S1: E2   The Painting is The Message 

"Ziyang & Charmian"

Duration

2021. 05. 07 - 2021. 05. 15  

Venue

No. 0 Hall， Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts

Artist /

Sima Yuan  

Produced by Yamin Wang and Jiang Hanfei

Team 

Jiang Hanfei   

Wang Ziyang  

Charmian Niu  

Di Zhengjie   

Yamin Wang   

In this project, Sima Yuan continued her previous creative methods. She does not deliberately "make things" in material practice, but shapes the concept itself. From 2019 to 2021, while working part-time in an overseas affairs service agency, Sima Yuan used the cognition of the two students，Ziyang (male, 19- year-old) and Charmian (female, 17-year-old)， as material to create. She has completed an experimental act of shaping the interest and taste of artistic creation by means of "counseling photography portfolio". And she accepts any possible results, as well as discusses questions raised from any standpoint. 

Every week when Sima Yuan teaches her students, she reshapes the aesthetic standard and mode of thinking of them in various ways and presents their "before and after" works in the form of exhibition. Each work is the result of communication, dialogue, controversy and compromise during the long teaching process. Sima Yuan discussed the relationship between her and the students during this process. As a teacher, she shaped the ideas of the students, but the results of the shaping and their recognition of the results are the essences of the issue. In this sense, both teacher and students are just in different positions in the ecological chain of artistic aesthetic power. The distinction between artistic taste at a higher level, as well as the governance-governed relationship, is proposed through such an experimental action.  

If the views on the art of the two students were once understood within the chain of "Creator-Art concept-Audience", then Sima Yuan's experiment stood outside this chain and exerted influence on it, as well as transforming and questioning itself. On one hand, she provided guidance to the students based on "the Big Other", the aesthetic taste of contemporary art. On the other hand, the students were actually chasing the recognition of "the Big Other". Therefore, in the entire process of "shaping" and "being shaped", the two sides are not opposed to each other but in a combination of certain desires and means.  

How do the ideas of the shaper and the shaped appear in the same work? What is the intermediate value of the final result between the two? Sima Yuan presents the issues above through this exhibition.

Sima Yuan

Sima Yuan, born in Beijing. B.S. from Nanjing University. M.A. from London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. As a professional scientific background artist, Sima Yuan's works have artistic sensibility under the logic of science. Her work reflects the meaning of the role of the environment in this era through the individual experience in daily life.  For her, the age of consumption and the Internet age are the sources of artistic creation and imagination, thereby awakening audiences to think about the real situation of human beings.

Main solo exhibitions: Acquisition, TELESCOPE, Beijing, (2019); Awareness, Shang 8 International Art Center, Onyx Gallery, Beijing (2018); The Second Sex, the 10th Lianzhou International Photography Festival, Lianzhou, (2014); Another Europe, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, UK, (2010), etc. Her works have been known in FORMAT International Photography Festival ( UK ), AMNUA,  Jinan International Photography Biennale, KABUSO Art Museum (Norway),  Ingallery, CITIC Bank, The China Millennium Monument, Tianjin Art Museum, Rong Yi Art Museum, Yuan Art Museum, 501-XU SPACE, Wooton Gallery, etc.