperture of a horizontal slice of the image which moves up and down the screen. Up close to the screen, this activation leaves the viewer ‘submerged’, a sensation cued as well by sound. Campbell plays on the blinds used by bird watchers and hunters to hide themselves while observing their quarry. Inverting this scenario by making the viewer activate the unfolding scene, the work withholds any complete perceptual feld, subtly undoing the illusion of spectatorial agency

Like close, close, Wang Gongxin’s The Other Rule in Ping Pong (2014) creates an illusory space, created

by the peregrinations of a ping pong ball which is spat, ricochets, and fnally swatted at over three screens set up in a triangular arrangement. The ball moves unpredictably; a viewer might want to duck whenoccupying the same space as its trajectory. Eschewing any reference to a vertical or horizontal horizon line, the work illustrates precisely Dibbets’ dictum that the horizon exists in three dimensions, “activated” here by synchronized video legerdemain. Zhu Jia’s It’s beyond my control (2014) similarly addressed video’s capacity to confgure spatiality. Positioned in a corner, the work shows a hand holding a pencil outlining the edges of the corner by marking the junctions of wall and foor. In Sydney the projection was almost exactly co-extensive with the corner into which it was projected, the hand’s action doubly demarcating illusionistic and real space and undoing their difference.

LANDSEASKY offered no single conception of spatiality in its concatenation of moving images designed to be addressed by moving bodies. That “sea between us,” in Machan’s words, is multiple and if it offers the possibility of a coenesthetic Romantic immersiveness, it is equally the ground for formal invention, refexivity, and historical reckoning.

Notes:

1. Dibbets is most frequently called a conceptual artist, but this work complicates that designation. Writing of the earliest phase of Postminimalism, a term he coined, Robert Pincus-Witten notes, “the virtual content of the art became that of the spectator’s intellectual re-creation of the actions used by the artist to realize the work in the frst place.” PincusWitten calls this frst phase, which peaked in the United States 1968-70, “painterly.” (Dibbets trained as a painter.) Robert Pincus-Witten, “Introduction”, Postminimalism into Maximalism: American Art, 1966-1986, (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), p.11.

2. Barnett Newman used thin vertical strips of colour to separate large areas of colour, giving his mature paintings spatial defnition and unity. Additionally, according to Yves-Alain Bois, the zip also served as a command to the beholder to “stand here [with the zip] ...and you will know exactly where you are.” Bois adds that Newman’s greatest wish was to give the beholder a sense of place. See Yves-Alain Bois, “Newman’s Laterality”, in Melissa Ho ed., Reconsidering Barnett Newman: A Symposium at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002), p.33.

3. Other photographers producing work that documents sites of historical atrocities where all markers of the event have disappeared include Ricky Maynard and Tomoko Yoneda. Kimsooja’s inversion however is singular. “Horror” is only one of several possible responses.

4. Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The discovery of the seaside 1750-1840, Jocelyn Phelps trans., (London: Penguin, 1994).

5. Thus Dibbets’ “painterly” (in Pincus-Witten’s terms) concerns with horizontality and the picture plane might usefully be discussed with reference to Mondrian’s versions of Pier and Ocean (1914/1915).

6. Corbin, op. cit., p.178. Coenaesthesia can be defned as the general sense or feeling of existence that arises from the sum of bodily impressions.

Zhu Jia 朱加

It’s beyond my control, 2–channel synchronised video installation, sound, 10’:00”, 2014

Zhu Jia (b.1963 China) is a frst generation Chinese video artist with a practice dating from the early 1990’s. He predominantly works in moving image and photography where his early video work explored urban phenomena revealing an analytic approach to imagined and real space. The creation and articulation of space through drawing is fundamental – through video the artist generously shares the process of contemplating the relationship of drawing and video, merging with architectural space. Confating and confounding several visual planes, Zhu Jia offers his work to cross-examine his observations and artistic proposition. The work, through its medium and sparse aesthetic, sets up a heightened awareness of representational and real space.

Derek Kreckler

Derek Kreckler (b.1952, Australia) works in performance, video, sound and photography. The littoral zone is an environmental term that describes the space between the shore and the water. Littoral zones are understood as abundant spaces, essential to much plant, animal and marine life. This installation employs the word ‘Littoral’ both literally and metaphorically to acknowledge the rich space of potential between viewer and artwork. In Littoral, waves roll toward an unseen coastline. A fan causes the sliced projection screen to move and fragments the work to create multiple silhouettes. Littoral seeks to create an immersive experience for the viewer using low-f technologies that nonetheless evoke the immensity of sea and sky.

Littoral, single channel video installation, olefn fbre screen, electric fan, no sound, dimensions variable, 2014

Yeondoo Jung

Handmade Memories – On the Dividing Line between Body & Soul, dual channel HD video on wall-mounted displays, audio, 9’:16”, 2008

Yeondoo Jung (b. 1969, Korea) is well known for his constructed photographs and videos that interpret and represent the recollections of others. His still and moving images capture elaborate hand-made sets that reconstruct memories of subjects, events and scenery in real-time. This diptych video work forms part of the Handmade Memories series. In one screen, an elderly man recounts a personal story set around a train journey. In the other, a projection of pre-recorded video footage of a train track is set into a staged environment. We become aware of several spatial layers in the assembly of imagery and narration.

installation view of Handmade Memories – On the Dividing Line between Body & Soul. Right: still of Handmade Memories – On the Dividing Line between Body & Soul.

Garage - sometimes you can see much more, single channel video projection, audio, 2009 – 2011

Giovanni Ozzola (b.1982, Italy) works primarily in video and installation. Central to Ozzola’s practice is the exploration of three-dimensional space and its relationship to light. The senses sharpen in the dark and are then overwhelmed by the strong light of a wider space. A tribute to Edward Hopper’s “Rooms by the Sea”, the rattling, mechanical movement of the rolling door shutter clashes with the opening of the horizon onto the sea. The shutter operates as a diaphragm between two dimensions.The video sequence of a roller door rising and falling dramatically alters the viewers’ perception of the room the work is installed within.

Right: installation view of Garage - sometimes you can see much more at OCAT Shanghai. 右图：《车库 — 有时你会看到更多》在OCAT上海馆的装置现场。

Giovanni Ozzola

A short sketch of spatial visual art

Andrew McNamara

The story of spatial art is the alternative history explaining what occurred within the visual arts (and what happened to it) over the course of the twentieth century. Its legacy informs many of the practices found in the LANDSEASKY exhibition; we could not comprehend these practices without understanding this history. Nonetheless, this legacy of spatial visual art is understood only in a sporadic way as a set of disparate, individual or idiosyncratic practices that lack a coherent framework or narrative underpinning its history. In some ways, this is apt. The history of spatial visual art in the twentieth century is far from continuous, it is not a movement, and its history fractured, but it explains the pathways from modernism to contemporary art better than the standard history that concentrates on modernist painting as an exclusive sphere of self-contained possibility.

1. 1922/23

In 1923, Kurt Schwitters knocked on the door of Herkulesufer 15, Berlin. Finding no one home, Schwitters modifed one of Erich Buchholz’s business cards to let him know he had stopped by. What would Schwitters have found behind the door of that apartment if Buchholz had been at home to open it?

2. 1922/1972

In 1972, in an obituary for Buchholz in Berlin newspaper, Tagesspiegel, Heinz Ohff made a remarkable claim about that very apartment Schwitters had visited almost half a century earlier. ‘In 1922,’ Ohff declared, Buchholz had ‘remodeled his studio fat at Herkulesufer 15 into the frst “environment,” the frst abstractly designed three-dimensional space in art history.’ (I) Chiming in, Eberhard Roters wrote that Buchholz was the frst to create a new prototype in art: “the frst ‘walk-in picture.’ ” (II)

A walk-in picture? At the time, there was no set terminology for such an innovation in art, but the idea is clear: it was three-dimensional and encapsulated the space around the viewer, who entered the work like entering a room. In other words, Buchholz could claim a signifcant innovation in modernist art practice, today we might say he created the frst installation piece, or—given it took up his entire Berlin apartment— he took abstract art into the three-dimensional realm.

3. 1948/1923

Well after Buchholz’s innovation in post-World War One Berlin, the American critic Clement Greenberg noted an interesting feature of emerging abstract art: its reversibility. In a review of an exhibition of Mordecai Ardon’s art, Greenberg detects this aspect of abstract art much later (1948) in regard to artwork that was far less abstract at the time:

… the most important threads in contemporary painting now converge: the even, all over, ‘polyphonic’ picture in which every square inch is rendered with equal emphasis … Texture and surface carry everything, and the picture becomes reversible … with beginning, middle, and end made interchangeable. (III)

Already reversibility was a key feature of the impetus behind the abstract works of El Lissitzky. (IV) Like Mordecai Ardon (Max Bronstein), the Russian artist originally had an artistic ambition founded in Jewish mysticism, but emerged to focus on radical spatial, abstract goals. In 1923, Lissitzky was one of four artists—that originally included Buchholz—commissioned to create an abstract room for the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in late 1923. The idea was to display whole rooms transformed by these new abstract, three-dimensional formulations in which the eye was led around the room. Works of visual art were now experienced by entering them; of course, ‘beginning, middle, and end’ had become interchangeable, if not to some extent evaporated.

Only Lissitzky’s Proun Room received funding and was realized. Buchholz missed out. The economy was a mess, the politics tumultuous and violent, and innovations in art were unheralded. Lissitzky’s Proun Room would eventually be regarded as a landmark of modernist art. It was perhaps the most directed because it did try to lead the viewer on a kind of directed visual journey along a sequence of walls, as if to suggest along the way that one could experience the course of painting into complete abstraction.

4. 1923

And Schwitters? We know he began to create assemblages in 1923 that would soon acquire a larger

scale, and also become an installation of sorts, initially inhabiting a portion of a room, then steadily consuming it, and fnally taking over his house in Hanover. But that was all to come: the resulting work, the Merzbau, or Cathedral of Erotic Misery, would eventually be retrieved for art history as a modernist classic, even though destroyed by allied bombing during World War Two and even though it was largely inassimilable to its most conventional accounts of abstract art. Another sort of modernism was brewing and the Merzbau would play an important role.

5. 1970

Schwitters readily acknowledged the precedent of Buchholz’s apartment, but Lissitzky was more reticent. Buchholz was left to lament the consequences of art-historical fate. Buchholz wrote often. One of the last pieces before his death was a 1970 treatise condemning art history, its fabrications, its inaccuracies and, most of all, for leaving him out of the picture:

Art history is nothing but a forgery; there are only differences of degree between deliberate interpretation—spawned by some fctional system of aesthetics—and interpretation that is inadequately informed. (IV)

6. Spatial art history

Could we say something similar in regard to the whole, diminished history of spatial art? Are we inadequately informed about its history—and not just the particular case of Buchholz?

