HER.E i see lotus
A two-part film & video exhibition and performance program curated by Luxin Zhang
Part I: Friday, January 11, 2019 – Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Part II: Thursday, January 31, 2019 – Sunday, February 17, 2019
Curatorial Statement
Organized as part of Vox Populi’s ongoing 4th Wall series, HER.E i see lotus, a film & video exhibition and performance program curated by Luxin Zhang, features the works of thirteen emerging, rising, and established international female artists living in the USA today working in video, film and/or performance. These artists embrace their own heritage, whilst consolidating a certain individualistic flair to their pieces. Works include short and mid-length film, experimental video, performance, fiction and documentary.
HER.E i see lotus is divided into two sections: Part I, Ripples on the water brings awareness to an array of themes pertaining to experience, observation, reflection, experimentation and being in the USA. PART II, Jiggling Petals showcases work that embodies strength, identity, intimacy and depth.
PART II, Jiggling Petals
Jan 31, 2019 – Feb 17, 2019
Various | 2019 | 60 minutes
This program features What I haven’t Known About Her by Yueying Feng, A National Dance by Salome Kokoladze, Korea Workout Routine by Yaloo Ji Yeon Lim, Self Portrait – AEG Vampyr by Selma Selman, The Boat Has Sailed, Hasn’t It? by Sichong Xie, and When We Started Using Sticks by Yilu Yang.
What I haven’t Known About Her by Yueying Feng
12’30’’, 2018
The film features two important female family members of the filmmaker, through narration of the protagonist and the filmmaker’s camera observation, it studies an untold family history that composed of sexual violations and oppressions against women in Contemporary China from an intimate perspective.
A National Dance by Salome Kokoladze
5’39’’, 2017
While national dances tend to focus on celebrating one’s nation and culture, “A National Dance” points to necessary violence that the existence of a nation entails. The video questions the discourse that idealizes the concept of a nation by focusing on disciplining and controlling mechanisms such as the police or the military and the ways in which they leave imprint on our bodies. The video piece is an interplay between found footage displaying quotidian movements in male-dominated disciplinary spaces and my own dance emulating these movements while being hyperfeminine. I create continuity between emasculation of men in the disciplinary spaces and subjugation of women in a day-to-day life. A national dance, in this context, becomes a set of body movements shaped and determined by patriarchal practices in Georgia.
Korea Workout Routine by Yaloo Ji Yeon Lim
5’00’’, 2017
Yaloo archives national workout routine campaign as a media artist.
Self Portrait – AEG Vampyr by Selma Selman
9’47’’, 2017
“Self-Portrait – AEG Vampyr” is a performance where I destroy multiple vacuums, sorting both the valuable parts and the less valuable parts. The metals and the motors are valuable, but the plastic is worthless. In addition, my family’s everyday survival is dependent on this exact same labor, but the metals and motors are sold in the recycling centers.
The Boat Has Sailed, Hasn’t It? by Sichong Xie
10’24’’, 2018
“The Boat Has Sailed, Hasn’t It?” is a logical continuation of projects like “For A Missing Funeral To Be Attended” (2018) and “The Boat Is Sinking” (2018). These are neither installations nor performances. The project “The Boat Has Sailed, Hasn’t It?” includes three parts – a fish’s funeral speech, a seesaw boat, and a floating dock in the Wesserunsett Lake, Maine. The voiceover present what Xie calls “boat conversations,” produced on a wooden seesaw boat that Xie built during the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency in 2018. What we see scrolling on the screen are not the documentation of the project but the search performed by Sichong Xie and Hadrien Gerenton with their personal and collective memories.
When We Started Using Sticks by Yilu Yang
16’19’’, 2018
From a macro-historical perspective, this work explores how human beings were using sticks and developing sticks into various tools to satisfy human desires. Meanwhile, this work implies how human beings progressed step by step, from wild primitive to intelligent creatures, while shows the reflection on the industrial revolution.
Artist Bios – Part II
Yueying Feng, born in China, is a filmmaker and writer based in New York City and Shenzhen, China. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Film from College of Visual and Performing Arts in Syracuse University, NY. She has a Bachelor of the Arts in Film Studies that was received in 2015, from Bejing Film Academy, China. Her films have been screened and exhibited in Bucherest International Experimental Festival, Art Helix, SU Art Gallery and Spark Contemporary Art Space. Her screenplay was nominated as ‘The Best Feature Film Screenplay’ in the 10th Golden Words Award of Beijing Film Academy. Her film review has been published on YingBo Impact, the magazine of China National Film Museum (CNFM). She served as a first-round selection Jury for the 20th Beijing College Student Film Festival. She also has volunteered for 3 consecutive years in International Students Film Festivals as writer, reporter and translator from 2012 to 2014.
https://www.afyueying.com/
Salome Kokoladze is a visual artist working with video, installations and performance art. Born in 1992 in Batumi, Georgia, she currently lives and works in Syracuse, New York. Before coming to Syracuse, Kokoladze has edited visual content for the feminist periodical HYSTERIA, developed social media platforms and original visual content for Romedia Foundation and was an editorial intern at Fence magazine’s nonfiction/other section. Since 2016 Kokoladze is an MFA student of Art Video program at Syracuse University, where she also teaches undergraduate art video courses. Kokoladze has participated in performances at Kirby Theater in Amherst, MA, American College Dance Festival Association Conference in Boston, MA, Stúdió Galéria and Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Budapest, Hungary and Spark Contemporary Art Center in Syracuse, New York. Kokoladze’s visual work has been shown at Gallery Verkligheten in Umeå, Sweden, Artpolis in Prishtina, Kosovo, at Urban Video Project and Random Access Gallery in Syracuse, New York.
