Ink Things, Chen Shaoxiong

Artwork Overview

Image not available
Chen Shaoxiong, artist
born 1962
Ink Things, 2006–2007
Where object was made: China
Material/technique: NTSC; 3 minutes
Credit line: Museum purchase: R. Charles and Mary Margaret Clevenger Fund
Accession number: 2008.0303.01
Not on display
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Images

Exhibitions

Chen Shaoxiong: Ink Things
Kris Ercums, curator
2009–2010
Art Minute Tour
2017

Resources

Audio

Didactic – Art Minute
Didactic – Art Minute
Episode 207 Jan-2010, Sooa Im I'm David Cateforis with another Art Minute from the Spencer Museum of Art. In Ink Things, a short video work from 2007, Chinese artist Chen Shaoxiong explores our fragmentary relationship with the "stuff" of our daily lives. Accompanied by rhythmic, percussive music, fluently painted black-and-white pictures of objects like socks, tools and toys, along with occasional human and animal images, successively flash on the screen at brief, irregular intervals, evoking the material inundation of 21st century urban life. In the history of Chinese painting, ink has traditionally been reserved for lofty and spiritual subjects. Chen, however, employs this medium to depict the trivial and mundane, and then transforms these ink paintings into a rapidly flowing chain of digitized still images. Effectively combining old and new artistic media, ink painting and digital photography and video, Ink Things leads us to consider the contrast between the long and careful observation of material life required to make a painting and the rapid glimpses of ordinary objects that characterize daily urban experience. With thanks to Sooa Im for her text, from the Spencer Museum of Art, I’m David Cateforis.