The story of spatial art is the alternative history explaining what occurred within the visual arts (and what happened to it) over the course of the twentieth century. Its legacy informs many of the practices found in the LANDSEASKY exhibition; we could not comprehend these practices without understanding this history. Nonetheless, this legacy of spatial visual art is understood only in a sporadic way as a set of disparate, individual or idiosyncratic practices that lack a coherent framework or narrative underpinning its history. In some ways, this is apt. The history of spatial visual art in the twentieth century is far from continuous, it is not a movement, and its history fractured, but it explains the pathways from modernism to contemporary art better than the standard history that concentrates on modernist painting as an exclusive sphere of self-contained possibility.

7. 1922/1969

By the 1960s, many of the practices and artworks just mentioned were being rediscovered after the tumult of two world wars, the Great Depression, the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and atomic weapons. Recreations of Schwitters, Buchholz and Lissitzky were being constructed; the coloured environments of de Stijl were being recovered, all after fading from art-historical memory.

Buchholz wrote an article in 1969 to describe what he had created in his small apartment nearly half a century earlier. By then, the same section of Berlin he had lived in no longer existed in the same way. His article, “A Coloured Room, 1922,” explained what he had created back in 1922. Buchholz noted the interchange between colour and relief. The wall surfaces that remained smooth after the removal of a heavy brownish, foral wallpaper were painted light blue, the rough surfaces a vaguely complementary green. The wooden foor and austere furniture were painted grey; the door and window frame white; the relief elements and glass ceiling construction black and gold. The focus was on surfaces and the visual movement around the room.

Buchholz’s studio was simultaneously a space of discourse. He notes the many visitors to see what he had constructed and the debates and intense discussions over topics, such as kinetic art, spatial vibrations in the eye of the viewer, physiology of the eye, and physics.

These spatial practices, though often highly abstract, respond to issues within the visual arts and the general “cultural climate” one hundred years ago. For the artists, they were themes that could no longer be contained within the boundary of picture plane. Instead the practices responded to a sense that the world had transformed in ways that eluded or confronted conventional perception.

8. Sputnik and art, 1958

Over a decade earlier, Buchholz had written another essay on spatial art and its curious fate. On the 4th October 1957, the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik into space. For Buchholz, it was a confrmation of possibilities heralded by the avant-garde so many decades earlier. He did not mention that the Soviet Union had also successfully tested the world’s frst intercontinental ballistic missile earlier in August the same year. His main point was that by 1958 everybody had forgotten Malevich and his crucial importance for spatial art. Responding to Sputnik and Malevich, Buchholz declared that the pencil point on the page

should not be regarded as a point that leads to a line, but an accumulation on a surface that is vertical and suggests taking off from the page or surface and into space. That same year, 1958, the frst post-war exhibition of Malevich’s art was held in Braunschweig, Germany.

By the 1960s, Buchholz had begun to return to the theme of foating screens. In 1924, he had sketched designs for mobile screens in a public setting as part of an array of architectural projects he devised in the mid-1920s. In 1965, he created a mobile, foating installation, documentation b-3, which featured screens similar in design to the ceiling of the Herkulesufer apartment. These screens did not foat off into space but instead moved independently of the artist, courtesy of small machinery, in a shuffing sequence as if demonstrating kinetic spatial art—the topic of the discussions back in 1922. Movement was a perennial theme of spatial art.

9. Vilem Flusser, “Line and Surface”, 1973 (V)

A few years later in Brazil, Vilem Flusser ruminated on similar themes to Buchholz, specifcally the spatial differences between lines and surfaces. Flusser’s ruminations were prompted by the technological transformations that impacted upon our perceptual awareness.

The line, Flusser suggests, is indicative of alphabetical writing. Its primary mode is linear or chronological; it suggests a sequence—from left to right—and that ‘one aims at getting somewhere.’ (23) For this reason, Flusser asserts that lines are distinctive of offcial discourse as well as the emblem of historical thinking. The focus is always on ‘getting somewhere.’ Of course, the directional impulse is assumed.

‘Until recently,’ Flusser notes, ‘offcial Western thought has expressed itself much more in lines than written surfaces.’ (25) So what happens with surfaces? Flusser thought that surfaces had begun to proliferate long before personal computers. Surfaces exert an all over effect and elicit a random, wandering eye. The initial response is one of synthesis followed by analysis. This is because the surface is categorically different to the line with its unidirectional movement, say from left to right. Yet, the transformation is not a linear one from line to surfaces.

Film, for instance, is hybrid. According to Flusser, flm ought to be considered a composite of surface— flms, he declares, are visually surfaces, but spatial to the ear (25)—and of a line due to their narrative structure, which follows a text. (24) One of the visitors to Buchholz’s apartment was Viking Eggeling and one could typify his ambition as promoting flm as pure surface, even though the movement of lines govern the abstraction of his Diagonal Symphony (1924). Eggling sought to escape the hybrid quality of flm, while utilizing both the linear and surface dimensions of the medium.

Flusser declares that we still “read” flm and television ‘as if they were written lines’, thus failing to ‘grasp their inherent surface quality.’ (25) Yet, somewhat echoing Greenberg on abstract painting, he observes that such media are ‘partially reversible’, thus allowing the possibility of ‘the reader to control and manipulate the sequence of pictures.’ (25) In more utopian fourishes (or do his observations merely anticipate a coming digital media transformation?), Flusser extends this insight to suggest that these potential transformations ‘imply a radically new meaning of the term historical freedom.’ (25) Flusser may project too much in his ruminations about the perceptual-historical changes prompted by technological transformations, but he does lend a vivid insight into the motivations prompting the earliest avant-garde aspirations when venturing into the frst wholly abstract, spatial visual artworks. In a declaration strangely resonant with the themes of Buchholz’s essay, “Sputnik and art,” (1958) Flusser notes in his essay, “The Vanity of History,” (1969): ‘Rockets have done away with the concept of distance in the traditional sense.’ (139)

10. Perceptual challenge and spatial art

Examining what prompted spatial visual art, a common thread is not the question of optimism or pessimism, but that of art’s response to perceptual upheavals. It is possible to say that spatial visual art is always tied to a perceptual failing. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a common view was that the world had transformed without precedent, such that the changes surpassed traditional historical calculation. There was an almost tangible sense of things speeding up, everything changed before one’s eyes, and the intimation that the conventional parameters of perception were failing.

When spatial practices come to the fore again in the 1960s, this sense of foreboding that emanates from social or technological transformation becomes prominent. Whether it be Robert Smithson’s emphasis on entropy, completely expelling the linear, chronological expectation that Flusser argues is epitomized by the line; or Dan Graham’s contention that the proliferation of glass windows and surfaces actually does

not indicate greater transparency, but an evermore tightly circumscribed social and architecture space that we struggle to inhabit; or Gordon Matta-Clark’s suggestion that his strange cuts, or extractions, into derelict buildings sought a “… strange sort of connection AND divergence at the same time”, while also transforming “lost” spaces into “images”—these are all concerns that echo through the history of spatial visual art, that is seeking to animate new spaces of and for art, while transforming that legacy in continuing it.

Notes:

(I) Heinz Ohff, “Als Unbequemer unersetzlich. Zum Tode von Erich Buchholz [The Irreplaceable Inconvenience: an obituary of Erich Buchholz]”, Der Tagesspiegel, 30 December 1972; cited in Mo Buchholz and Eberhard Roters eds, Erich Buchholz (Berlin: Ars Nicolai, 1993), pp.117-118.

(II) Roters, in Erich Buchholz, ibid, p.21.

(III) Clement Greenberg, “Review of an exhibition of Mordecai Ardon-Bronstein and a Discussion of the Reaction in America to Abstract Art”, The Nation, 6 March 1948; in John O’Brian ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-49, pp.217-218.

(IV) Yves-Alain Bois, “El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility”, Art in America, April 1988, pp.161-181.

(V) All page references that follow are from Vilém Flusser, Writings, Andreas Ströhl ed., Erik Eisel trans., (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

Above: a model of Erich Buchholz’s studio at 15 Herkulesufer, Berlin.

Yang Zhenzhong

杨振中 Passage, single-channel video installation, sound, 14’:19”, 2012

Yang Zhenzhong (b. 1968) has explored spatial relationships in many of his video projects throughout his career. In an ongoing examination of the personal, political and institutional, Yang turns the camera to record actions and construct situations that deliberate from a precise point of view. Using the convention of perspective, Passage speaks to the transitional space between spaces. A space that is cut away, removed from all visual references of ‘the other side’. While portraying an exaggerated long space it is in fact a fat screen space that is before us that we must reconcile.

Sim Cheol-Woong

An│other River, 3 channel video installation, audio, 2011

Sim Cheol-Woong (b.1949, South Korea) works predominantly in digital video and often employs special effects in his videos. In An│other River (2011) the artist grafts together two sides of a river. At the top of the screen, the image pans along the Han River in Seoul showing a relentless length of high-rise development on the south bank. The bottom half of the screen shows video of the river lapping onto the northern riverbank, captured at a static position. Formally, the work references traditional Korean ink painting that uses a bird’s eye perspective. However, as cued by the imagery of skyscrapers, it is modernization that Cheol Woong speaks to, and in particular, the loss of the traditional cultural landscape as another twist in Korea’s dramatic history.

Above: still from An│other River: Dream. 上图：《另/一条河流：梦》的视频截图。

Below: still from An│other River: Blood. 下图：《另/一条河流：血》的视频截图。

Zhang Peili 张培力

The Distance of a Kilometre, 2 Channel Video projection, sound, colour 26’33” /PAL on 2 rear projection screens, 2010

Zhang Peili (b.1957, Hangzhou) is a senior artist who emerged in the frst wave of Chinese contemporary art in the 1980s. His video work 30’ X 30’ (1988) has been regarded as the frst piece of video art in China. In The Distance of a Kilometre, the two screens show two people’s point of view, each holding a video recorder while walking a kilometre along the same street but from opposing directions. As the walkers get closer with their cameras the image progressively degrades as the distance between then diminishes. The electronic dis turbance and noise increases until the images are unreadable – a mediated deconstruction of representational space.

Shilpa Gupta

100 Hand Drawn Maps of India, single channel video projection, table, 3’:42”, 2007– 08

Shilpta Gupta (b.1976, India), One Hundred Hand Drawn Maps of India draws us into the complexities of the construction and delineation of space articulated in man-made borders. The video sequence features numerous representations of the Indian map, as drawn from memory by 100 Indian adults. The variety of forms produced throw into question how political borders are created, imagined, and learnt. A highly subjective interpretation of the territory of a nation sees states skipped or incorporated with the attitude of each author. The work is made in times where the identity of the nation state has been emphasized and the relationship between an individual and the imagined state is ambivalent.

