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The dslcollection was created in 2005 by the French collectors Sylvain and Dominique Levy. The collection comprises major works of 200 contemporary Chinese artists, spanning different media, from cutting-edge technologies, painting, sculpture, installation, and photography.
Dslcollection – Focus on Photography Works
“Our mission is always to collect the work of our time.” Karen Levy
The dslcollection was created in 2005 by the French collectors Sylvain and Dominique Levy. Today their daughter Karen Levy is also actively helping to build the collection. The collection focuses on contemporary Chinese art. Even though limiting itself to a certain number of objects – not more than 350 – the collection comprises major works of 200 contemporary Chinese artists. The dslcollection itself spans different media, from cutting-edge technologies, painting, sculpture, installation, and photography. It includes key artists experimenting with the photographic medium, which we would like to introduce below.
GU DEXIN 顧德新
ABOUT THE WORK
To create this work, the artist pinched a piece of pork every day taking a photograph of the moment until the pork finally became too dry. The viewer is led to imagine Gu, a man full of life, sitting there pinching the "water" and "blood" out of a dead life, experiencing the constant contact between life and death. However, what the viewer experiences is only the elegance of false pretences and the ritualistic scene in a temple-like space. The photographs of hands pinching the pork are neatly arranged like a series of abstract paintings. The pieces of dried pork are laid on a table in the middle wrapped in red cloth, like the remains of the deceased waiting for others to pay their last respects. Gu has deliberately created a distance between what the viewers had “seen” and the real “meaning” that he had obtained in creating the work, so as to conceal what only he had experienced. What Gu created was only an inflammatory scene, a tentalising hint at the true significance.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
A pioneer of contemporary Chinese art, Gu Dexin is best known for his subversive installations that explore the concepts of decay and permanence. Since the 1980s, Gu has rejected the exploration of China’s socialist legacy that preoccupies many of his contemporaries, instead filling galleries with fruit or meat, which he would allow to rot in the gallery space. For other works he installs arrangements of mass-produced plastic, as in the toy automobiles of 2004.05.09 (2004), its title reflective of his insistence to not impose meaning on to his works. Gu’s artistic output is extremely varied—he began his career producing surrealistic, figurative paintings, and in recent years has turned to animation and a quieter, less graphic mode of installation, exemplified by 2009-05-02 (2009), a peaceful, cemetery-like piece accompanied by accusatory texts like “WE KILLED HUMANS.” Gu ended his career upon completing this work.
ZHANG HUAN 張洹
ABOUT THE WORK
Fifteen photographs of identical size, each showing a close-up of Zhang, whose face is covered with soap foam while a small photo peers through his open mouth. Although well known for his range of artistic practices, many of Zhang's works are in fact composites. "Foam" drives this approach further by actively deceiving the viewer. What looks like the documentation of a performance was in fact especially staged for the series of photos. Zhang holds on to his method of captivating his audience through a sense of discomfort. The foam on his face is open to a range of unpleasant inferences, while the photos of his family in his mouth could be interpreted as devouring history, just as the soap may be washing away his past.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
One of China's best-known performance and conceptual artists, Zhang Huan's more recent work has consisted of sculptures and paintings that reference the history of his native China, from significant political, intellectual, and religious figures to anonymous portraits and landscape scenes. For his two- and three-dimensional works, Zhang frequently uses both common objects and unusual organic materials, including feathers, cowhides, and for his 2005 sculpture Donkey, a taxidermied donkey. Particularly evocative is Zhang’s use of incense ash, a material that epitomizes both detritus and religious ritual, with which he paints and sculpts works that are as olfactory as they are visual
WANG QINGSONG 王庆松
ABOUT THE WORK
In this work, Wang posed a male and a female model in the pose of Russian-style painting (as taught in most art academies) simply to show the provocative spread of education as a business to make money in China. Artist statement – “Children who are less capable of going to universities due to the higher grades are given the opportunity to pay a lot of money to go to art schools. So how to make these children pass exams to art schools is a huge industry. This is what I am critical about.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Wang first won recognition as a painter in the mid-1990s through his membership in the Gaudy Art group, a movement influenced by the work of Jeff Koons and championed by China's most influential art critic, Li Xianting. Since turning from painting to photography in the late 1990s, Beijing-based artist Wang has created compelling works that convey an ironic vision of 21st-century China's encounter with global consumer culture. Working in the manner of a motion-picture director, he conceives elaborate scenarios involving dozens of models that are staged on film studio sets. The resulting colour photographs employ knowing references to classic Chinese artworks to throw an unexpected light on today's China, emphasizing its new material wealth, its uninhibited embrace of commercial values, and the social tensions arising from the massive influx of migrant workers to its cities.
