“How does it feel . . .” he ventured, “to be a leper?” The question seemed so personal, but Maria did not hesitate to answer. “In some ways I feel no different now than I did a year ago, but I am different because I’ve been sent here,” she said. “It’s a bit like being in prison, for someone like me who’s not affected by the disease day to day. Except there are no locks on the door, no bars.”
—Victoria Hislop, The Island
In November 2020, CAFA ART INFO starts the third phase of "Reflecting The Sharing Moment". Presently, while the domestic pandemic is still in a state of partial rebound and under strict control, the worldwide eye-catching U.S. presidential election has basically been settled and many European countries have ushered in a second round of lockdowns.
We care about the world while keeping eye on our inward world. In the forced estrangement, people are contradictorily isolated and interdependent. As John Donne wrote in his poem: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” When looking at the vast universe of galaxies, the earth on which mankind lives is nothing but an isolated island floating in it. We look up at the radiance of the sun and the moon and seek from unknown energy. Mankind will never lose hope of becoming better.
In this section, we have invited 15 artists/groups to create an ongoing discussion on the impact of the pandemic/post-pandemic era on individuals, lives, relationships, and society in different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
Six feet (approximately two meters) is the safe “social distance” advocated under the pandemic. In the reality of society, the physical distance between people is separated. Isolated at home, people seem to become various floating islands. We start to think about the meaning of distance, dependence, and intimacy. At the same time, the intervention of the Internet allows more convenient communication between each other, which means people become used to confining themselves to the screen in a limited space. Distance, in this way, seems to have been unprecedentedly close. However, who is exactly talking with us through the screen? Is it the virtual or real “he or she”?
In the works and reflections presented in this section, what we can see are the dialogues between the hearts and the world within the expression made by ink and colour, the consideration of reality and illusion, the surreal photography, the record of the once-familiar but now empty street, the fashion design made by shredded masks, the life in the social distancing circle that is highly generalized and abstracted, and the “virion” that is locked in the screen and wanders around... There is more than a month before the end of 2020, in some ways we feel our lives are not going to be very different from a year ago, but we are indeed different.
The Island
Reflecting the Sharing Moment | Section Three
Launch Date: 2020.11.28
Participating Artists (in alphabetical order of surnames):
CHEN Xi, comma, DUAN Jianwei, JIANG Zhi, LIU Jin'an, LUO Min, LYU Yue (Aluna), MA Liang, Dalila PASOTTI, QIANG Yong, Hideho TANAKA, Johan WAHLSTROM, WANG Chuan, YE Pei, You Open a Box
Curator: Emily ZHOU
Visual Design: Yizhi ZHANG
Organizer: CAFA ART INFO
Go Back To The Exhibition Page
