Pure Land - Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang

The Pure Land gallery exhibition presents a fascinating virtual experience.  Surrounded by a 360 degree interactive 3D display, visitors are immersed in one of the caves housing ancient Buddhist murals at Dunhuang.  These caves, or grotto temples, date from the 2nd century BC to the 14th century, and are one of the world's richest locations of Buddhist art.  Since the preservation of ancient sites like Dunhuang conflicts with the need to show them to the public, methods have been attempted to recreate the experience of being inside the caves without the need to visit the site.

Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang is such an attempt.  Combining high-resolution photography with 3D modelling and animations, the exhibit provides visitors with an unparalleled experience of this ancient art.

 

 

What is so striking about the experience, beside the eye-popping 3D (far more impressive than that used in 3D movies), is the feeling of viewing ancient Buddhist artworks (some over a thousand years old) not only in a location which is not their actual location, but by wearing 3D glasses.  The juxtaposition of ancient and modern is spine-tingling!  It is one thing to view the past in the spaces of the modern (in, for example, museums and art galleries), a step even further removed to experience it in the manner presented here.  Animations that pop out in front of your face add an interpretative element to the visual history, and the guide herself spent as much time explaining the technology behind the exhibition as she did the murals.

 

These two elements sharply underscore the (seemingly contradictory) nature of the experience.  Should I be writing about 2nd century BC Asian art, or the experience of standing in a circular space in the dark, wearing 3D glasses?  Even in the moment, I was aware of the dual nature of the experience, and wondered not whether it was a good thing or a bad thing (clearly the whole endeavour, as an attempt at both preservation of the actual site, and a desire to showcase it to the public as mentioned above, is a good thing), but whether this representation was enough.  I was overwhelmed with a desire to see the real thing - an inclination that somewhat goes against the whole point of the exhibition.  But I was also aware of the space around me:  circular (an uncommon shape for a gallery space), in the dark (like being in a movie theatre), 360 degrees (I could turn to face any direction and continue to see what I was supposed to see), and - rather strikingly - the black silhouettes of my class-mates standing near and around me.  Furthermore, the room was in a building that I spend a great deal of time working in - a building whose architectural design has intrigued me since I first arrived at CityU.  The room's existence having been unknown to me all this time, discovering that it existed in the building felt like stumbling upon a secret grotto: this allusion to the Mogao Grottoes that so stunningly came to life in that 'chamber' was not lost on me.

 

This combination of sensations and thoughts led to a novel experience, one that transcended what I might ordinarily have had seeing Buddhist art in a normal gallery.  As I left, I took off my 3D glasses, and rubbed my sore eyes.  My final impression then, was the one that connected it to 3D cinema:  a headache inducing experience that loses its novelty after the first 5 minutes of watching a film; an exhibition technology that I hope will turn out to be as long-lived as earlier experiments in 3D in film history.  And that position, when placed against the art that was on display in that room, is a contradiction.

 

 

Assignment 3 - Artwork and Reference - Nicolas Provost's 'Papillon d'Amour'

Papillon d'Amour (Butterfly of Love) is Nicolas Provost's third experimental film.  Shot in 35mm in 2005, the piece is interesting on a number of levels.  We can see how - in taking a sequence (slightly re-organized) from Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), and splitting the screen in half to create a mirror effect - Provost has significantly altered the image and has managed, in the process, to create something that bears little resemblance, thematically, to the original.  'Provost,' notes his website, 'creates a hallucinatory scene of a woman's reverse chrysalis into an imploding butterfly. This physical audiovisual experience produces skewed reflections upon Love, its lyrical monstrosities, and a wounded act of disappearance.'

In some ways, the piece demonstrates how a hot medium (in Marshall McLuhan's terms) can be changed into a cold - something that has been subjected to the interactivity of an artist.  This process is in fact what seems to be literally happening to the transmogrified 'chrysalis' shape that appears in the film to morph into a 'butterfly.'  The fact that it does so in a violent fashion suggests that the artistic process is sometimes not easy, or not without its problems.  However, this analysis of the artwork cannot be supported with any real evidence.  The website's description, quoted above, does not in fact help.  Do the images really produce a 'skewed reflection of Love?'  I think a lot of the responses to a piece like this are likely to be determined by the spectator's own past, and the kinds of moving image he or she recollects when watching it.  For example, when the 'butterfly' emerges with violently flapping 'wings,' I was reminded of certain Edison actualities from early cinema - shorts that displayed interesting people or events that lacked narrative but which presented startled audiences at the end of the 19th century with unbelievable sights.  Annabelle Whitford's (appropriately-named) 'Butterfly Dance' springs to mind.

Provost manages to turn clear images into abstract forms, never more so than when the central figure's anthropomorphic shape ceases to look even remotely human.  But the results produced by the mirror effect also suggest - to me - the ink-blotter tests made famous by Hermann Rorschach.  Such a comparison to a clinical (and highly-debated) method of psychological analysis might seem strange, were it not for the possibility that Provost's images in this film could at any moment be freeze-framed, and the resulting still used for just such a purpose.

