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Living
Elsewhere
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CHINA
/ 1999 / Chinese / Color / Video / 175 min
Director, Editing: Wang Jian-wei
Photography: Chu Jian-ping
Source: Wang Jian-wei
No. 705 Building 41 Huayanbeili Chaoyang District, Beijing 100029
CHINA
Phone & Fax: 86-10-62384664
E-mail: wangaa@public3.bta.net.cn
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Wang
Jian-wei
Born in 1958 in Sichuan Province, China. Received his Master's degree
from the Oil Painting Department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts.
Now makes his living as a professional artist, living and working
in Beijing. His acclaimed Tea painting series, showing villagers drinking
in the local teahouse have been exhibited internationally. Exhibitions
include "China´s New Art, Post-1989"(Hong Kong Arts
Centre, ' 93 and Marlborough Fine Art Clondon Ltd, GB, ' 93), "New
Asian Art Show - 1995" (Osaka and Tokyo, Japan, ' 95), "'
95 Kwangju Biennale" (infoART Kwangju, Korea, ' 95), "Asia-Pacific
of Contemporary Art Triennial"(Brisbane, Australia, ' 96), "Documenta
X Kassel" (Kassel, Germany, ' 97). His films include, Reproduction
(1995), Production (1996, shown at YIDFF '97), Architecture in
Contemporary China (1998.) |
Along
the newly constructed expressway to Chengdu's airport, there is a
group of villas built in the beginning of the nineties and left uncompleted
for almost seven years. In this marginal area between the city and
the country, four peasant families from different parts of China live
under primitive conditions as squatters, growing some vegetables,
collecting waste metals, and sewing clothes. Unable to return to their
homes after losing land in a bubble economy, they decided to migrate
and seek a new beginning. Artist Wang Jian-wei (Production,
YIDFF '97) sees the image of contemporary Chinese artists in these
farmers, caught between tradition and modernity.
Director's
Statement
It was in my experimentations with anthropological methodology, when
I was trying to capture a certain "event" in daily life, that I came
up with what you could call a new method of secret perception.
Individuals each from different places, oppressed individuals, come
together in one enclosed space and put themselves, as a group, in
the position of ' living elsewhere.' Can each of these individuals
maintain their own life-style, keep up their own ways, in this unique
place? Or, without their realizing it, will each be slowly changed,
taking on new experiences and new habits?
Through the continuous, or discontinuous, documentation of this process,
I want to show the attitude of people coming to understand culture
as they live out the realties of daily life.
To read what is an 'other' (what is an object) from the mutual interaction
of living daily life and of acting in the world, to read that ' other'
from the very condition of moving through a real, concrete space.
I want to simply place myself directly within the process of perceiving
the world, to reflect from a position where I had a consistent relation
to this ' other,' where I could refer to the ' other' as I depicted
the ' other,' and to never again be subjected to preconceptions or
to a linear mode of thinking "moving from here to there."
This process upholds a semantic space where meaning is ambiguous and
uncertain. The world will probably never again embody essence, but
it will hold anew what are real possibilities. |
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COPYRIGHT:Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival Organizing Committee
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