Contemporary Chinese Art- another kind of view
DSL Collection
?To day city looks like an anthill. It has risen and grown as bamboo shoots spring up after the rain. The human made world has replaced the integral nature one. The living space we now experienced is just an enormous artificial hole. The towering structure in CITY represents our living reality which combines individual lives with a chaotic world. The combination of these square windows and the figures facing the same direction form a sequenced cycle of natural movement. The projected image and sound coming from above in the work creates a human paradise where things crash together in order to expand and become dramatized?
Liang Juhui
"Inside an open metal rack a wooden, tower-like structure grows to a height of seven meters. Viewed from a distance the installation looks like a Babylonian tower. Coming closer one realizes that the little windows in fact are small video screens and that a similar installation is fixed to the interior of the construction.
The Babylon tower metaphor offers various approaches to the understanding of Liang Juhuis installation. Liang, together with Xu Tan, Chen Shaoxiong and Lin Yilin, formed the Guangzhou based Big Tail Elephant Working Group. They were not a classic ?artists community? as its members neither lived together nor worked on common projects. The group members nevertheless shared a common need to artistically come to grips with the breathtaking changes of their living environment. Guangzhou was one of the earliest centres of an unleashed capitalism in post-Mao Zedong China. Located in the Pearl River delta, during the last thirty years the city expanded in an unprecedented speed and together with Hong Kong and Shenzhen mingled into one gigantic urban space, which by now is one of the fastest growing mega-cities on earth.
Today China is one of the countries with the highest number of skyscrapers on earth. As much as high-rises drastically changed the appearance of the city, digital media have rearranged the living habits of the urban population. Cell phones, DVD-players and the Internet became an inseparable part of life. Furthermore people from all over China and the world spill into the cities. There are the well-educated highly flexible international white-collar specialists and their newly emerged Chinese counterparts and there are the uncounted masses of migrant workers who do the dirty labour which forms the basis of the economic miracle and whose forced nomadic life-style is about to create social conditions of a highly explosive potential. This melange of latent civil unrest, architectural developments, linguistic alterations and globalized urbanism is condensed into the seven meters of wood and electronic gear made by Liang Juhui.
The artist tragically passed away in 2006 due to an undetected heart disease. With his death the fifteen years history of the Big Tail Elephant Working Group came to an end."
christoff Buettner
Liang Juhui
"Inside an open metal rack a wooden, tower-like structure grows to a height of seven meters. Viewed from a distance the installation looks like a Babylonian tower. Coming closer one realizes that the little windows in fact are small video screens and that a similar installation is fixed to the interior of the construction.
The Babylon tower metaphor offers various approaches to the understanding of Liang Juhuis installation. Liang, together with Xu Tan, Chen Shaoxiong and Lin Yilin, formed the Guangzhou based Big Tail Elephant Working Group. They were not a classic ?artists community? as its members neither lived together nor worked on common projects. The group members nevertheless shared a common need to artistically come to grips with the breathtaking changes of their living environment. Guangzhou was one of the earliest centres of an unleashed capitalism in post-Mao Zedong China. Located in the Pearl River delta, during the last thirty years the city expanded in an unprecedented speed and together with Hong Kong and Shenzhen mingled into one gigantic urban space, which by now is one of the fastest growing mega-cities on earth.
Today China is one of the countries with the highest number of skyscrapers on earth. As much as high-rises drastically changed the appearance of the city, digital media have rearranged the living habits of the urban population. Cell phones, DVD-players and the Internet became an inseparable part of life. Furthermore people from all over China and the world spill into the cities. There are the well-educated highly flexible international white-collar specialists and their newly emerged Chinese counterparts and there are the uncounted masses of migrant workers who do the dirty labour which forms the basis of the economic miracle and whose forced nomadic life-style is about to create social conditions of a highly explosive potential. This melange of latent civil unrest, architectural developments, linguistic alterations and globalized urbanism is condensed into the seven meters of wood and electronic gear made by Liang Juhui.
The artist tragically passed away in 2006 due to an undetected heart disease. With his death the fifteen years history of the Big Tail Elephant Working Group came to an end."
christoff Buettner