Yaloo is a Korean artist based in Seoul and Chicago. She received her Master of Fine Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2015 with a focus on digital image making and video installation. She was the first recipient of Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fellowship, given by SAIC’s Video Data Bank. She won a gold award by AHL foundation, New York. Yaloo’s works have been part of number of solo and group shows and screenings in Chicago, New York, Seattle, Vancouver, British Columbia, Malmo, Sweden, and Seoul, South Korea. Her has received full residency fellowships at Headlands Arts Center, Bemis Studio Art Center, La Bande Video, Vermont Studio Center among other.
http://yaloopop.com/
Selma Selman (b.1991) comes from Bosnia and Herzegovina and is of Romani origin. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2014 from Banja Luka University’s Department of Painting and in 2018 she graduated from Syracuse University, Master of Fine Arts -Transmedia, Visual and Performing Arts, Syracuse, NY. She was a fellow for the Roma Graduate Preparation Program at the Central European University in Budapest, the following year. That year, Selman was the recipient of the prestigious “Zvono Award”, given to the best young artist in Bosnia and Herzegovina, winning a residency in New York City. Selman participated in Tania Bruguera’s International Summer Academy in Salzburg, “Arte Util” in 2013. In 2017 Selman was awarded as the best Young European Artist “Trieste Contemporanea Award”, Trieste (ITA). Her works were shown internationally, “Hero Mother” in Kunstquartier Bethanie, Berlin (2016), “Identification – Field exercises after Katalin Ladik”, acb Gallery, Budapest (2017). Solo shows “You Have No Idea”, agnès b. Galerie Boutique, New York (2017), 2018 ‘’I Will buy my freedom when”, Studio Tommaseo, Trieste (ITA). Selma is a founder of the organization ”Get The Heck To School” whose aim is to empowering Roma girls all around the world who faced the ostracization from the society and poverty. Lives and works in the USA and Europe.
https://www.selmanselma.com/
Sichong Xie seeks to be a cultural organizer who utilizes body-based sculptural forms (masks / costumes / objects) transforming discarded materials and disregarded spaces by using the tools of humor and absurdity. By placing traditional sculptural forms within new sites, materials, and social constructs, she investigates these forms and movements within global communities to reconsider and re-envision shared spaces and performative practices. In the summer of 2016, she was a fellowship artist in the Watermill Center for Performance in Long Island, NY. During the six-week intensive workshops and practices, she collaborated with five other actors and dancers, creating a piece called Everyday Objects, a three-hour endurance performance integrating dance, experimental theatre and installations. In the summer of 2017, Sichong Xie has been chosen to participate in the Hauser & Wirth Somerset exchange residency at Bath School of Art & Design, Bath Spa University. She also did a five-hour endurance performance Walking With The Disappeared at the Hauser & Wirth Somerset gallery. Her practice deals with issues of identity, politics, cross-culturalism, and the surreal characteristics of her body in the ever-changing environment. Her current body of work explores Chinese culture versus American culture, her female gender versus the patriarchy that is reflected in municipal sculptures in China, and Chinese Communist politics versus the “only one child” generations.
http://www.sichongxie.com/
Yilu Yang is a performance and video artist. Born in 1990 in Shanghai, China. She often uses alternative body movements, monologues, singing or other ways to construct the cognitive world. She currently lives and works in Syracuse, New York. She received her BFA from Shanghai University where she majored in digital art. After graduated from school, she was working as an assistant director in 101 film studio in Shanghai for 3 years, getting familiar about the whole process of producing a film. Currently she is studying video art at Syracuse University, undertaking her MFA at the VPA school. Her videos and live performance have been shown on school exhibitions and Everson Museum screening project, in Syracuse, New York.
About the Curator
Luxin Zhang is an interdisciplinary artist and curator who works in Philadelphia, PA. She holds a B.S from Far Eastern University and received her MFA from Syracuse University in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. Her work often takes the form of performance, video, sound and photography. As a classically trained vocalist, she creates video and performance that plays with audience expectation. Widening the lens of performance and stage to include original audience, gallery viewers and mundane “off stage” scenes expands the spectrum of a song’s larger subliminal language.
Luxin Zhang has exhibited and performed internationally in galleries, museums, concert halls, including Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse; David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center in New York. Her work was also shown at Light Work in Syracuse, N.Y. She recently joined Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia, PA as an artist collective member.