For all this, it must still be pointed out that, on one level at least, Papillon d'Amour does reflect and relate to the Kurosawa film's narrative.  In abstracting a previously clear cinematic image, and in the process engendering a highly subjective response in the spectator, Provost is at the very least commenting on the themes of subjectivity present in Rashomon.  However, because the images in Papillon d'Amour are simply so striking, I do not believe that most spectators' minds will immediately turn to the Japanese classic in order to elucidate personal meaning.  They may acknowledge the source material in Provost's piece, but will not believe that Provost is adding his own commentary to Rashomon's thematic concerns.  There is much more going on here than merely explicating Kurosawa's narrative.

Preliminary research on a living artist

Nicolas Provost is a Belgian video artist whose work (experimental shorts + one feature) seeks to explore the grammar of cinema in ways that bridge the gap between the purely aesthetic experience perhaps derived from video installation art, and the narrative-driven cinema that mainstream audiences of movie theatres routinely enjoy in the millions.  Much of his earlier work is small, abstract, experimental - each film focused, seemingly, on one narrative or cinematographic code that Provost aims to investigate.  However, in 2011, he directed his first feature, The Invader - a narrative-driven film that tells the story of an African man living in Brussels whose life begins to unravel after an affair with a local woman ends unexpectedly.

It is his earlier work - the more abstract shorts - that I will explore as I continue with my research of this artist.  Although not ostensibly interested in The Invader, I want to chart Provost's path from experimental filmmaker to feature-length director, and en route understand a little more about the ways in which he comments on, and manipulates, standard codes and conventions which I - as an amateur filmmaker - have studied as part of my film studies degree program.

Robrecht Vanderbeeken, writing about Provost's loosely-connected trilogy of films set in New York, Las Vegas and Tokyo, commented: "[the artist] plays with the codes of cinema to create visual poems about our reality, more specifically about that with which our experience of reality is permeated: cinema. Not only did we all grow up with the film canon, it is also a window through which we have learned to look at the world. Whether we like it or not, our conditioned gaze is continually focused by the parameters of our collective memory of film. Provost senses this like no one else."  Vanderbeeken's comments are what draw me to Nicolas Provost (the infuriatingly vague term "film canon" notwithstanding), and compelled me to watch The Divers (2006), a 7 minute film that plays with our expectation of cinematic romance.

Vanderbeeken, talking about this film, observes that, "[Provost's] work swells into one big yearning mating dance: the kiss which hangs in the air like a firework cannot be captured."  There is far more that can be said about this piece, and I will analyse it further as part of my final paper.


All material here (except photo of Provost) taken from his website:

http://www.nicolasprovost.com/

Song Dong: 36 Calendars

'36 Calendars' is Beijing-based artist Song Dong's first solo exhibition in Hong Kong.  As the name implies, the work is composed of 36 separate calendars, hand-drawn in simple pencil, charting 432 months in the artist's life, from 1978 to 2012.  Their individual subjects range from socio-political commentary, to reflections on cultural change, to candid admissions of a more personal nature.

The work partly deals with themes of memory and time, and this is hardly new territory for an artist to explore.  So how does Song Dong's concept maintain interest?  What exactly is he doing here, and how well does he explore his chosen themes?



The arrival of KFC in China, March 1994.

The answer to the last question perhaps lies in the collaboration of more than 400 invited members of the public, who convened at the venue in January to colour-in, expand, deface, or erase copies of each of the calendars.  These copies are displayed on small low tables arranged in a grid-like formation in the central area of the exhibition, and - for students at least - evoke the feel of the exam room.  The artist's intention was to add another layer to the artwork, but in making '36 Calendars' a participatory work, he has accomplished much more.  Following the sequence of calendars around the perimeter of the exhibition space, one cannot escape the feeling of viewing a pictorial autobiography (although the months within each individual year are pleasingly arranged into white blocks that copy the geometric pattern of the central area's tables, and seem to extend that same three-dimensional pattern onto the two-dimensional wall).  Were the artist's calendars to appear anywhere but in the rarefied space of an art gallery, I don't believe they would hold as much interest as they actually do.  What saves the work is the presence of not one additional layer, but of 432 additional ones.

 

Each of these pieces either comments on, edits, or entirely rejects Song Dong's personal recollections.  The individual personalities of hundreds of other people become blended with the artist's to some extent, suggesting not only the impossibility of separating history from the personal memories of those who record it, but that history itself is an amalgamation of countless testimonies.  It is important, however, to point out that each participant was seated at a random calendar:  this resulted, in many cases, of artists working on calendars whose month and year they were not actually alive in.

If our concept of art is dictated to some degree by the space in which we experience that art, how does '36 Calendars' use its exhibition space to alter or affect our concept?  I have already mentioned the grid-like pattern of 3-D tables surrounded by 2-D images.  The monochromatic colour scheme of the exhibit (blacks, greys and whites, lit by spotlights) is punctuated by monolithic dull black pillars: the tables have to make room for them.  There is a sense of austerity here that lends seriousness to the endeavour.  This makes the brightly coloured participants' calendars (when you stumble upon them) all the more striking.  Yet at the same time, one is aware that it is ultimately Song Dong's grand conception: his calendars, mounted on the surrounding wall, enclose and embalm his contributors'.  It is his memories, recollections, and life story that frame - and give reason for - the 432 individual pieces of art so artfully arranged within them.