《100幅手绘印度地图》，单屏录像投影桌，3分42秒, 2007 － 2008

库普塔（出生于1976年，印度）的《100幅手绘印度地图》吸引我们的是人为空间构建与边界划分的 复杂性。作品根据100位印度成年人的记忆绘制了不同的印度地图。地图不同的形状所产生的问题 使我们联想到政治边界是如何产生、想象和领会的。由于对于国家领土的解读是非常主观的，所以 每一个人画的地图都是不同的。这件作品产生于民族国家的身份一直被强调的时代，而个人与想象 的国家之间的关系是矛盾的。

A Brief Introduction to the Concept of Third Spatial Position

Paul Bai

Australia, an island continent, surrounded by the sea, is often regarded as the “bottom” of the world. Distanced from the majority of countries, the geographical isolation and the country’s vast open space gave rise to my awareness of spatiality and the meaning it represents. As a Chinese migrant, the physical and psychological distances between “old home” and “new country” were the primary factors in my adjustment to Australia, and this re-adjustment has been an ongoing process that keeps me from committing to the dichotomised concepts of ‘here’ or ‘there’, or ‘us’ and ‘them’.

For some years I have found myself in a position that is between China and Australia, relating to both places, but also not belonging to either. To this extent, national boundary and spatial identity are secondary to my interpretation of space and its meaning. The personal adaptation of a spatial independence has assisted in my maintaining certain non-conformist and critical attitudes towards general and conventional spatial interpretations and representations. I view my spatial position as a constant process of defning and redefning, and the result of my migrant experience has affected the notions such as in-between and ‘otherness’ in my conscious self-positioning. This aspect of my ‘position’ has developed into the investigation of the Third Spatial Position in my art practice. This essay briefy discusses the notion of Third Spatial Position that is critically open to other spatial interpretations and not solely adherent to the binary debates. Unlike artists driven by the postcolonial political motivations, I do not desire to reverse the values of a dichotomy or to supplant one of its terms. I use the term ‘third’ because I identify with a spatial position that is entirely alternative to the conventional dichotomised spatial terms such as here/there, inside/outside, central/marginal, physical/conceptual etc.

In his essay Thirdspace: Towards a New Consciousness of Space and Spatiality (2009), American political geographer Edward Soja states:

The spatial dimension of our lives has never been of greater practical and political relevance than it is today. Whether we are attempting to deal with the increasing intervention of electronic media in our daily routines; seeking ways to act politically to deal with the growing problems of poverty, racism, sexual discrimination, and environmental degradation; or trying to understand the multiplying geopolitical conficts around the globe, we are becoming increasingly aware that we are, and always have been, intrinsically spatial beings, active participants in the social constructions of our embracing spatialities. Perhaps more than ever before, a strategic awareness of this collectively created spatiality and its social consequences has become a vital part of making both theoretical and practical sense of our contemporary life worlds at all scales, from the most intimate to the most global. 1

If art should refect the social and political conditions of our time, and space is becoming more than ever crucial to the contemporary social and political changes, then it is equally important the focus on spatiality is particularly relevant to contemporary art practice. From the fundamental level, the focuses on spatiality offers an insertion point that allows us to rationally examine the relationship between representation and the audience occupied reality. As for much needed art criticism in our contemporary times, the understanding of spatiality in art practice can certainly indicate the level of communication between the artwork’s conceptual ambition, physical realisation and its contextualisation with the actual environment.

To explain the concept of Third Spatial Position, frst I will briefy introduce a couple of important fndings by the French theorist Henri Lefebvre on the notion of space and its representation. In his seminal book The Production of Space (1991), Lefebvre proposes the space we perceive is the product of social development, designed to meet the needs of political dominance, institutional requirement, economical demand and religious belief. To Lefebvre, space is not a natural entity, but a concept that is realised through the artifcial constructions in nature. These constructions, i.e. building, city, map or painting, allow spatiality to manifest through lines, boundaries and perspectives, while we are viewing and perceiving the dimensionalities of the constructs, we are also sensing the existence of space.

Though Lefebvre does not satisfy with such a conclusion, as the conceptual and physical aspects of space together form a binary relationship, such dichotomy is not suffcient to explain the spatial construction to its full extent. Rather it confnes spatiality to the abstract representations, on both conceptual and physical levels. Lefebvre criticises such binary logic as the ‘double illusion’ in spatial recognition.

If it is true (social) space is a (social) product, how is this fact concealed? The answer is: by a double illusion, each side of which refers back to the other, reinforces the other, and hides behind the other. These two aspects are the illusion of transparency on the one hand and the illusion of opacity, or ‘realistic’ illusion, on the other. 2

According to Lefebvre:

The illusion of transparency goes hand in hand with a view of space as innocent, as free of traps or secret places. Anything hidden or dissimulated – and hence dangerous – is antagonistic to transparency, under whose rein everything can be taken in by a single glance from that mental eye which illuminates whatever it contemplates … an encrypted reality becomes readily decipherable thanks to the intervention frst of speech and then of writing. 3

To this extent, a spatial reality is supported through visibility, language and writing, thus the mental overwrites the actual. On the other hand the “realistic illusion’ is “the illusion of natural simplicity … the mistaken belief that ‘things’ have more of an existence than the ‘subject’, his thought and his desires.” 4 Edward Soja also sees the ‘realistic illusion’ as one that ‘ … Reduces spatial reality to empirically defnable spatial practices, material or natural objects, to the geometry of things in themselves.’ 5

This powerful critique on spatial double illusion has demonstrated the deceptive nature of both conceptual space and physical space in spatial interpretation, and initiates the introduction of a third option into the study of spatiality that would steer spatial interpretation away from the pitfall of double illusion.

To break out of the deadlock of double illusion, Lefebvre introduces the spatial triad that encompasses both physical and conceptual spaces and also includes a third element – ‘lived space’, the space that is actually experienced by the inhabitants.

Space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’ … It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. 6

The ‘lived space’ is not an actual space but is the actual experience of the space, where participants can make decisions about their interactions in the space and how they perceive the spatial construct. Edward Soja furthers Lefebvre’s analysis and amplifes the concept of ‘lived space’, in doing so Lefebvre’s spatial triad turns into a reconstitution, which Soja termed as the Thirdspace:

Thirdspace epistemologies can now be briefy re-described as arising from the sympathetic deconstruction and heuristic reconstitution of Firstspace (physical) –Secondspace (conceptual) duality, another example of what I have called thirding–as--Othering. Such thirdings is designed not just to critique Firstspace and Secondspace modes of thought but also to reinvigorate their approaches to spatial knowledge with new possibilities heretofore unthought of inside the traditional spatial disciplines. 7

To Soja, the Thirdspace not only includes both physical and conceptual modes of spatial thinking but also opens to the ‘unknowable’, like the ‘lived space’, the Thirdspace is an indeterminate space, a negotiating space, a spatial context that is open and critical, where people make the decisions and changes.

As the ‘lived space’ and Thirdspace both intend to break up the traditional spatial dualism, this is very close to the role of the ‘Third Spatial Position’ that I try to establish and identify in art practice. My proposed term of Third Spatial Position is derived from Edward Soja’s spatial term Thirdspace. To name it Third Spatial Position is because such a notion accentuates the concepts of Thirdspace, to assume a position beyond the traditional spatial dialectics, and offers the ‘other than’ option. As this other is based on neither of the binary options, the third position still paradoxically relates to the binary, together they form an open yet critical trialectical spatial relationship.

The third spatial position will keep the spatial representation alive and also critical to any established defnitions. Being labelled as a ‘position’ refects that the Third Spatial Position doesn’t necessarily have a designated location to operate within, it rather is an intellectual position to recognise the options and possibilities beyond the existing dichotomised spatial defnitions. As the Third Spatial Position in my current research is based on the in-between spatial moment, the characteristics of third spatial position can be described as: tentative, transitional, situational, indeterminate and open.

The turn to spatiality is not a new trend in art, as British art historian Peter Osborne observes, the shift from the time focus to spatial relations has mainly been used as in the 1980s and early 1990s to distinguish postmodernist from the modernist theory. 8 Here I would like to emphasis that the 1960s Minimalism art movement already moved away from the modernist spatial isolations, and initiated spatial relations with the exhibition context. In other words, the postmodernist practice already started along with the artistic developments in the 1960s.

In his book The Return of the Real (1996) Hal Foster claims that minimalism does not mark the end of the modernist art, rather is ‘a paradigm shift toward postmodernist practices.’ 9 Anne Rorimer also in New Art in the 60s and 70s – Redefning Reality (2001) describes the art of late 1960s and 70s as: ‘Crossing the divide between the modernist belief in the self-contained object and postmodernist attention to relational, non-autonomous, multifaceted open-endedness.’ 10

If the modernist artwork can be seen as isolated from the external spatial contexts and becoming the object in space, to break out of the transcendental and isolationist shortcomings of modernist art practice, Minimalism in the 60s made the proactive ‘spatial turn’, directly connecting artwork to its surrounding space. Through spatial juxtaposition and integration, the minimalists created confusion and ambiguity between content and context, which are also the traits of postmodernist art practice until today. Conceptual Art practitioners favour to dematerialise the physical existence of artwork, as the work’s fnal presentation often manifests through language and text, and artwork’s spatial concerns consequentially also become conceptual. At least from the spatial perspective, the Minimalism and Conceptual Art movements of 1960s and 70s that subsequently evolved as the postmodernist art might distinguish their practice by celebrating the tensions between physical and conceptual, abstract and real, onside and offside, yet they still limit their spatial understanding within the spatial dichotomies and double illusions that both Lefebvre and Soja want to break.

By focusing on the in-between space I want to identify a spatial moment as the Third Spatial Position, which is more of a conceptual position than the physical position in space – although in practice it often recourses to a physical context for demonstration purposes. The binary debates are only secondary to the argument of the Third Spatial Position — as it opens the way to the spatial interpretation that is beyond the existing spatial dialectics. The Third Spatial Position holds no determinations, though offers the spatial moment, or a conceptual position beside the established spatial binaries. It is the reminder of the preexisting context that precedes any spatial construction, a non-place that we must have in any spatial interpretations and structures. Through co-existing with the binary elements of a structure, the third spatial position will keep the representation open and critical.

The natural world that precedes human inhabitation is not spatially defned, it doesn’t have up and down, left or right, inside or outside etc. it is a reality that is hidden by the later spatial structures, and it is crucial and fundamental to the spatial construction. Therefore this hidden reality should be remembered in the spatial representation and subsequent analysis. Without acknowledging this precondition of spatial construction, the spatial representation will always be trapped in the binary debates such as physical/ conceptual, inside/outside, centre and peripheral etc. The Third Spatial Position I try to establish uncovers and identifes the precondition of spatial construction. By emphasising its neutral and indeterminate status within the spatial structure, I would argue this precondition should be seen as an entity of its own, and one that can coexist within the spatial structure among other binary elements. The non-committing nature of the Third Spatial Position allows us the time and interval to review the established spatial structure, to consider or contemplate before making a commitment. We should always remember there is ‘no space’ before space.

Notes:

1. Edward Soja, “Thirdspace: Towards a New Consciousness of Space and Spatiality”, in Communicating in the Third Space, Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), p.49.

2. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith trans., (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991, p.27.

3.Ibid., p.28.

4.Ibid., p.29.

5. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p.157.

