The artwork named Louis Vuitton
Though titled Louis Vuitton, an artwork seemed to have nothing to do with luxurious goods. It contained a wood carving bird standing on a branch that was made of acrylic glass. The bird overlooked the tree and leaves in the background which was enamel paint.
In addition, there were more similar pieces that were named Gucci, Dior, Hermes and the likes. Craig Voligny, Assistant Professor of the Media Arts and Design Programme, Division of Culture and Creativity (DCC), was the artist of these complex and creative contemporary art pieces.
Dior and Hermes
“When my wife and I stayed in Guangzhou, I noticed that there were some expensive shopping malls located nearby, such as ‘TaiKoo Hui’, and they were full of crowds,” Mr Voligny said. “I walked into some museums as well, but what really upset me was that nobody was there.”
He came to green Zhuhai city and drew inspiration from the Flower and Bird Painting in China’s Song Dynasty, to reinstate the aesthetic of quite, poetic imagery through a merging of retail visual fashion merchandising materials that would reach the audience.
Craig Voligny explains his exhibition
He explained his idea of the “Eastern Surface, Western Content” artworks, “Finding areas where artistic histories overlap, and reinstating them in a contemporary context has served as a point of creative research for this work.”
His colleague Andy Dada, aka Andy Tam, Senior Lecturer of the Culture, Creativity and Management Programme, joined him to display their recent artworks at the Two-person Faculty Art Exhibition that started on the afternoon of 7 November at the Learning Resource Centre.
Andy Dada talks of his paintings to the audience
As opposed to the theme of Craig Voligny’s art objects, Dada showed “Western Surface, Chinese Soul”. His art concept was based on the "science-artist" and explored the ontology of biological evolution and cultural development.
Andy Dada’s 4.4 metre long Blue Lotus, an acrylic paint and ink on canvas, depicted the flowers’ experiences from birth to death. The lyrics of a Chinese song of the painting’s namesake were written with a brush at the top of the painting. Dada explained that this song, composed by China’s famous singer Xu Wei, inspired him in hard times.
Blue Lotus
He believed both the painting and the song expressed vacant emotions of those addicted to consuming instead of enjoying their lives. “Today, most people enjoy being a consumer; however, when they are in the middle of age, they will easily get lost without paying more attention to their lives by heart.”
Andy Dada also invited two students to perform the song with guitars. He expected his exhibition to demonstrate and echo “crossing-border and interactivity with the nature of cultural discourse, visual imagination, and retinal pleasure in general.”
Speaking of the exhibition, UIC President Prof Ng Ching-Fai said, “Both ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ are subjective terms that are open to many different definitions.”
“In the arts, creativity is the source of a piece of artwork, and thus can have a profound influence on the expansion of the mind and soul,” he added, encouraging the DCC faculty to create a culture and environment of creativity as “learning is equally accomplishable from exposure as much as it is from instruction.”
Reporter: Deng Min (IJ, Year 1), Deen He
Photographer: Zhou Chunmei
Editor: Samuel Burgess
(from MPRO)
