The shortlist for Art Basel BMW Art Journey 2019 was announced during Art Basel in Hong Kong on 28 March. The joint iniative by Art Basel and BMW aims to recognise and support emerging artists worldwide. The BMW Art Journey was launched in 2015, and until 2017, it was awarded twice a year to an emerging artist from Art Basel in Hong Kong Discoveries sector and from Art Basel in Miami Beach Positions sector. Since 2018, artists have been selected only from Art Basel in Hong Kong, by an expert jury including Claire Hsu, Director Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Matthias Mühling, Director Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau, Munich; Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, President Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Phil Tinari, Director Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), Beijing; and Samson Young, artist and winner of the first BMW Art Journey. Once the jury announces the shortlist, the three artists selected will have to submit a proposal for their journey. The jury then reconvenes to choose a winner from the three proposals, to be announced in early summer.
Past winners include Astha Butail (Hong Kong, 2017), Jamal Cyrus (Miami Beach, 2017) and Zac Langdon-Pole (Hong Kong, 2018), who presented the documentation of his winning journey project Sutures of the Sky at this year’s Art Basel in Hong Kong.
The shortlisted artists for the ninth BMW Art Journey are Lu Yang, Shen Xin and Clarissa Tossin. A month after the official release, ASIA briefly looks at the shortlisted artists, in anticipation of the winner announcement.
Multimedia artist Lu Yang (b. 1984, Shanghai) graduated from the New Media Art Department of the China Academy of Arts. She has shown in exhibitions at UCCA, Beijing; Centre Pompidou, Paris; M Woods, Beijing; Shanghai Biennale; and Athens Biennale, among others. Her controversial, provocative work often incorporates sexuality, violence, death and morbid visions of the world rendered through fiery, vibrantly audacious animated video works. Lu Yang’s practice is deeply influenced by the subcultures she follows in her everyday life: that of anime, video games and sci-fi. She merges these elements of pop culture with traditional and spiritual images and ideas from China, juxtaposing religion and technology as two pillars of our existence. The result features 3D-animated films, video game-like installations, holograms, neon, VR and software manipulation, often with Japanese manga and anime references.
In their unanimous deliberation, the jury said of the artist:
Lu Yang is a Shanghai based artist who creates frenetic multimedia installations. Her works combine images with references from religion, manga, anime or pop culture. Her fast moving colorful images show both entertaining and deeply intellectual visions of our contemporary culture.
At Art Basel in Hong Kong in March 2019, Société Berlin presented her solo project “Cyber Altar” in the Discoveries sector. Engaging with ideas of spiritual healing and modern technology, Lu Yang’s works formed a shrine in which the worshipped deities have no material form, but are instead reincarnated as flashy, multicoloured moving images. On the two side walls were four LED-lit panels representing deities from her work Electromagnetic Brainology. The five-channel video was installed in the shrine-booth, arranged as an altar, providing a place of worship where visitors could experience trance, transcendence and altered mind states, dazzled by the flashy images and the techno tempo of the videos.
The work takes inspiration from the Buddhist and Hindu conception of the four elements – Earth, Water, Fire and Air – corresponding to the four great pains in the brain’s neurological system. The deities represented by Lu Yang are all armed with modern medical techniques and equipment to suppress and cure the sources of human suffering. The artist’s own image is part of her work, where her body dies, is slowly inserted in a coffin and then loaded in a kitsch, traditional-style Chinese funeral car. Death is represented as a liberation from earthly demons, the end of suffering and the achievement of a higher self-conscience. The artist seems to suggest an awareness and consciousness of our surroundings and our contemporary life is our salvation, our liberation from our blind selves.
Shen Xin (b. 1990, Chengdu) lives and works between London, United Kingdom, and Amsterdam, Netherlands. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Media at The Slade School of Fine Arts of the University College London. She has held solo exhibitions at K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai and Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester, among others. Her work has been part of group exhibitions at various venues, including OCAT Shanghai and Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf. The artist was awarded the BALTIC Artists’ Award in 2017. Shen Xin works with video, installation and performance, to examine and fabricate techniques and effects of how emotion, judgment and ethic circulate through individual and collective subjects. In her films, she focuses on interpersonal complexity and political narratives, aiming to dismantle dominant power structures.
At Art Basel in Hong Kong, Shanghai-based MadeIn Gallery presented her solo project Commerce des Esprits, a four-channel video installation presenting a scripted monologue through animation and text. The work is based on the research of works by French sinologists on Chinese Warring States period philosopher Zhuangzi (370 BC-287 BC). In the video work, Shen Xin translates the perspectives and productivities of comparative philosophy into an event which narrates an unconscious state. The four channels are divided into two animation and two text channels. The animation traces human bodies through motion capture, while the text in English and French talk about “the commerce of language”, as well as its potential for new ways of producing meaning, and for undermining cultural autonomy of the nation-state. Shen Xin’s work in this way continues on her efforts to produce abstractions of inclusivity and foreignness, giving her protagonists the freedom to narrate, speak and act out of their desires.
The jury said of the artist:
Shen Xin has distinguished herself with expansive, curious, poetic works that generally take the form of complex, multi-channel video narratives. She explores contemporary subjectivities by delving into histories, philosophies, and psychologies as embedded in different cultures, genders, and other identities. Her research-intensive, project-based way of working struck the jury as particularly suited to the nature of the Art Journey.
Brazilian multimedia artist Clarissa Tossin lives and works in Los Angeles, United States. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts. She has had exhibitions at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Cambridge and Sicardi Gallery, Houston. Her work was also included in group shows at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Tossin Works with installation,video, performance, sculpture and photography.
At Art Basel in Hong Kong, Los Angeles gallery Commonwealth and Council featured her project Future Fossil, whic draws on Amazonian tribal culture and sci-fi to bring attention to ecological disaster. Future Fossil borrows material first presented and conceived for the exhibition of the same title at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2019), which closed only days before Art Basel in Hong Kong. Future Fossil speculates upon a post-apocalyptic world following ecological collapse, taking inspiration from Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction trilogy Xenogenesis (1989), in which the Amazon becomes the site for a new civilisation of alien-human hybrids.
Tossin deeply engages with material culture. Part of her practice is the investigation into a society’s objects and modes of production, and what they teach us about its members’ practices and everyday rituals. This is reflected in her work, which carries the results of her research. In the project at Art Basel in Hong Kong, Tossin paired DIY plastic recycling techniques with the materials and practices of Amazonian aesthetic traditions, creating sculptural works with archival inkjet disks, suspended and woven, and fossilised-looking, globe-like objects made of garbage. These works aim to highlight the contemporary footprint left in the geological sedimentation of the earth. The jury talks about Tossin thus:
At a time when we are facing the extinction of animals and plants on a daily basis, Clarissa Tossin asks us to reflect on the future of our planet and humanity by drawing on traditional weaving processes from the Amazon region and mass-produced materials. Both true alluring and beautiful, her works also conjures a future unknown – both apocalyptic and utopian – and asks us to imagine what imprint our current mass consumption will have on future generations.
C. A. Xuan Mai Ardia