6. Lefebvre, op. cit., p.39.

7. Peter Osborne, “Non-places and the Spaces of Art”, The Journal of Architecture No.6, 2001 pp.183-192.

8. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: the avant-garde at the end of the century, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p.36.

9. Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefning Reality, (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), p.275.

Barbara Campbell

close, close, single channel responsive video projection, audio, 5’:00”, 2014 Camera and edit, Gary Warner Responsive programming, John Tonkin

Barbara Campbell (b.1961 Australia) works between multiple concepts of spatiality—mediated, architectural and geographic—to create singular experiences for the viewer/participant. She has been following the journey of migratory shorebirds on the East Asian-Australasian fyway, the fight path that links the birds in Australia and New Zealand to their breeding grounds in Siberia and the Arctic through the all-important feeding and resting sites on the Korean Peninsular and China’s east coast; a path that uncannily tracks the very trajectory of this exhibition. In her responsive video installation close, close Campbell creates a space to observe and perform within. Multiple horizons, seen and implied, are synthesized within the work.

Lauren Brincat

This Time Tomorrow, Tempelhof, documentation of an action, single-channel digital video; 16:9, colour, sound, 5':19'', 2011

Lauren Brincat (b.1980 Australia). Brincat’s work includes a variety of media, including video documentation of ‘actions’. Her practice is guided by early performance art of the 1970s. Perspective exaggerates this simple recorded action made for video. The artist walks into frame and follows the airport runway line at Berlin’s Templehof Airport till she disappears. Space and references to time in the title activate histories of Templehof Airport: the second world war, the Berlin Airlift, the Cold War, and the now dormant space since the airport was closed in 2008. While the video is directly recorded and not altered through post-production, the artist diminishes relatively quickly as she walks toward the horizon point and evaporates at the point of convergence. 《明天此时，滕佩尔霍夫机场 》, 行为记录,单屏数码录像，彩色，音频，5分19秒, 2011

明天此时，滕佩尔霍夫机场》通过夸大的视角简单地记录了艺术家的行为。艺术家行走在画面之 中，沿着柏林滕佩尔霍夫机场的跑道直至画面的尽头。作品选择的特殊场地唤起对这条跑道关于二 战、“柏林空运”以及冷战的历史记忆。现在该机场因2008年关闭而处于闲置状态。

Installation view of This Time Tomorrow, Tempelhof at National Art School Gallery.

Installation view of Wang Peng’s Feeling North Korea at Griffth University Art Gallery. 王蓬的《感受朝鲜》在格里菲斯大学美术馆。

Wang Peng 王蓬

Beyond, 3 channel video, 20’:00”, 2014

Feeling North Korea, single channel video, audio, 12’:15”, 2007

Wang Peng (b.1964, China) explores a very particular logic relating to screen space in his recent video work. His approach is realised through constructed techniques that includes the synthesis of two or more spatial points of view within the one screen. In Beyond it is the separation and relationship between the three screens’ imagery with reference to an obscured (or invisible) horizon that is employed. In Feeling North Korea half of the screen is fattened by imposing a black void, while the other half screen plays out footage the artist discreetly flmed on a visit to Pyongyang.

Installation view of Beyond at Griffth University Art Gallery. 《超越》在格里菲斯大学美术馆。

Craig Walsh

Standing Stone Site, single-channel digital animation, colour,10:00 loop, 2012

Craig Walsh (b.1966, Australia) often uses projection and photography in relation to environments he experiences. On the Burrup Peninsula, in the Pilbara region of Western Australia − ‘Murujuga’ in local Aboriginal language − there is a signifcant site, sacred to Aboriginal people, featuring 96 standing stones. It is the largest concentration of standing stones in one area in Australia. Walsh has recorded the changes of light across the rock forms at the extremes of the day, sunrise and sunset; and through digital animation he has composed the images into a fuid and dynamic representation of the illuminated landscape.

《立石场》，单屏数码动画，10分钟，2012 克雷格·沃什（生于1966年，澳大利亚）经常会通过投影来表现回应现有环境和风景。他的作品经 常会大规模地创造身临其境和有趣的投影体验，使现实空间面对虚幻空间。《立石场》（2012年） 使用了延时摄影技术，记录了位于西澳大利亚州原住民的圣地皮尔巴拉（Pilbara）96块站立着的铁 矿石上日出和日落的景观。通过数码动画技术的编制， 这些图像流畅并有力的呈现了大地被照亮的 景色。。

LANDSEASKY: National Art School Gallery, Sydney

Artists have long been infuenced by the vastness of nature, with the distant horizon – bound by land, sea and sky – as the embodiment of this fascination. Contemporary artists working in the digital era are no exception. Curator Kim Machan brought a rigorous conceptual and spatial approach to her selections of screen-based artworks for the exhibition LANDSEASKY at the National Art School Gallery.

The gallery is housed in a two-storey sandstone building that dates from 1841, a former cell-block for male prisoners in Sydney’s Darlinghurst Gaol. Since 1922 the site has been occupied by one of Australia’s earliest and most respected art schools. The gallery, a well-proportioned space with high ceilings and timber foors, presented work by twelve artists: Paul Bai, Lauren Brincat, Barbara Campbell, Jan Dibbets, Shilpa Gupta, Kimsooja, Derek Kreckler, Giovanni Ozzola, João Vasco Paiva, Wang Gongxin, Wang Peng and Zhu Jia.

The artists share a commitment to working beyond the two-dimensions of the projected frame, incorporating sculptural, environmental, architectural and conceptual concerns. In LANDSEASKY they explored a range of themes and experiences by utilising the gallery spaces to present three dimensional engagement. The careful positioning resulted in a visually rich and thought-provoking exhibition of artwork by leading Australian and international contemporary artists.

LANDSEASKY was anchored by the seminal work of pioneering conceptual artist Jan Dibbets. Horizon I, II & III – Sea (1971) was presented in the upper space along a single, ten metre length of wall, exhibited as a seven-channel installation. Dibbets’ experimental flm in three parts dates from the early 1970s, shot in 36mm and 16mm flm. The altered horizon line produced by the artist tilting his camera at various angles, and the random dips and juxtapositions of sea and sky were clearly visible in this singular, mesmerising layout.

Still in the upstairs gallery, Derek Kreckler’s major site-specifc work Littoral (2014) featured a huge projection of a vast, heaving ocean. The title refers to the ‘littoral zone’, the valuable stretch between shoreline and water, recognised as a zone of abundance for life. The screen comprised strips, which wafted in the breeze of a fan, moving and fragmenting the image of the waves rolling to shore. Combining sophisticated hi- and low-f technologies, Kreckler’s work created a large-scale, immersive experience, with audiences interacting with the screen and the space behind it.

As visitors entered the downstairs gallery, they experienced Barbara Campbell’s work close, close (2014), a deep space with a horizontal band of projected imagery on the end wall. Reminiscent of the view from a bird watcher’s hide, the screen revealed focks of wading birds. As the visitor moved closer, the audio of the bird cry was activated, and the horizon responded by moving up, revealing more of the scene. Campbell is concerned with migratory birds and their journey from non-breeding grounds in Australia and New Zealand, north to the feeding and resting sites in Korea and China’s east coast, and on up to their breeding grounds in Siberia and the Arctic.

Many of the works in LANDSEASKY explored the horizon-line as a timeless metaphor for humanity’s relationship to the world. Others drew connections between history and society with a fresh perspective, and others, such as Zhu Jia’s work Beyond My Control (2014) simply articulated a poetic, visual experience. Occupying a quiet, easily-missed landing at the top of the stairs, a projector pointed into a corner. The video showed a hand busily tracing the contours of the corner between foor and wall. The work delivered a refreshing and memorable juxtaposition of moving imagery and every-day space.

LANDSEASKY demonstrated ways artists working with video can extend to incorporate a range of other approaches. All the works contributed strong physical and visual impact with rigorous focus on the formal qualities. This approach enabled viewers to experience the works primarily as fne art objects — eloquent interventions in space rather than video narratives.

In Sydney a range of public programs were offered. They included artist talks in the gallery with Barbara Campbell, Lauren Brincat and Derek Kreckler; an Art Forum Lecture by Kim Machan in which she discussed her curatorial approach to LANDSEASKY; she also delivered a tutorial to NAS Post-Graduate

students on digital media and its application in gallery-based installations. Sydney-based artist Emma Hicks conducted a three-hour workshop, Space without Edges, drawing on themes in LANDSEASKY and using experimental video sequences. A comprehensive education resource for primary and secondary school visual arts students — available in PDF format on-line — provided background notes, resources and suggestions for practical art-making. National Art School drawing lecturers recognised the potential for creative investigation and inspiration for students, and conducted workshops in the gallery. Based on Shilpa Gupta’s work 100 Hand-Drawn Maps of India (2007-8), art students spent hours drawing in the dark, exercises utilising mark-making and memory, to broaden their approaches and ideas.

Judith Blackall

National Art School Curator and Gallery Manager

Wang Gongxin 王功新

The Other Rule in Ping Pong, 3 channel synchronized video installation, audio, 3’:23”, 2014

Wang Gongxin (b.1960 China) has emphasised the sculptural by incorporating objects into his projections and spatially considered screen arrangements. In this work, Wang synchronises two wall projections and one monitor to construct a simulated ping-pong game in screen space. The ball appears to move with speed from wall projection to monitor to wall projection, implied by rhythmic audio cues describing the ball’s movement. The conventional expectation of the game and the balls movement is ruptured by unexpected behaviours. The perception of the space (built in the relationship between the projections and monitor) is both constructed and subsequently deconstructed with conficting rules.

page

opposite: installation view of the Other Rule in Ping Pong at Griffth University Art Gallery

Heimo Zobernig

Untitled (Nr. 23), video, colour, audio, 9’: 26”, video projection, projection screens, 2005

Heimo Zobernig (b.1958 Austria) employs various media to address a distinct selection of artistic problems in Modernism. In this work he uses chroma-key post-production effects to introduce layers of spatial views and in turn highlight the materiality of the medium. The video alternates between fat monochrome blue and external views to a garden through gridded windows and venetian blinds. The artist, moving the blinds and the projection screens up and down, performs a repertoire of movements to create the editing framework. The projection sometimes exposes the screens (the real image support) at other times camoufaging the elements, perpetuating honest confusion about the verge of materiality and the editing technique.

LANDSEASKY: Griffth University Art Gallery, Brisbane

Planes and spaces, volumes, elemental phenomena, ephemeral images – where defnitions of one thing predicate consideration of what they are and are not – LANDSEASKY linguistically posits consideration of three nouns — so simple and restrained. By deleting the spaces between words, Kim Machan’s exhibition title, however, asserts connectedness with a range of associations – linguistic, observable and imagined. The potency of interstitial states, or ‘between’ zones , is evident throughout LANDSEASKY in touchstone artworks featuring geographically distant regions, cultures and philosophies. The constancy and mystery of a horizon line fusing sea and sky or land and sky is fgurative of Machan’s compelling themes for consideration — what is the nature of the screen, projection and movement that so effectively pries our perceptions open, reinserting spaces in which to savour complications of words, symbols as aggregate elements.

