Being an Ending - 冷静，切磋，陪伴
Single Channel HD Video, Color, Sound, Clay, Plaster casts, Projection
3 min 17 sec
Cross-country collaborative project by
Ang Xue Ning and Liu Yefu
Full Video
The two artists hope to demonstrate the correlation
between isolation and friendship. Innately isolated individuals (humans) are progressively pressured to socialize in the virtual world. This paradox closely applies to the contemporary age where humans can bypass the need of time and places to form fragile friendships. This becomes more prominent as time progresses and generates a depressing experience for ‘friendships 2050’.
The project started off by creating a series of sculptures using ‘Lonesome George’, a tortoise of an extinct species
as reference. Various sounds and recordings exchanged
during the 30 days are mixed in to form a video with
an abstract plot.
About Project
ARTX30:A CELEBRATION OF KINDREDSHIP THROUGH THE ARTS
(CLICK FOR PROJECT PAGE)
ARTX30 brings together 12 artists to respond to the theme of future friendship by collaboratively creating new digital artworks that are presented in an experimental documentary. This project celebrates 30 years of bilateral relations between Singapore and China through art exchange between the two countries. Co-organised by G20 Youth Entrepreneurs’ Alliance China, U30s Academy China, and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts Singapore, and supported by National Arts Council Singapore and China Green Foundation, this art exchange project emphasises meaningful online interaction and creative exploration amongst young artists of the two countries.
What does friendship look like in the year 2050? Participating artists of ARTX30 ponder over the definition, purpose and value of this special type of relationship in 30 years’ time, speculating how shared joy among equals begins, develops, evolves and terminates across time and place.
Friendship has benefits of different values. Aristotle claimed in his Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII (350 B.C.E.) that friendships of utility and pleasure are inferior to that based on virtue. Alain de Botton disagrees slightly as he defends the networking purpose of friendship because the task that one person wishes to complete may be so enormous that it is achievable only with the help of an accomplice or alliance. Jacques Derrida even goes so far as saying that friendship is the basis of politics.
In this project, participating artists make friends by making work together. Will their artistic alliances affirm or add to those well told in art history—from the tumultuous (eg Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin) to the symbiotic (Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquait) and mutually supportive (Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan) Are their speculations of friendship in the future hopeful or realistic, mundane or bizarre? Have they achieved artistic insights, developed a robust collaborative system, or ignited an enduring alliance? Whatever the case, one thing is for sure: their brief but intense period of collaboration would be leaving a mark on their life, and that of others.