Light Year 35: Digital Fairy Tales: Chinese Stories
International Premiere!
March 1st, 2018
Opening Reception: Made in NY Media Center by IFP, 6-8pm
After Party: The Triangle (Pearl Street and Anchorage Place), 8-10pm
Watch the teaser!
Featuring new work by: Rani Messias + Anna Leevia, Yuki Ideguchi with Suguru Ikeda + Isis Salam, Nicole Antebi + Xiren Wang, Lian Mengzhuo + Kinga Toth, Nina Sobell + Laura Ortman, Làszlò Zsolt Bordos, Junjie Zhang + Theory, Vivian Qin
Curated by Leo Kuelbs and Wing Lu with Able Sun.
Digital Fairy Tales: Chinese Stories is the third installment of the Digital Fairy Tales series, which has appeared in multiple cities since 2016. The purpose of the series is to present archetypal material from different cultures and ask artists to respond in search of cultural commonalities. Also, as the times the tales were created in (represented on all levels) is so far removed from this new, digital era, we seek to create bridges through time: between people and epochs.
The first set of Digital Fairy Tales (Album One and Two) is based upon Germanic stories collected in the late 18th/early 19th Century and was represented by a set of 14 videos created by over two-dozen artists. And now we continue with “Digital Fairy Tales: Chinese Stories,” which considers Chinese Folk Tales from four different perspectives: Origins of the universe, Persistence, Love, and Eternity.
Eight teams of artists (visual+sound) from different cultures each took one area of emphasis and represented it in their own collaborative manner. By pairing and presenting artists from different backgrounds and cultures, we hope to strengthen bridges between cultures, as well as to illuminate commonalities in ways unique to the individuals and this amazing circumstance.
Artists were asked to forego verbal language in exchange for sonic and visual representations of their concepts regarding the chosen area of emphasis, while exploring and developing contemporary technique. How has the essence of what it means to be a person, through the shared creation of myths, evolved through time? By asking artists today to consider these ancient common tales from China, we can experience collaborative bridge building through time and between people of different races and eras. Digital Fairy Tales: Chinese Stories creates contemporary windows through which we can view the common creations of the past.