ZHANG DALI 張大力
ABOUT THE WORK
As part of his "Dialogue with Demolition series, Zhang spray-painted silhouette of his head on walls of half-demolished traditional houses in Beijing and hired workers to chip away the bricks within the silhouette so that people could look through the hole at urban architecture in a sense "reading his thoughts" regarding the replacement of the old with the new. By applying a "modern" technique such as graffiti onto the ancient walls of Beijing, Zhang is commenting on the cost of modernity to China – destruction of tradition and in turn loss of identity or rebuilding for a better future?
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Zhang Dali was born in Harbin, China in 1963. He graduated from the painting department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing with a BA in 1987. An influential figure in socio-political artistic movements in China, Zhang Dali has, for decades, challenged the conventional with his social documentation in graffiti, sculpture, photography, and painting. Zhang was exiled after graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and spent six years immersing himself in Western art and art history in Italy. Upon his return to Beijing, he developed a keen interest in portraiture (usually of himself), documentary and public urban art, often interrupting spaces with confrontational political statements.
YANG YONG 楊勇
ABOUT THE WORK
The initial impression of Yong’s photograph is one of self-consciousness - a woman posing in a fictional urban setting. What is interesting is that the work does not suggest a narrative – it is not simply an out-take from a bigger story. It simply shows the relationship between the photographer and the model herself. Like most of Yong’s photographs, this is taken in Shenzhen, one of China's Special Economic Zones. The forced nature of this development (an imported population, inorganic growth of an urban infrastructure) has produced the sense of artificiality that underlines Yong’s photographs.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
b.1975, Sichuan Province, China. Yang Yong graduated from the Sichuan Art institute (Chongqing, China) in 1995. He moved to Shenzhen in the early 1990s and he currently lives and works in Shenzhen and Beijing, China. With photography, installation and painting, Yang Yong is firmly recounting the stories of his own generation, born in the 1970s and grown up in the process of China’s opening and urbanization.
CHEN CHIEH-JEN 陳建仁
ABOUT THE WORK
The film is based on the famous 1905 photograph of a man being punished the Manchu way, by being cut into pieces for the crime of murder. His ecstatic expression is attributed to opium, which was administrated to prolong the torture. Philosopher Georges Bataille discussed this photo extensively in his book The Tears of Eros and noted the correlations between the beauty of religious eroticism, divine ecstasy and the shocking horror of cruel torture. Chen’s cinematic close-ups of the victim’s face bring to mind images of blissful euphoria, homoeroticism, and religious crucifixion. The film is oddly un-sadistic, even though the content is of death by dismemberment. By linking the historical with the contemporary social and economic situation in Taiwan, Chen has created an extremely powerful work that links the past with the present, the fictive with the documentary. He is also specific to the local situation, while remaining universal.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Chen Chieh-Jen (b.1960) currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. Chen employed extra-institutional underground exhibitions and guerrilla-style art actions to challenge Taiwan’s dominant political mechanisms during a period marked by the Cold War, anti-communist propaganda and martial law (1950 – 1987). After martial law ended, Chen ceased art activity for eight years. Returning to art in 1996, Chen started collaborating with local residents, unemployed laborers, day workers, migrant workers, foreign spouses, unemployed youth and social activists. They occupied factories owned by capitalists, slipped into areas cordoned off by the law and utilized discarded materials to build sets for his video productions. In order to visualize contemporary reality and a people’s history that was obscured by neo-liberalism, Chen embarked on a series of video projects in which he used strategies he calls “re-imagining, re-narrating, re-writing and re-connecting.
SHENG QI 感奇
ABOUT THE WORK
"Memoirs (Me)" is part of a series of large-scale photo prints of Sheng's left hand in the palm of which he holds various small images. Using what he calls "found images, like old family photos, newspaper cut outs, historical images, political or pornographic photos, Sheng creates "image-within-an-image" situations. By reducing the images' size and presenting them in his un-proportionally large hand, he cuts off their recording function as he once cut off his finger. This act of de-contextualization transforms the images' original political, cultural or social content, reducing them to their aesthetic and entertaining function.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sheng Qi is a Chinese performance artist and painter who was one of the founders of the Chinese art group, Concept 21. He graduated from the Academy for Art and Design in Beijing in 1988. In 1989, Qui demonstratively cut off his little finger as a form of protest to the massacre at Tiananmen Square, he chopped off the little finger on his left hand. He then buried his finger in a porcelain flowerpot. After, he was exiled to Europe. In 1998, Qi graduated from the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, whereafter he returned to Beijing. As of 2010, Sheng Qui resides in London. His work is strongly focused on the body and on body language. He states that the Chinese people are poor and lack education and accommodation. His work resembles propaganda at first glance, but certainly carries out social criticism. He himself doesn't describe his work as a form of entertainment, but as a form of protest.
