Jag skrev en liten introduktion till Chun Lees utställning, som ska vara med i katalogen. Den kommer att vara på kinesiska och engelska, svenska är inte så gångbart i Kina. Nedan den engelska versionen:
A cloud of butterflies
Chuang Tzu once dreamt he was a butterfly. When he woke up he did not know if he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man.
There is a similar dreamlike quality in Chun Lee Wang Gurt’s pictures. Having lived half her life in China and the other in Europe and America, she is a true cosmopolitan and has a broad outlook on life and a very personal style. A series of landscapes brings Monet to mind. Her landscape series is not a celebration of light; instead, as if on a journey where it gets darker and darker, in the very last picture we see the threat that has been there all the time.
One of her installations is a humorous reply to Marcel Duchamp’s Ètant Donnés. She replaces Duchamp’s nude woman with a grasshopper, a Kafkaesque bug on its back exposing its body. From the size of the grasshopper, and in exact proportion, the artist has recreated the key work that Duchamp worked with secretly during 20 years.
Obviously, whatever subjects she employs they are all seen through her own eyes and personal expediencies; together they form a deeply personal artistic landscape.
Her technique is as exact and poetic as in old Chinese ink paintings and the pictures so rich in contents that you can spend days in front of them and still discover new things each time you come back. The narrative quality tells about lives passed and about the future. All shrouded in uncertainty.
In her picture of people on a flatbed truck – they could be prisoners or a funeral procession – flowers and vegetation dominate while people are reduced to silhouettes. The scene brings Bosch to mind, although her style is far from that of the 15th century. In other pictures insects take the place of humans. A moth can dominate a 17th century European cityscape or take a stroll in the park. There are butterflies in hotel corridors and on space ships, mosquitos go for a walk, butterflies grow into clouds. They form suns and eventually complete darkness.
We do not know why they are there or what they signify. We can just look at them, follow them into their parallel universes.
Perhaps they all dream that they are men.
Stefan Gurt
2013 Stockholm-Beijing
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