Legacy and fiction

Conceptual photography by XuGuofeng & KangKai

Artists:XuGuofeng Kangkai

Dates: June 13-July 9,2009

Opening: June 13/5-8pm

Open everyday from 11am to 6pm

Exhibition concept: Chinese Opera once was Chinese popular art, but nowadays Chinese pop culture has quickly emulated the advanced world culture (of the west) with a high speed of Chinese modernization and the globalization of world economy and culture. Chinese opera—the formerly prevalent popular art however has become classic art or alternative art which has triggered us to ponder over it.

Relaxing, fashionable, innovative and leisured are four important features of pop culture in modern society. Under the premise of keeping the special stylized forms of Chinese Opera, we added some popular elements in our work, trying to smash the shackle of “Classic” and deconstruct the old patterns in order to present it in an easy look of popular art.

During the exhibition, we saw the attention and interest in the eyes of our audiences with different age, different culture background and different social status ( including administration executives, experts and professionals, also the local city residents and peasants) which indeed made us feel satisfied at certain point, after all they are the public who are different from amateurs.

——text by XuGuofeng

The Chinese Opera and Conceptual photography

--Text About Xu Guofeng KangKai By LiJiawei

First, conceptive photography technically weakens the physical function and mechanical duplication. Next, it formally goes beyond functions of photography itself, and is, by definition, against photographic documentary. What’s more important is that conceptive photography transcends the logic of physical time and space into the collective history and memory, and concerns social phenomena and cultural symbols of the sub-health, through the emphasis on the spiritual care for collective consciousness and non-physical issues on collective unconsciousness.

Xu Guofeng has immersed into the performance art for years, excelling at applying Peking Opera as his motifs for creation. He makes various opera make-ups mixed with many kinds of elements, such as the western multi-god worship, propaganda of freedom, democracy, truth, science, and even the so-called “war of justice” --- the Gulf War. He strives to build a narrative space in the cultural context. He analyzes certain cultural symbols spiritually, and is focused on social consciousness in form of indicative method within the universe, depending on the opera nature of assumption or hypothesis.

In “Honey Trap”, there are exciting pearls crown, shark fins, thick making-up, fresh animal haslets, beauty with vague charm, strange and evil, full of tangled nostalgia of the past and anger to the future. This scene follows the constant requirement of time, place, story in accordance with the law, which is written in Chinese as “三一律.”However, the irregular combination of various indicative symbols incites an intense internal conflict which has a sharp insight into the reality, and further reveals the substantial debauchery, cheats, deceptive verse, superficial demeanor, happiness caused by fine appearance, which is tentative and fatal.

"Pond" is metaphorical to all living creatures in the world, being engulfed by the flood instantaneously. There are some opera characters with different identities standing on the fallen Leaning Tower of Pis (it means science), and Inca Temple (it means truth). The middle scene is filled with the falling Gothic Cathedral (it means religious belief), and the erecting Statue of Liberty (it means the spirit of democracy) on the background, as well as a variety of metaphoricala symbols that mean the gospel coming. Xu Guofeng creates a deep scene with sense of fluoroscopy on two-dimensional photographs, mixing various identifications from different semantic space and conscious reference together, breaking through the photographic ontology’s dependence on time, jumping out of the technical domain of photography. Different opera actors behaving as absurd theatre-style rehearse, worrisome and anxious, express their helplessness to the loss of China's "national essence".

Xu Guofeng is an expert at flexibly restructuring multi-dimensional physical space on two-dimensional flat medium. In the premise of hypothesis, he strives to achieve the multi-narration of photography ontology by the transmission among different mirrors. He manipulates the relationship of role, actor and audience by means of indicative method, and interprets the humanistic history viewpoints of progress in myth, aesthetics, science, art and culture, in forms of critical vision, creative thinking and dramatic composition. He adheres to the historic/emotional evaluation on Chinese opera especially Peking Opera, but feels helpless and painful when it mentions the collective ignorance on history and culture currently.

It can be said that it is the collective, not certain talented individual, who creates fantastic art works. The unconscious collision of both creates the art itself on the basis of its taking root in the conscious restoration of ego and super-ego. This is the reason why Xu Guofeng’s conceptive photograph expresses his concerns about the collective loss of faith by means of transcending the appearance.