| Virtual Show (2020) Cheng Huai Art & Culture Association is a Montreal-based non-profit organization, dedicated to connect university students and young artists to the professional art industry. We provide possible resources and hands-on opportunities for those who wish to build a future career in arts. This year, COVID-19 has caused many unprecedented changes in our lives, communities, and country. During this unparalleled time period, the members of Cheng Huai believe that art has the power to give hope and strength. After three months of preparations, the Cheng Huai team is excited to officially launch this multimedia virtual exhibition to share with the world! “Through the Looking Glass,” this exhibition’s theme, calls back to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the absurdist reality in which she finds herself after falling down the rabbit hole. During quarantine, many of us feel like we are in our own “Wonderland,” where nothing is the same as it was before. We invited the participating artists reflect on their current circumstances. We ask the same question to them as we do to you, the viewer: “What do you see when you fall through your Looking Glass?” The resulting exhibition you are about to witness is a surreal journey of beauty, monsters, outlandish characters, as well as absurd and illogical visions. We hope you will enjoy it! Contributed Artists: Anne Thibault, Athena Katerina, Bin Dong, Ergang Feng, Fan Pu, Jinyan Feng, DOIS (kimura byol-nathalie lemoine & Fernando Belote), Laurence Dauphinais, Monique Boudreau, Wenyang Li, Xin Guan, Xuewen Yao, Ying Li. Contributors: Adeline (Jiawen) Li, Yuhan Xiao, Béatrice Langevin Background Music Composer: Zihan Xu Graphic Designer: Jessica Gu It is a series of pictures whose aim is to raise questions about self-reflection, curiosity, anonymity, loss and fragmentation. |
| The mirrored door of the closet is locked and opened by the same hand. A pair of shoes is missing. Someone cannot leave barefoot derrière cette porte |
| Curiosity if too close to the mirror, one loses its identity. 9 octobre (What is inside? Who am I?) |
| The door release. qu’est-ce que ça veut dire ? (Forced or opened by itself?) |
| A drawer offers a velvet little bag. if i let you know https://vimeo.com/143411459 (Was it a lost item? Or was it putted in there on purpose?) |
| The little bag has a mirror inside / who are you? The mirror only reflects 3 fingers. |
| Depending on how invested one is to the experience of self-reflection, the mirror will assume a paradoxical role. At the same time that it makes people more conscious about their bodies, the mirror also gets them lost in allegorical fantasies about who they are. The mirror disassociates the human from the concrete instance of reality in order to prioritize the emotions of the <em>self</em>, which is marked by fictional narratives of psychological order. This allegorical aspect of illusion marks the mirror symbolically as a portal to a different dimension, which is interior rather than exterior. |
| In the art piece, I evoke this private space by setting the bedroom and the closet as the background to a curious journey of finding by chance a carry-on mirror. It is a photographic sequence formally conceptualized in dualities and antitheses. |
| The phrases that kimura has chosen for the each photograph makes allusion to short stories that she explored in her video art projects, from which I identify myself conceptually. Kimura’s practice played a role in the understanding of myself as immigrant as in Montreal, and this way we shared our insights on how identifying ourselves with a culture in which we were not born but that we opted as home, which is Quebec. |
| No pieces of clothes, no shoes, the mirrored closet reveals another identitary item: a carry-on mirror. But this little mirror can only reveal a small part of a fragment that we already know: the fingers of the character. The viewer is left without knowing who the person was, where he was going, what he was looking for. One can only grasp a couple clues of the as unsettling propositions towards the unconscious. The art piece is a dream-like narrative revealing the mirror as an identitary promise that fascinates but never reveals. |
| These are 5 inkjet priced photos framed. Each image has a 8×10″ size and The Keywords are: self-reflection, curiosity, anonymity, loss and fragmentation. |
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star~kim project (kimura byol lemoine) 