Griffth University Art Gallery is based in Brisbane, Australia, in a precinct called South Bank. Brisbane is often referred to as a ‘River City’, and our metropolitan area is characterised by a broad curlicue of water funnelling through highrises and parklands. Griffth University Art Gallery is modest in scale, and housed within the campuses of Grifffth University’s Queensland College of Art. It is an angular building divided into three gallery spaces where we contend with several oblique and acute angles.

The screen-based exhibition LANDSEASKY occupied the vertical, horizontal x and y axis of our gallery walls, but also includes sculptural components into the third dimension. Derek Kreckler presents images of crashing waves on a shore over a massive cut screen of Tyvek material that sways and breaks apart when hit with the breath of an oscillating electric fan. Barbara Campbell’s interactive video reveals a slice of vision mimicking the view from an animal or bird ‘hide’ (the built structure that conceals the presence of humans, and cameras, with the intent to observe wildlife without disrupting their behaviour) and this slice of video responds to sensors tracking the speed of a viewer’s movement toward the screen or back, frustrating or rewarding the viewer with glimpses and misses.

As a curator of screen-based exhibitions, with Kim Machan I cannot ignore the 3D-ness of the equipment present in spaces, the ‘methods of production’, as they fundamentally impact our viewing experience, however successful a work might be in seducing our attention to and seemingly through the area of a projection. Jan Dibbets’s seminal silent flms from 1971 called Horizon I, II, III — Sea presented on loan from the Stedelijk Museum, The Netherlands formed the central locus of Griffth University Art Gallery’s two chapter approach to realising LANDSEASKY. On the foor, seven projectors with 4:3 aspect ratio were readily apparent along with the small media players and syncing cables. Prior to this exhibition, Dibbets’s two and three-channel pieces had never before been exhibited together, given that seven expensive and specialty use 16mm projectors would have had to be sourced or loaned. The transfer of the flms to HD video, with the artist’s explicit approval, is a highly signifcant moment to acknowledge here. That technological possibility has made it possible for viewers to experience the flms in a way that the artist desired, but that even he at the time of making was not able to achieve. The transfers are excellent and we are enormously privileged to be among the frst institutions to realise the full installation and present that experience in Australia. Occupying three large walls in our main gallery, the horizon that fuses sea and sky rose and fell, pitched, drew back and enveloped the viewer.

Wang Gongxing is another pre-emninent artist whose current work engages with technology that was previously unavailable, to sync and choreograph multiple screens and sounds. The installation of an artwork titled The other Rule in Ping Pong showed a ping-pong ball shot from one wall-based projection, as if down into the space of a fatscreen monitor (lying horizontally like a table) then ricocheting upward into another projection. The installation required exactitude in order to maintain the playful absurdity of his piece. The fdelity of the sound deftly supported the illusion of an actual ball.

We are grateful that Wang Gongxin, and Wang Peng, represented in this exhibition with two works Beyond and Feeling North Korea, both gave generously of their time and few from China to Brisbane to participate in artist talks. Their knowledge, dialogue and open-ness in sharing their approaches to art making was invaluable.

In collaboration with Machan, and in respect of the artists’ wishes for presentation of their work, we were able to present 18 artworks across two installation chapters. While Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 phases had distinct characteristics, the totality of the exhibition stays with many people who saw the show, and have commented that the practical separation is almost forgotten. The works have had time to resonate and coalesce in conversation long after they were seen. Movement on screen manifests an acknowledgment of time passing in a way that circumnavigates our three starting words – LANDSEASKY devolves 2D, through 3D and into the fourth dimension. And Machan’s selection of conceptually rigorous artworks might be approached through a cluster of meta-narratives but also on the most personal and idiosyncratic level, which of course is where memories reside.

Naomi Evans

Griffth University Art Gallery Actiing Director (2012 –2015)

Installation view at Griffth University Art Gallery. 《海陆空》在格里菲斯大学美术馆的展览场景。

The opening night of LANDSEASKY at Griffth University Art Gallery.

Promenade in Seoul

Art Sonje Center, Gallery IHN, ONE AND J Gallery, Lee Hwaik Gallery, Gallery SKAPE, OPSIS ART

The director of MAAP Kim Machan and I talked about the LANDSEASKY exhibition and the way it might tour to Seoul before it continued to China and Australia. After considering the circumstances of the exhibition, I suggested a different style of presentation that would depart from a conventional exhibition and solve some of the logistical issues that a large group video installation exhibition poses. I thought if we can show the art works in several galleries across the Samcheongdong district, the audience can have more time to consider each individual gallery’s exhibition through the physical walk between the galleries, which are situated quite near by each other.

The image of audiences sightseeing in the cultural district, like taking a promenade from one place to another, is reminiscent of scenes we might see in traditional oriental painting. The project ‘Platform Seoul’ (2006–2010), introduced a similar multiple gallery collaborative exhibition format. When several galleries participate in one project together, it naturally creates more opportunities and spaces for the art works to be exhibited thereby increasing the different possibilities of grouping works within each particular venue. This format allows more space to be given to each video installation and that in turn offers audiences a comfortable environment to concentrate and appreciate works. The exhibition in Seoul was presented in six ‘chapters’ where approximately three artists were shown in each gallery, supporting audiences in a situation where they could give their full focus on a small number of works at a time. The uncluttered and calm use of the gallery spaces by the artists’ video installations enabled the viewers to pursue the art works with little disturbance from other works.

The short time spent travelling between venues gives the audience a thoughtful space to ponder upon the art works they have just viewed before they move to the next venue to see more. From this strategy, audiences will not only perceive the difference of the space between and within the art works, but also experience a sense of rational time through the promenade. All six venues, including Artsonje Center, are of a different spatial size and character, and has its own setting and its own condition that contributes to the rhythm and texture of the exhibition in Seoul.

Artsonje Centre hosted Jan Dibbets, Kimsooja and Joao Vãsco Paiva’s works under the theme of the conceptual horizon. The changing landscape through time and light was demonstrated in works from Giovanni Ozzola, Sim Cheol-Woong and Craig Walsh at the Opsis Art. At ONE AND J Gallery exhibited the works by Derek Kreckler, Barbara Campbell and Wang Peng showed the moving path of the space. Gallery SKAPE projected works by Lauren Brincat and Craig Walsh through their 2nd Floor street window at night. Lee Hwaik Gallery hosted works by Yeondoo Jung, Shilpa Gupta and Lauren Brincat. Gallery IHN exhibited the works from Paul Bai, Wang Gongxin and Heimo Zobernig. Paul Bai proposes a spiraling wind charm as an image to contemplate and reconcile. Wang Gongxin synchronises two wall projections and one monitor to construct a simulated ping-pong game in screen space. Heimo Zobernig use chroma-key post-production effects to introduce layers of spatial views and in turn highlighted the materiality of the medium in <Nr.23>.

Through the promenade, audiences can experience another space in our imagination – one that is constructed and connected through the images of the land, the sea and the sky within each video installation in the six different venues.

Sunjung Kim Artistic Director of ACC Research & Archive in Asian Culture Center; Chief Curator of Art Sonje Center

王 wáng

OCAT Shanghai

The LANDSEASKY exhibition project evoked in my mind the Chinese character “king” – 王 wáng – that in the cultural tradition and history of China is the one who connects the sky and the earth. The character shows three horizontal traits crossed by a vertical line: the central horizontal stroke actually stands for the human sphere, somewhere in-between sky and earth. At a further, careful consideration, this is exactly the function of the “medium”, that in the pre-modern world is the offcer of shamanic ritual (the one connecting gods and men, or the dead and the live), it’s now also the paradigm of technology, the so-called “media”. All these aspects make LANDSEASKY a pretty unique project.

By bringing this project inside the space of OCAT Shanghai, Kim Machan and the exhibited artists have brought the enchantment of serene landscapes inside the old bank warehouse at the ground foor of a deco building located on the northern shore of the Suzhou River, and showed how the same landscapes may fnd a meaning, but also get disrupted by the human intervention, establishing a thread which connects different worlds: China (eminently man-made) and Australia (dominated by nature); East and West; city and countryside. What LANDSEASKY does indeed is bridging instances inbuilt in human vision, in the way we relate to space, the way we control it and use it to get an understanding of the physical and social world and our presence in it. At the same time, landscapes can contain history or be contained in it, they can shape our way to relate to society or be shaped by socio-historical circumstances, and cultural values. Landscapes can be even modeled by fashion, but eventually always go back to the basic alignment of natural elements, and the slightly curved line (always reminding us the shape of this world) separating the sky from the land – or the sea.

The enlightening experience of hosting this exhibition has made us and the audience come close to another possibility and approach to media-based art, one that fnds its inception with Land Art and the conceptual experiments with space of the Sixties, but it’s now enriched with references to contemporariness, to new economical and political courses, to the contradictions implied in the encounter/clash between old landscapes and new sceneries, between physical dimensions and virtual or augmented reality, which is no less real.

LANDSEASKY also marks the collaboration between OCAT Shanghai and MAAP. Organising this show with Kim Machan has been a very valuable experience for the international dialogue it triggered but also for the insight we could gain, through the eyes of Kim, her team, and of course those of the seventeen featured artists showing that media art is a genuinely cross-national and transcultural language. From my personal point of view, in these time of uncertainties when uniting moral and economical forces has almost become an imperative, when large (and not so large) institutions are somehow delegitimized and local artistic practice cannot and should not be self-suffcient, this type of cooperation across nations, cultural contexts and operative backgrounds is a successful model that is already becoming a standard for the years ahead. We were extremely happy to act as forerunners, and we are sure this will not remain an isolated case or exception.

Mariagrazia Costantino Artistic Director at OCAT Shanghai

Artist Biographies

PAUL BAI

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2012 Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane

2010 Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane

2006 Return to Aesthetics, Ausstellung sraum Ursula Werz, Germany

2004 Paintings +more, Ausstellungsraum Ursula Werz, Tubingen, Germany

2003 Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane

2002 Painting, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

Selected Group Exhibitions

2015 GOMA Q, Queensland Art gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

2015 NEW15, Australian Centre for Con temporary Art, Melbourne

2008 Primary Views, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne

2007 Lion, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney

2006 TURRBAL–JAGERA, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane

LAUREN BRINCAT

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2014 No Performance Today with Bree van Reyk and the NSW Police Marching Band for Sonic Social, Museum of Con temporary Art, Sydney

2013 It’s Not the End of the World, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

2012 SHOOT FROM THE HIP, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

2010 Shine on you crazy Diamond MONA FOMA Festival of Music and Art, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart

2010 Best Time Ever, (with Dominic Finlay-Jones), Splendor in the Grass, Woodford

2009 Pushme Pullyou (with Will French), Peleton, Sydney

Selected Group Exhibitions

2013 The Wandering: Moving images from the MCA Collection, Museum of Contem porary Art, Sydney

2013 Anne Landa Award, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney

2012 Basil Sellers Art, Ian Potter Gallery, Melbourne

2012 Contemporary Australia: Women, Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland

2011 Nothing Like Performance, Artspace, Sydney

2010 MONA FOMA Festival of Music and Art, Tasmania

BARBARA CAMPBELL

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2015 Barbara Campbell: ex avibus, Uni versity Art Gallery and Macleay Museum, University of Sydney

2011 Farewell to Meng Haoran at Yellow Crane Tower, performance with Yu Bao Di for Site Lab at Minto Mall, New South Wales

2011 Refer to Source: Ali Baba Aurang

and Barbara Campbell, works on paper, Cross Art Projects, Sydney

2010 News Haiku from the West, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth 2005 –08 1001 nights cast, durational performance, online at http://1001.net.au.

