A 20th-Century Love Affair: Art, Music, and Video

2021.03.16 Tuesday 19:00

Location

Zoom Online Talking

Guests: Qinmin Liu, Siyu (MimikBanka), Wang Xin

Moderator: Yuan Fuca

Language: Chinese

Duration: 60-90 minutes


Zoom Online Talking (click to join the meeting)

Conference number:910 9512 9796

Password:180097

Composers have attempted to spatialize music, and artists have tried to add the temporality of sound to visual art, so it is often difficult for us to discuss twentieth-century music and art  separately. Wassily Kandinsky compared artists to the hand that plays a piano; the colors are the keyboard, and the eyes are the harmonies. In a constantly expanding perception of space, art and music flow easily together. Russian film pioneer Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera abandoned dialogue entirely and used music as a backdrop; he would continue to stir emotion in viewers by controlling fast-motion frames in real time. In the 1980s and 1990s, the hybridization of music and visual art made its mark through our TV screens, with art forms such as Michael Jackson’s forty-minute film about “Thriller” from 1983. Experimental music videos were no longer byproducts of the music industry; they became mass culture and visual experience common to all.

We have invited artist Liu Qinmin, curator and art historian Wang Xin, and musician Siyu to an online public event for “Bare Screen,” Macalline Art Center’s digital video commissions program, where they will discuss how the music video, a global visual phenomenon, promoted and contributed to the visualization of a collective soul, a sense of identity and belonging, and the charms of social media.

About Moderator

Yuan Fuca

Chief Curator-at-Large of Macalline Art Center

About Guests

Qinmin Liu

Qinmin Liu is an artist based in NYC and Beijing. Her multi-medium artistic practice attempts to decipher and understand the bigger “choreographic system”, namely, ourselves and the social structures we are in. By using the philosophy of choreography as translatable code and intellectual framework, she documents and reveals the flexible yet malleable aspects of human nature, through which the possibility of defying our ‘destiny’ is presented.

Her artworks have been presented at important international institutions such as UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, The 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, etc. In 2015, Qinmin was selected as the cover artist for the San Francisco Weekly Newspaper. Her artworks have been reviewed by Artnet, The Guardian, Timeout, Reuters, CCTV, etc. In 2019, She received an Emergency grant from the Foundation Of Contemporary Arts. In 2020, She was selected as The Watermill Center residency artist, and Silver Art Project residency artist. In May 2020, Qinmin became the first ever Chinese artist to collaborate with COS. Recently, she is among the eight finalists of the Han Nefkens Foundation-Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Award 2020. She is honored to be inducted into Forbes 30 Under 30, and awarded as Art & Fashion industry Vanguard. In 2021, Qinmin is nominated as a finalist of the Net-A-Porter Incredible Female Artist Award. Qinmin holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She is also the creator of Angelhaha Airline, which is a viral art project that has been covered by 300+ influential media outlets worldwide.

Siyu

Siyu is a singer,  songwriter, pianist, and music producer. She received her master’s degree from the School of Music and Recording Arts at the Communication University of China. Her indie rock/synth pop band Mimik Banka has released four albums, toured in China and internationally, and performed at festivals such as Strawberry, Midi, and Simple Life. Mimik Banka’s 2016 EP Ping Pong won the Best Overseas Work Award at the Golden Indie Music Awards in Taiwan and EP of the Year at the Fresh Music Awards in Singapore. Her work outside the band involves film and animation soundtracks and sound art. These pieces often focus on, but are not limited to, the world of sound; she also explores the relationship between sound and space, sound and video, and sound and people.

Xin Wang

Xin Wang is an art historian and curator based in New York. Past curatorial projects include Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013); Lu Yang: Arcade, New York (2014); THE BANK SHOW: Vive le Capital, BANK, Shanghai (2015); THE BANK SHOW: Hito Steyerl, BANK, Shanghai (2015); chin(A)frica: an interface, Institute of Fine Arts, New York (2017); and Life and Dreams: Photography and Media Art in China since the 1990s, The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm (2018). Her writing has appeared in e-flux journal, Artforum, Kaleidoscope, Mousse, Flash Art, and Art in America. She has lectured at institutions such as the Para/Site International Conference, Yale University, School of Visual Arts, Queens Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Städelschule, and as the keynote speaker for the “Asia/Technics” conference at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2019). Currently pursuing a PhD in modern and contemporary art—focusing on Soviet hauntology in Postmodernism—at the Institute of Fine Arts (New York University), Wang also works as the Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art while planning an exhibition that explores Asian Futurisms.

Video

The Macalline Center of Art (MACA) is a non-profit art institution located in the 798 Art District of Beijing and officially inaugurated its space on January 15, 2022. Occupying a two-story building with a total area of 900 square meters, MACA unites artists, curators, and other art and cultural practitioners from around the world. Through its diverse, ongoing, and collaborative approaches, the Center establishes a new site on the contemporary art scene. Guided by the “work of artists” and backed by interdisciplinary research, the Center aims to bring together a community passionate about art and devoted to the “contemporary” moment so as to respond proactively to our rapidly evolving times.