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Qin Yufen |
The Baukunst Galerie opens on Wednesday, the 30st of June 2004, the previously second solo-exhibition of the Chinese artist Qin Yufen. Angelika Stepken, director of the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe will give a short introduction in her œuvre. In the indoor- and outdoor-exhibition-space of the gallery expansive sound installations will be shown which were especially created for the exhibition. Furthermore smaller sound objects and works on paper will be exhibited.
Qin Yufen was born in Qingdao in China in 1954. In 1988 she emigrated from Beijing to Germany by the support of an scholarship of the DAAD and settled down in Berlin, where she basically lives and works today. Yufen incorporates her point of view of a Chinese immigrant in a Western world in her artistic work. Foreignness is her original topic. Thus this strangeness is not slanted toward her perception of the culture of her new home. Since the beginning of the 80s she has also derived from the traditional Chinese art. She went through an exciting artistic development from Chinese calligraphy to the utterly unknown Western genre of installation. Once she discovered that genre for her art, she has not changed this medium anymore. In her installations Yufen succeeds to join influences of the traditional Chinese culture with Western means of expressions in a unique artistic way.
Qin Yufen was already represented in several museum-exhibitions, e.g. “Zeitwenden” at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 1999 or “Heimat Kunst” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2000. Solo-Exhibitions were organised for example by the Kunstverein Solothurn (2001), the Kunstverein Göttingen (2001), the Kunstmuseum Heidenheim (2002), the Kunsthalle Bremen (2002) and lastly the Kunstverein Marburg (2003). In 2002 the Hamburger Bahnhof, a Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin presented a large room installation of the artist.
Since 1990 the sound is a central component of the installations of Qin Yufen. The material for the acoustic elements of her works is derived from the music of the traditional Beijing-Opera or noises recorded on the streets of Beijing or Berlin. Due this basis the artist forms complex abstract compositions, which are composed by an electronic processing of the raw material in a recording studio. These acoustic compositions synchronically sound from little loud speakers at the objects. Since the sounds are silent and not space filling, they are bond to the object. They increase the poetic and immaterial dimension of the installation.
Yufen reports on everyday life in different roles, cultures and environments. Her installations are complex; they consist of variable arrangements of objects: “Everday Life or Scenery“ is the title of one of her works. On a table some paint and painting utensils are placed. Aside there is a clothing rack, where painted sheets of paper are hung up. Between the sheets little speakers with long cables are installed, which accompany the installation with little sounds. The artist joins familiar elements as removable clothing racks with foreign elements as sounds of Chinese music. During her first time in Germany the clothing racks appeared to her as strange objects with very special aesthetics which are unfolded by their estrangement in her installations. The artist often combines this profane instrument with traditional material and objects from her country, amongst others with rice paper, silken cloth and bamboo. Here she uses painted sheets of paper, products of traditional art. Qin Yufen reflects on herself as a Chinese woman and artist and on the environment, she lives in. She initiates the exchange about different cultures and the global culture as a whole. Yufen places emphasis on the fragile, immaterial and incomprehensible. She embeds her artistic arguments in constellations of poetic beauty and provides the spectator with indications of current and prevailing subjects. The artist “wants to create an atmosphere in which the spectator transcends the everyday life” (Qin Yufen).
Qin Yufen’s interest in the formal characteristics of objects and her precise use of them in installations or as a sound objects brakes with the apparent authenticity and allows a clear reception of the visual and acoustic constituents without preconception. Qin Yufen’s works refer to the foreign within the familiar and bring forth the reflection on the contradiction and at the same time unbreakable interrelation of the unknown and the known, of modernity and tradition.
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