2002 Flesh Winnow, performance survey, University of Sydney and the Art Gallery of New South Wales,

Selected Group Exhibitions

2014 Venice International Performance Art Week, Palazzo Mora, Venice

2014 Far and Wide: narrative into idea, UTS Gallery, Sydney 2010 (to) give time to time, Mildura, Victoria

2010 Siteworks, Bundanon Trust, New South Wales

2010 Kent State: four decades later, Uni versity Art Gallery, University of Sydney

2009 Chance Encounters, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart and South Australian School of Art Gallery, Adelaide

JAN DIBBETS

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2014 Jan Dibbets: Another Photography, Castello di Rivoli Muso d’Arte Contempo ranea, Turin

2013 Jan Dibbets, Gladstone Gallery, New York

2013 Jan Dibbets, New Color Studies 1979-2012, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Ber lin; Nelson-Freeman Gallery, Paris 2011
 3 x Jan Dibbets, Cultuurcentrum Mechelen, Mechelen, Belgium 2010
 New Horizons, Gladstone Gallery, New York

1972
 Jan Dibbets, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Selected Group Exhibitions

2014 Making Links: 25 Years, SCAI the Bathhouse, Toyko

2013 When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969, Venice

2012 Minimal and Beyond, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany

2011 Light Years, Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977, The Art Institute, Chicago

2009 In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976, Museum of Modern Art, New York

1969 Exhibition by Mail, Seth Sieglaub, New York; TV as a Fireplace, Fern sehgalerie Gerry Schum, Dusseldorf, Germany

SHIPLA GUPTA

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2015 My East is Your West, Two person show with Rashid Rana Palazzo Benzon, The Gujral Foundation, Venice

2014 Shilpa Gupta, Galeria Continua, Sangigimano

2013 Shilpa Gupta, MAAP SPACE, Bris bane, Australia

2012-13 Will we ever be able to mark enough?, Galerie im TaxisPalais, Inns bruck; Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem; Cultuurcentrum, Bruges

2010 2652, Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv

2009 Solo Show, Yvon Lambert, Paris

Selected Group Exhibition

2015 Between the Idea and Experience, 12th Havana Biennial, Cuba.

2015 Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), Gothenburg

2015 A Century of Centuries, SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul

2015 Experiments with Truth: Gandhi and Images of Nonviolence, International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, Geneva.

2015 After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997, Queens Museum, New York

2014 No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia GuggenheimUSB Collaboration, Singapore’s Centre for Contemporary Art

YEONDOO JUNG

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2015 Galleri Charlotte Lund, Stockholm, Sweden

2014 Spectacle in Perspective, Plateau Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea

2013 Wonderland, K11 art space, Shang hai; Wuhan

2012 Inside Out, Tina Kim Gallery, New York

2010 An Ordinary Paradise, Espacio Third Hermes, Singapore

2007 Memories of You – Artist of the Year 2007, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea

Selected Group Exhibitions

2014 K P.O.P – Process, Otherness, Play, Museum of contemporary art of Taipei, Taipei

2013 Video Art in Asia 2002 to 2012, Alter native space Loop, Seoul

2013 Artist File 2013, The National Art Center, Tokyo

2010 New Organ, Space C, Seoul, Korea 2009 Artists of the Future, Roh gallery, Seoul 2009 Truly Truthful, Art Asia Miami, USA

DEREK KRECKLER

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2014 Untitled, video (Littoral) installation, Project Contemporary Art Space, Wol longong

2012 Accident and Process, photographic installation, Peloton Gallery, Sydney

2012 Appropriated Circumstance, photo graphs installed on Billboards, Princess Highway Heathcote and Waterfall, NSW

2011 Big wave hunting, photographic installation, University of Wollongong

2011 Adaption, video installation, Univer sity of Wollongong

2010 How to discipline a tree and Photographs from China, Installation of sculpture and photography, The Paper Mill, Sydney

Selected Group Exhibitions

2013 Good Little Soldier, performance visual dramaturgy for Animal Farm Collec tive, Radialsystem V Berlin.

2013 Many a slip…, Bowness Photo graphic Prize, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne

2009 Blind Ned, video installation, Twelve Degrees of Latitude: Queensland regional gallery and University art collections tour

2007 Opinionated, video, ARTIST MAKES

VIDEO Artrage Survey 1994–1998, Queensland College of Art, Brisbane

2004 White Goods, On Reason And Emotion, Sydney Biennale, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

2004 Holey 1, 2 & 3, Adelaide Festival Biennale of Contemporary Photomedia, Art Gallery of South Australia

GIOVANNI OZZOLA

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2015 Dove nasce il vento, Gazelli Art House, London, UK

2013 LA THÉORIE DES COMÈTES, Gal leria Continua, Beijing, China

2013 Giovanni Ozzola, Flash Art Event, Palazzo del Ghiaccio, Milano, Italy

2012 Castaway Depot: 41° 7’ 31’’ N 16°

52’ 0’’ E – In a sentimental mood, Dop pelganger, Bari, Italy

2010 On the Edge, curated by Elena Forin, Elgiz Museum, Istanbul, Turkey

2008 Giovanni Ozzola – Video Works, curated by Michiyo Miyake, Waseda University Department of Arts and Letters, Tokyo

Selectd Group Exhibitions

2014 On Another Scale, curated by Ricardo Sardenberg, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy

2014 Geografe, curated by Alexandra Gracco Kopp and Giulia Giovanardi, Festi val Attraversamenti, Ostuni, Italy

2014 Posizioni attuali dell’Arte Italiana, Premio Artistico FONDAZIONE VAF – VI edition, (touring exhibition), S!CHAUFLER FOUNDATION - SCHAUWERK SINDELF INGEN/STADTGALERIE KIEL, Germany; PALAZZO DELLA PENNA, Perugia, Italy

2013 Paraphernalia, De Garage, Cultuur centrum Mechelen, Belgium

2013 Rêves De Venise, Institut Culturel Bernard Magrez, Bordeaux, France

2013 Pen To Paper, Al Madad FoundationAthr Gallery, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

JOÃO VASCO PAIVA

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2015 Mausoleum, Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong

2015 Counter Space, Zurich, Switzerland

2014 Cast Away, Casa GardenFundaçao Oriente, Macao

2013 Near and Elsewhere, Edouard Ma lingue Gallery, Hong Kong

2011 Palimpseptic, Saamlung Gallery, Hong Kong

2010 Sea of Mountains, Para/Site Central, Hanart Tz Gallery, Hong Kong

Selected Group Exhibitions

2014 A few reasons for a non dismissive

art, Laboratorio das Artes, Museu Natural da Electricidade de Seia; Campo Arqueo logico de Mertola – Casa Amarela; Museu de Portimao; Museu Nacional Ferroviario, Portugal

2014 The Part in the Story, Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

2013 Vladivostok Biennale, Vladivostok, Russia

2012 Hong Kong Eye, Saatchi Gallery, London

2012 What should I do to live your life, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE 2011 Seoul International New Media Festi val, Seoul

KIMSOOJA

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2015 Kimsooja: Thread Routes, Guggen heim Bilbao Museoa, Bilbao, Spain

2014 Kimsooja, A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir, A SiteSpecifc Instillation for Intimate Cosmolo gies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology, 1st Cornell University Biennale Ithaca, New York

2013 Kimsooja, To Breathe: Bottari, The Korean Pavilion, 55th Biennale di Ven ezia, Venice

2012 Kimsooja, Musée D’Art Moderne de Saint Etienne, St. Etienne, France

2011 Kimsooja, Mumbai – A Laundry Field, Sullivan Gallery, School of the Insti tute of Chicago, Chicago

2010 Kimsooja, Earth – Water – Fire – Air, NPPAP - Yong Gwang Nuclear Power Plant Art Project, Organized by The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea,

Selected Group Exhibitions

2015 Experiments with Truth: Gandhi and Images of Nonviolence, The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, Geneva

2015 The XIV Biennial of Photography of Cordoba, Cordoba, Spain

2014 Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanote chnology, 1st Cornell University Biennale, Ithaca, New York

2014 True Colors, Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photogra phy, Tokyo

2014 The Eye of the Needle. Embroidered Art, KODE – Art Museums of Bergen, Bergen, Norway, travelling to The National Museum of Art Architecture and Design, Oslo,

2013 Making Space. 40 Years of Video Art, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland

SIM CHEOL-WOONG

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2014 De-sp[l]ace, Art Space Gallery Jung miso, Seoul

2013 The Wall Given No, KDB Daewoo Securities WM Class Yoksamyok Art Space, Seoul,

2012 Moments of Nomadic Journeys, Mo tor Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal

2011 An|other River, KunstDoc Gallery,

Seoul

2011 Welcome to Media Space, Sim, Cheol-Woong’s Special Day Art Space Gallery Jungmiso, Seoul

2008 Moments of American Life Broad Art Center, David Bermant Gallery, UCLA, California

Selected Group Exhibitions

2013 Korean Art from the Museum Col lection: Grand Narrative Part II, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul

2012 Korean Modern Art (Trazos de Co rea), Galeria Nacional, San Jose, Costa Rica

2011 Korea-Re-Imagining The City, The Arts Centre Gold Coast, Australia

2010 Platform 2010, Projected Image, SAMUSO, Artsonjae Center Art Hall

2009 Drawing of the World | World of Drawing, Museum of Art (MoA), Seoul National University

2006 The Paris Cinema, Palais de Tokyo, Paris

CRAIG WALSH

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2013-14 Embedded, Institute Of Modern Art, Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2010-11 Digital Odyssey: MCA National Media Arts Residency, Museum of Con temporary Art Touring Project, (touring project through rural and remote Australia) 2008 Heads Up, C3West, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2001 K:\012044 (collaboration with Cox Rayner Architects), Brisbane City Gallery, Brisbane

2001 Blurring the Boundaries, Vietnam Institute of Architects, Hanoi

Selected Group Exhibitions

2013 Traces Blue, Setouchi Triennale,Teshima Island, Japan, In collaboration with Hiromi Tango 2012 Home/Gwangju, Roundtable, Gwangju Biennale, South Korea. In collaboration with Hiromi Tango 2009 Jakarta Biennale XIII, Jakarta 2008 01SJ Biennial, San Jose, California, 2006 Re: Search, Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai, Japan