LIN TIANMIAO 林天苗
ABOUT THE WORK
Lin created her first series of prints in 2006 at the invitation of the Singapore Tyler Print Institute. Lin’s characteristic technique is to create gradual changes with a subtle palette of black, grey and white. In some of Lin's more recent work, she has further pushed the investigation between the pull to modernity and nostalgia for the past. Using technological mediums such as video and photography, Lin intercuts, interlaces and weaves over, under and beside images, using traditional women's craft techniques.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Lin Tianmiao received a BFA in 1984 from Capital Normal University in Beijing and, in 1989, studied at the Art Students League in New York City. From 1986 to 1995 she and her husband Wang Gongxin, a video artist, lived in the United States. The couple returned in 1995 to Beijing, where Lin began to gain recognition as a leading Chinese artist.
CHEN WEI 陈维
ABOUT THE WORK
Just a worn hat lying on a concrete ground... the simple yet poetic narrative of this work creates a strong visual impact that truly distinguishes Chen's oeuvre. The eccentric imagination of Chen's photography marks a definitive departure from the previous generation of artists who were focused on political history and social concerns. The spirit of Chen's works points towards a newfound focus on personal experiences and intellectual freedom.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Chen Wei was born in Zhejiang Province, China, in 1980.Chen’s multimedia works toe the line between experimental illusion and the quotidian realities of contemporary society, focusing on the almost imperceptible dream sequences that exist in even the most mundane of moments. His staged photographs, at once idealistic and ominous, negotiate the symbolist tropes put forward by the medium of photography.
JIANG PENGYI 蒋鹏奕
ABOUT THE WORK
A visual spectacle that is characteristic of Jiang's oeuvre, the "Everything Illuminates" series captures light trails emitted by phosphorescent powder over everyday objects, thus transforming their appearance and endowing them with a non-objective self-contentedness.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jiang Pengyi was born in 1977 in Hunan, China. He attended the Beijing Institute of Art & Design, from which he graduated in 1999 with a BA. Using photography as a catalyst for his carefully constructed scenes – a living room aglow with phosphorous powders or a wrecked miniature city – he captures uncertain narratives that inspect the socio-political landscape around him.
HU JIEMING 胡介鸣
ABOUT THE WORK
This highly acclaimed work is loosely modelled on Théodore Géricault’s 1819 historical painting of the same title. Hu draws a parallel between the social demise portrayed in Géricault’s “Medusa” and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Hu’s “Medusa” is far more than just a reference to the past; the photos allude to today’s excess consumerism and advertisement imagery. Pictures of contemporary youths engaging in hedonistic acts are juxtaposed with dull grey pictures of suppressed people in traditional Mao uniforms. These compositions using images appropriated from different social-political realities signify a strong critical engagement with both history and the present – it is a concern that ranges beyond pure private considerations.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
A pioneer of new media and video installation in China, Hu Jieming was born in Shanghai in 1957. He graduated from the Fine Art Department of the Shanghai Light Industry College in 1984. His work since the late 1980s ha explored the passage of time, and the collisions between past and present in the contemporary world. Hu has exhibited widely within China, and globally, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; MoMA PS1, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His work featured in the 9th Shanghai Biennale in 2012. Hu Jieming lives and works in Shanghai; his work is informed by the history of that city, and its importance in his own life.
ZHENG GUOGU 郑国谷
ABOUT THE WORK
In May 1994, Zheng spent an extensive period with a mentally handicapped man in Yangjiang, following him around and photographing him in various places at different times. These pictures became a major part of this poignant work, “Me and My Teacher”. In Zheng’s view, the essence of art may well lie in those people who, because of their so-called "abnormality", are in some sense free from serial and cultural constraints In one of the photos. both he and his companion appear possessed by innocent and spontaneous laughter which is perhaps the most natural and touching moment among these images.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Zheng Guogu was born in 1970 in Yangjiang, Guangdong province of China. He graduated from the printmaking department at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art in 1992. Zheng Guogu utilizes performance, photography, painting, sculpture, embroidery and the environment in his work. Zheng Guogu’s work has been collected by major museums including the Guggenheim Museum; Hammer Museum; The Museum of Modern Art; and M+ Museum, among others. He received the Best Artist Award by the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in 2006 and currently lives and works in Yangjiang, China.
More information:
•
www.g1expo.com/v3/dslcollection
• Texts and images from:
www.dslbook.com
