Presenting:
Spring, Three-screen video installation, 2016
Sequence3-1 (5’11″) Sound, Color, Loop
Sequence3-2 (4’30”) Sound, Color, Loop
Sequence3-3 (9’23”) Silence, Color, Loop
Under Blue, single video, colour, sound, 6’38”, 2015
About Artworks
Spring
Spring is a season. A spring is an elastic object used to store mechanical energy.
Political “spring” is a term popularized in the late twentieth century to refer to any of a number of student protests, revolutionary political movements or revolutionary waves. Hence, there are many definitions to this word, spring. But it is ultimately about storing and releasing energy.
The video installation will be laid out as a three-part projection (Sequence shown as 1, 3, 2 here on the screen): sequence 1 will be projected from behind the screen, but can be viewed from both the front and back sides; sequence 2 will be projected on another screen and sequence 3 on a separate adjacent screen. Sequences 1 and 2 both have a corresponding soundtrack. The installation pieces work together to question the relationship between nature and civilization, and gender and politics. The narrative structure is broken among the three videos and the helix shape characteristic of a “spring” is the metaphor and metonymy which connects the three screens together to the theme. Imageries including water flowing on the stem, the mechanism of springs in action, and the shape of DNA are used create a dialogue between the projections.
Under Blue
Under Blue explores gender politics through beauty, pleasure, disgust, danger, violence, the erotic and the artificial, the dance of the brush and the movement of the camera, imparting an uneasy feeling of voyeuristic power to the viewer. Under Blue broadly speaking fits into the performance and body art trend in video art, but its exclusive use of close ups and the effect of not really understanding what we’re looking at. In the work, the fragmented body, body movement, colours and textures appear between real and surreal, our attention to those colours and textures are greatly rewarded, even as we understand the context even less.
About Artist
Yao Cong (b. 1992 China) currently lives and works in China.
Sensitive emotions have always been the driving force behind his inspiration. Yao Cong intends to build an exquisite, compelling body of work that critically reflects on how sexuality, gender, and body is manufactured and deconstructed today, how individual and collective engagements make the political personal, and unravels the in-between spaces of our private and public bodies. Through reconfiguring the language of desire, anxiety and authority into a new fluid, hybrid structure. He creates immersive works with hazy, poetic and sharp aesthetics by diverse media such as moving image, performance, installation, photography and painting in constant developments and explorations.
Yao Cong was born in Xi’an in 1992. He received his BA in Intermedia Art from China Academy of Art in 2014, In the same year, he won the Luo Zhongli Scholarship for the best graduating young artist in Greater China. His MA in Fine Art from Royal College of Art, London, in 2017.
Yao Cong’s works are exhibited extensively, at venues such as Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; CICA museum, Korean; Mill Hall, Kerala, India; Centre for Art and Culture, Barcelona, Spain; Shanghai Himalayas Museum, China; Today Art Museum, Beijing, China; Space Station, Beijing, China. His works have been featured at 8th International Contemporary Art Fair ARTVILNIUS (2017); VIDEONALE.16 (2017); Loop Barcelona (2017); 10th Beijing Queer Film Festival (2017); 13th Athens Digital Arts Festival (2017); Microwave International New Media Arts Festival (2016); Helsinki Festival (2015); 11th Beijing Independent Film Festival (2014), among others.