2006 Media City Seoul, 4th Seoul Interna tional Media Art Biennale, Seoul

WANG GONGXIN

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2015 Present · Being – The Video Works of Wang Gongxin Over 20 Years, OCT–Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai 2013 Wang Gongxin, MAAP SPACE, Brisbane, Australia

2011 My Sun, Asia Society and Museum, New York

2010 Relating, Platform China, Beijing 2009 It’s not about the neighbors, Arrow Factory, Beijing

1995 Digging a Hole in Beijing, SOLO Show, NO.12 House of Arts, Beijing,

Selected Group Exhibitions

2012 It’s About Art – It’s about China, RedLine Space, Denver,USA

2010 The Constructed Dimension -2010 Chinese Contemporary Art Invitational Exhibition, National Art Museum of China,Beijing

2008 Drawn in the Clouds, Kiasma Mu seum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki

2008 Christian Dior Chinese Artists, Ul lence Foundation, Beijing

2007 All about Laughter, Humor in con temporary art, Mori art Museum, Japan 1998 Inside Out, New China’s Arts, P.S.1 New York

WANG PENG

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2013 One Man As a Group, Today Art Museum, Beijing

2007 Wang Peng’s photo exhibition, Tra Gallery, Beijing

2005 Designed Meaninglessness, Plat form China, Beijing

1997 Passing Through, Performance in New York

1996 Inside & Outside, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT 1984 84’s Performance, Beijing

Selected Group Exhibitions

2012 A Bigger Splash: Painting after Per formance, Tate Modern, London

2011 Light from Light, State Library of Queensland, Shanghai Library, National Library of China & Hangzhou Public Library

2007 Chengdu Biannual, Chengdu, China

2007 The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China, Tate, Liverpool, UK

2002 The 4th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea 1998 Inside/Out, P.S.1, New York

YANG ZHENZHONG

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2014 Eternal Return/Вечное возвращение, Moscow Manege Museum and Exhibition Association, Moscow

2013 Trespassing, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai

2011 Don’t Move, ShanghART Beijing space

2008 Overpass, Canvas International Art, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

2008 Yang Zhenzhong Solo Exhibition, Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen

2006 Yang Zhenzhong, IKON Gallery, Birmingham, UK

Selected Group Exhibitions

2014 Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014, KochiMuziris, India

2014 Art from Elsewhere, Gallery of Mod ern Art Glasgow, UK

2013 La Biennale de Lyon 2013, Lyon

2012 Fruits de la passion, Musée national d\’art moderne, Paris

2011 Moving Image In China: 1988-2011, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

2011 Play Van Abbe: Part 4: The Pilgrim, the Tourist, the Flaneur (and the Worker),

Van Abbe museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

ZHANG PEILI

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2012 Zhang Peili, MAAP SPACE, Bris bane Australia

2011 CERTAIN PLEASURES/Zhang Peili Retrospective, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

2009 Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand 2008 Zhang Peili, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York

1998 Zhang Peili: Eating, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1996 Video Forum, Art 27’96, Basel, Switzerland

Selected Group Exhibitions

2011 Light from Light, National Library of China, Shanghai Library and State Library of Queensland

2010 Not only time: Zhang Peili and Zhu Jia, REDCAT, Los Angeles, USA 2007 85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art, Ullens Center for Con temporary Art, Beijing 2007 We Are Your Future, White Box, New York

2007 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow 2006 China Power Station, Serpentine Gallery, London

ZHU JIA

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2013 ZHU JIA: The Face of Facebook, ShanghART Singapore, Singapore 2013 Video Bureau Archive 17: Zhu Jia, Video Bureau, Guangzhou and Beijing 2012 ZERO, Solo Exhibtition, ShanghART Beijing

2011 The Face of Fecabook, ShangART Beijing

2008 We Are Perfect, Zhu Jia Solo Ex hibtition, ShangART H-Space, Shanghai

Selected Group Exhibitions

2015 Art Changsha China: Bridges to History, Technology, Poetry and Grace, Changsha Municipal Museum; Tan Guobin Contemporary Art Museum, Changsha

2015 Mobile M+: Moving Images, Hong Kong

2014 In & Out Réel ShanghART, Réel Department Store, Shanghai

2012 Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World, the Seventh Shen zhen Scultpure Biennale, OCT Contempo rary Art Terminal, Shenzhen

2011 Moving Image In China : 1988-2011, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

2010 Not Only Time, Zhang Peili and Zhu Jia, REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/Ca larts Theater), Los Angeles

HEIMO ZOBERNIG

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2015 Austrian Pavilion, 56. Biennale di Venezia, Venezia

2014 Mudam Luxembourg, Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg

2013 Heimo Zobernig, Kunsthaus Graz

2012 Heimo Zobernig, Palacio de Velázquez, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid

2011 Galerie Christian Nagel, Köln

2010 Permanent Reversal, Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane

Selected Group Exhibitions

2015 Die 80er Jahre. Pluralismus an der Schwelle zum Informationszeitalter, MUSA, Wien

2015 Picasso in der Kunst der Gegenwart, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg

2015 Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015, Whitechapel Gallery, London

2014 Die andere Seite. Spiegel und Spiegelungen in der zeitgenössischen Kunst. Eine Ausstellung des Belvedere, Museum Moderner Kunst Kärnten, Kla genfurt

2012 Minimalism in Germany. The Sixties II, Daimler Contemporary, Berlin

LANDSEASKY VENUE PROFILES

《海陆空》承办场所一览

OCAT – OCT Contemporary Art Terminal was established in 2005 under the direction of the well-know art historian and critic Huang Zhuan. Actively Involved in the project are the Chicago based curator Wu Hung, Tate curator Marko Daniel, and the artists Sui Jianguo, Wang Guangy, Wang Jianwei, Zhu Jia. OCAT Shanghai was set up as the Shanghai branch of OCAT in the Suzhou Creek area. With the opening of Yang Fudong’s solo exhibition “Quote Out of Context” in September 2012, it offcially started its autonomous activity as a space for display and research of Chinese and International Multi-media Art. www.ocatshanghai.com

Art Sonje Center shows art from “here and now.” Actively searching for the opportunity to collaborate with those in the felds of music, literature, architecture, dance and fashion. The Art Sonje Center also has the mandate to provide radical exhibition planning to support new projects. Through networking with major art museums and artists especially in other Asian countries, the Art Sonje Center is becoming an important center for Asian cultural exchanges. www.artsonje.org

艺术善载中心是一家成立于1998年的私营艺术博 物馆，常期支持极具实验性的当代艺术。秉承着 开放的态度和对展览手法的实验精神，艺术善载 中心致力于展现“此时此地”的艺术。在积极与 音乐、文学、建筑、舞蹈和时尚领域的才能跨界 合作之余，艺术善载中心的另一目标便是以激进 的展览规划支持新锐项目。通过与各大艺术博物 馆以及来自其他亚洲国家的艺术家的频繁合作， 艺术善载中心正日益演变为亚洲文化交流的重 要枢纽。

Gallery IHN was established in April 1989 and promotes, represents, supports and exhibits the new and innovative works of major Korean artists. The gallery aims to develop relationships between the art, the artists, the audiences, and the collectors.

design. The program allows the gallery to present a diverse array of artists that are not formally a part of the gallery program but provides a platform for a community of compelling appreciators of the creative process. www.oneandj.com

One and J 画廊在2005年9月成立于首尔，是城内 首批聚焦于年轻当代韩国艺术家的画廊之一。目 前，画廊代理着一批备受瞩目的新锐艺术家，并 已开始定期展出来自其他国家艺术家的作品。 所代理艺术家参与过数量惊人的群展和个展， 作品多次选入国际、国内外馆藏。2015年，画廊 发起了名为1NJ629的夜间项目，呈现电影、录像 艺术、行为艺术、音乐和设计作品。通过该项 目，画廊得以呈现一系列未被其正式代理的艺 术家之作，为艺术创作鉴赏群体提供了一个绝佳 的平台。

MAAP SPACE features regular curated exhibitions of media art from Australia and the Asia Pacifc regions. MAAP has supported, generated, exchanged and collaborated on hundreds of projects with major international partners in Australia and abroad. MAAP was conceived as a not-for-proft cultural organisation and was registered as Incorporated Association in 1998. Between 1998 and 2006, MAAP cultivated an international reputation for annual and biannual media art festivals. In all, MAAP produced 7 international media art festivals across Brisbane, Beijing and Singapore, encompassing collaboration and representation from 14 countries. MAAP explores media art through critical exhibitions and research initiatives that engage the region’s major and emerging practitioners and producers. www.maap.org.au

The gallery has been dedicated to contemporary Korean art, bringing together artists from different generations, whose names are widely represented in Korea as well as in the international art market. Gallery IHN has obtained its reputation in organising ambitious and innovative exhibitions of leading artists.

The gallery acts as a consultant to major museums and public art institutions and as a precursor to Korean contemporary art. Gallery IHN has held exhibitions specialized in contemporary Korean art including painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media and installations. www.galleryihn.com IHN 画廊成立于1989年4月，通过代理、展出来 自著名韩国艺术家的新锐作品以宣传并支持他们

LEEHWAIK Gallery opened in 2001 and representing leading fgures in Korean contemporary art, presenting exhibitions and promoting artists to galleries and dealers worldwide. At the same time, it unwearyingly discovers and supports rising artists in Korea. LEEHWAIK Gallery continuously participates in the international art fairs such as Art Stage Singapore, Abu Dhabi Art and KIAF, also in the auctions by Christie’s and Sotheby’s in order to promote Korean artists to international viewers. Such opportunities enable artists to enter the international art markets and eventually contribute to the advancement of the Korean contemporary art market. LEE HWAIK Gallery will spare no efforts to increase public understanding and appreciation of the contemporary art. www.leehwaikgallery.com

LEEWAIK 画廊成立于2001年，在之后的十年中 一直注心于代理韩国当代艺术界的领军人物，举 办展览，并向全球范围的画廊和艺术品商人宣 传旗下的艺术家。同时，该机构亦孜孜不倦地挖 掘、支持韩国新锐艺术家。LEEWAIK画廊一直 踊跃参与包括艺术登陆新加坡、阿布扎比艺博会 和韩国国际艺博会在内的国际艺博会，以及佳士 得和苏富比拍卖会，以便向国际受众宣传韩国艺 术家。此般契机让艺术家们得以进军国际艺术 市场，最终为韩国当代艺术市场的发展做出贡 献。LEEWAIK画廊将为提高公众对当代艺术的理 解和鉴赏而全力以赴。

The Art Sonje Center, founded in 1998, is a private art museum, which supports current and experimental contemporary art. With an open attitude and the spirit to experiment with exhibition methods, the

ONE AND J. Gallery was founded in September 2005 in Seoul as one of the frst galleries to focus primarily on young contemporary Korean artists. Currently, the gallery represents a strong lineup of emerging and mid-career artists and has begun to show non-Korean artists in Seoul on a regular basis. Artists represented by the gallery have participated in an impressive array of group and solo exhibitions and works included in international and national collections since the inception of the gallery. In 2015, the gallery launched a night program titled 1NJ629 focusing on flm, video art, performance, music and

OPSIS ART is a new and energetic gallery that opened in 2012. Representing both young and experienced artists, the gallery specialises in conceptual art practice in domestic and international spheres. The gallery embraces challenging art works across media and interdisciplinary practice. The gallery is located in the center of the cultural district, with a number of art galleries, museums including the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, and the historic Kyungbok Palace in close proximity. In its short history, Opsis Art has developed a strong and consistent reputation for its high-quality exhibitions, and is now seen amongst the most infuential art spaces in Korea. www.opsisart.co.kr

OPSIS ART 于2012年开张，是一家全新的、充满 活力的画廊。画廊聚焦于国内外的概念艺术实 践，既代理年轻艺术家，又代理经验丰富的艺术

Gallery SKAPE, with aim of appreciating multiformity and perceiving the landscape of today’s art scene, Gallery SKAPE opened its doors in September 2004. Actively promoting contemporary Korean artists, the gallery has been quickly positioned as a platform of the ‘newness’ within Korean art scene. Furthermore, by its distinctive taste of contemporary art, Gallery SKAPE has become a forefront of discovering and promoting Korean artists. Participation in international well known art fairs is also an important activity for Gallery SKAPE to promote Korean contemporary art. Gallery SKAPE is progressively gaining international recognition along with the representing the most promising contemporary artists in Asia. www.skape.co.kr

www.griffth.edu.au/visual-creative-arts/ griffth-artworks/griffth-university-artgallery

格里菲斯大学艺术画廊是一家坐落于昆士兰艺术 学院南岸校区内的公共画廊，免费向公众开放。 画廊常举办多样且策划考究的展览，并常与当 地、州内、以及国家范围内的画廊一同巡展，让 公众聚焦于当代艺术实践及其历史语境。

Guangdong Museum of Art is a major cultural establishment in the province and the largest of its kind in China. Equipped with modern facilities, this museum, like the best art museums in advanced countries, is a place where works of art are preserved, studied and displayed. The museum also promotes education and cultural exchange. With a total area of 20,000 square meters and a display area of over 8,000 square meters, the Guangdong Museum of Art consists of twelve exhibition halls, in which exhibitions of both large- and small-scale work may be shown. The 300-seat auditorium has an advanced projection and video facilities. www.gdmoa.org

The National Art School (NAS) Gallery encourages appreciation and critical perspectives of art and its role in society through direct engagement with artists and innovative art practices. The program consists of research, publications, public programs, artist residencies, and exhibitions featuring multi-discipline group and solo projects by Australian and international artists, including the end of yearshowcase of graduating students. The NAS Gallery is housed in the former A-Wing of the old Darlinghurst Gaol. Originally built between 1836–41, the building was refurbished and opened to the public in 2006. www.nas.edu.au/nasgallery

广东美术馆是位于广东省内的一家顶尖文化机 构，是国内同类博物馆中最大的一所。馆内设备 先进优良，堪比发达国家中的优秀艺术博物馆， 是保存、学习、展示艺术品的圣地。博物馆同 时重视宣传教育和文化交流。全馆占地20,000平 方米，展馆面积超过8,000平方米，内有十二间 展厅，展出各种规模的艺术品。此外，馆内还有 间可容三百人入座的礼堂，内有高端投影和录 像设备。

University Art Gallery is a free pub lic gallery at the Queensland College of Art’s South Bank campus. A diverse and rigorous range of exhibitions are generated in-house, or toured with regional, state or national galleries in a bid to focus attention on contemporary practices and their historical contexts.

LANDSEASKY was an extended collaboration that was made possible through the generous support of our partners and many individuals that contributed invaluable expertise and resources. It is impossible to list all by name, but MAAP extends sincere gratitude to all those who were involved in the development and presentation during the near four years of this project.

Sincere thanks to the MAAP Board once again for steady advice and stewardship through the many phases of this project: Zane Trow, Paul O’Kane, Naomi Evans, Christopher Meakin, Dave Allen, and Jeffery Sams. Thanks to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam for the extended loan of Jan Dibbets works from its collection; David Pestorious for assistance with the loan of work by Heimo Zobernig; MAAP and Craig Walsh wish to acknowledge the Circle of Elders (the traditional custodians), the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, and Rio Tinto staff. Thank you to the Confucius Institute at QUT.

OCAT Shanghai Director, Yuan Jingping; Executive Director, Zhang Peili; Artistic Director, Mariagrazia Costantino; Curatorial Assistant, Tao Hanchen; Exhibition Affairs & Designer, Lele Geng; Media and public relation, Gini Yuan; Public Educator,Yu Xixi; Secretary, Tang Yani

SIVA – Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, Fudan University, Vice Dean Hu Jieming, Translator Lixin Bao, Mu Jin Guangdong Museum of Art, Director Luo Yiping, Yuqing HU, Hairong HUANG, Chunyuan ZHOU, Ye Jing

Art Sonje Center Chief Curator Sunjung Kim, Brandon Lee, Najung Kim, Sunmin Lee / Gallery IHN Ihn Yang, Jini Yang / Lee Hwaik Gallery Hwaik Lee, Donghyun Kim / ONE AND J Gallery Pat Lee, Vicky Kim / Gallery SKAPE Kyung-ae Son, Somi Sim / OPSIS ART Woong-kie Kim / Special assistance Rue Young Ah and Jun Young Chang / Technical Installation, Multi Tech

Griffth University Art Gallery Acting Director Naomi Evans 2012-2015, Exhibition and Public Programs Offcer Rob Corless.

National Art School Gallery NAS Director Michael Snelling, Curator and Gallery Manager Judith Blackall, Jane Barrow and a vast array of volunteers. Technical installation, Gotaro Uematsu.

MAAP – Media Art Asia Pacifc Director Kim Machan, Exhibition and Tour Support Ashlee Sang, Gallery Assistant Jessica Row, Research Assistant and China projects support Davina Li, Korea Project Manager Eunju Kim, LANDSEASKY Graphic and Identity design Paul Bai, Exhibition Design Drawings Bridgette Li, Exhibition Models Nicholas Brand, Exhibition support Troy Skewes, Compilation Assistant Zoe Knight.

Image credits

All artworks were photographed as they were installed at multiple LANDSEASKY venues. Other images stills as provided by the artists. Copyright of the artworks remains with the artist unless otherwise stated. All photography © MAAP-Media Art Asia Pacifc Inc., excluding otherwise named photographers:

Courtesy OCAT Shanghai, photographer Allan pp 6, 13, 39

Courtesy Griffth University Art Gallery, photographer Mick Richards pp 8, 32–33, 36, 67–69, 74–77, 80–81, 83

Courtesy Gallery IHN, photographer Jung Dong Kwang pp 24–25

Courtesy National Art School Gallery, photographer Peter Morgan pp 16, 22–23, 30–31, 63, 73, 79

Courtesy the artist, photographer Craig Walsh p71

Courtesy the artist, photographer Marah Weston p61

Courtesy the artist and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam pp 14–15

Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery pp 62–63

Courtesy the artists and David Pestorius Projects pp 13, 24–25, 76–77

Courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery p 17

Courtesy the artists pp 29, 30–31, 32–33, 46–47, 52–53, 59, 67–69, 74–75

《海陆空》这一合作项目历时甚长，通过各个合作伙伴的支持和多位独立个人献出的宝贵专长和资源才得以圆满落成。 我们无法在此处罗列所有参与者的名字，但MAAP对参与了这一长达四年的项目的发展和呈现的各位致以真挚的感谢。 我们将再一次对MAAP的理事会在项目各个阶段所提出的中肯意见和严谨的工作态度表示特别的感谢，董事会会员包括： 赞恩·特洛，保罗·欧凯恩，纳奥米·埃文斯，克里斯托弗·米金，戴维·艾伦，以及杰弗里·山姆斯。感谢阿姆斯特 丹市立博物馆长期借予我们其馆藏中来自扬·迪波兹的作品；感谢大卫·佩斯托力欧斯为租借黑默·佐伯尼格的作品提 出的援助；MAAP和克莱格·沃尔什在此鸣谢 the Circle of Elders 理事会（传统管理人），Murujuga土著公司，以及力拓集 团的工作人员。感谢昆士兰理工大学孔子学院。

OCAT上海馆馆长：袁静平；执行馆长：张培力；艺术总监：玛丽娅·科斯坦蒂诺；策展助理：陶寒辰；展务设计：耿泊 渊；媒体推广：袁青仪；公共教育：郁熙熙；文员：汤娅妮 SIVA－复旦大学上海视觉艺术学院副院长：胡介鸣，翻译：木巾，吴歌 广东美术馆馆长：罗一平，胡宇清，黄海蓉，周春源，叶婧 艺术善载中心策展总监：金宣廷，李范九，金娜廷, 李鮮旼／IHN画廊： 梁仁, 梁眞禧／Lee Hwaik画廊：Hwaik Lee, Donghyun Kim／One and J 画廊：Pat Lee，Vicky Kim／SKAPE画廊： 孫瑞瀯, 沈昭美／OPSIS画廊： Woong-kie Kim／研究 及特别援助：柳英雅，同时感谢張俊英 ／ Multi Tech

格里菲特大学美术馆执行馆长：纳奥米·埃文斯（2012–2015），展览和公共项目指导：罗伯特·科尔勒斯 国家艺术学院画廊总监：迈克尔·斯内林；策展人兼画廊经理：朱迪思·布莱科尔，简·巴罗以及大量志愿者；声频及 视觉装置：戈塔罗·植松

MAAP－亚太媒体艺术馆长：金曼；展览及巡展支持：阿什利·桑；画廊助理：杰西卡·罗；研究助理和中国项目支持： 达维娜·李；韩国项目经理：金银铢，展览设计绘图：布里奇特·李；展览模型：尼古拉斯·布兰德；展览支持：特洛 伊·斯奎斯；编译助理：佐伊·奈特

图像所有权

所有艺术品图像皆于《海陆空》多个展览场所装置现场拍摄而得。其他定格图像由艺术家提供。 除特此注明的摄影师外，所有摄影版权属于MAAP-亚太媒体艺术有限公司。

致谢OCAT上海馆，摄影师：周玉强 pp 6, 13, 39

致谢格里菲特大学美术馆，摄影师：米克·理查兹 pp 8, 32–33, 36, 67–69, 74–77, 80–81, 83

致谢IHN画廊，摄影师：鄭東洸 pp 24-25

致谢国家艺术学院画廊，摄影师：彼得·摩尔根 pp 16, 22–23, 30–31, 63, 73, 79 致谢艺术家本人， 摄影师：克莱格·沃尔什 p 71 致谢艺术家本人， 摄影师：玛拉·威斯顿 p 61 致谢艺术家本人以及阿姆斯特丹市立博物馆