"Life is a heap of mixed material of unclear quality." This assertion by Duan Jianyu points to the philosophical nature of her art. Purposely avoiding the painterly sublime, she strives for the most generic subject matter and she delves into banal expression and style. The chickens, which appear in many of her photographs, multi-media installations and paintings, are a metaphor for this interest in the ordinary. Yet hers is not a naive or even narrative description of everyday life. Instead, she uses a highly refined method of displacement that propells the work into a realm where we start thinking of art as a language and painting as a medium. Her displacements include combining the wrong elements on a canvas, or mixing up poetry and poetics in her writing, or travelling to Qinghai Province on an extended stay, when instead she might have come to a thriving city center, the market place for art. Once, she claimed to have discovered an abandoned painting by Julian Schnabel in a Chinese chicken coop.
English and Chinese |Design: Huang He |Sizes: 22.7x26.2cm |Pages: 58 P |This book accompanies the CCAA Awards∕Blue Kingfisher limited & Vitamin Creative Space, idea and realization Vitamin Creative Space and Duan Janyu, 2011|ISBN 978-988-19912-3-2 | Price: €30
I'm looking for a possibility in everyday activities. We use everyday objects, but I think we use them unconsciously, even when we just use a cup, we never rethink about what a cup is. It is a functional tool for us. But if we rethink about the materials as not 'mere things', probably we can discover other aspects related to them. Then eventually we could find other ways to use them or different possibilities that we never realized before. Let's say that these possibilities are not hidden, maybe they are already there but we simply didn't notice them before.
English and Chinese |Sizes:19x14cm |Pages: 30 P | Vitamin Creative Space, 2011|Price: € 5
Hu Fang: Garden of Mirrored Flowers (English Version)
Fang's novel tells the story of a man in the process of designing a theme park, called Garden of Mirrored Flowers, and is an adaptation and transformation of the classical Chinese novel Jin Hua Yuan, or Flowers in the Mirror, from the Qing Dynasty. Beginning as a pictorial journey through myriad advertisements and the way they allow for many different entries into reality, there are parallel lines between the construction in reality and in the imagination of how a garden has evolved within an historic process. The story ends up in a big opening ceremony of the theme park where history seems to have been completely consumed and absorbed by contemporary social movement. For Hu Fang, reality in China is so dramatic that it seems that reality itself is writing its own novel. When reality has already become commodity, The Garden of Mirrored Flowers is a labyrinth to be lost in, or a pavilion made by semi-reflective glass which reflects self-images, precisely because we are situated within a reality replete with multiple routes.
For press inquiries and orders In Europe/ USA, please contact: mail@sternberg-press.com In Asia, please contact: publication@vitamincreativespace.com
English | Design: Huang He | Translation: Melissa Lim | Sizes: 13 x 21 cm| Pages: 192 P | Co-published by Vitamin Creative Space and Sternberg Press, 2010| ISBN 978-1-934105-15-3 | Price: $24.95 / €19.00
Keywords of Cowin Global by Xu Tan is the latest publication from the ongoing project "Keywords School". The publication is based on his latest Keywords School, which took place at a manufacturing company called Cowin Global in China. This book is considered to be an extension of Xu Tan's art practice into publication which can be called Paper Space. In this project, Xutan is for the first time using color to discuss the ineffable content of the consciousness. Xutan was working together with the employees to explore the status of collective consciousness behind the visual and psychological perception of colors responding to words, thus shaping the publication as a colorful "chromatogram of consciousness".
English and Chinese | Concept: Xu Tan, Hu Fang, Wang Jing, Huang He | Sizes: 17 x 18 cm| Pages: 138 P | Published by Vitamin Creative Space 2010|ISBN 978-91-633-3423-8 | Price: 25 Euros
Appendix:All Day(s) All Night(s)--Hu Fang In Conversation With Pak Sheung Chuen
"One Day of the Artist's Life invites one to believe the world of the artist, and not the work of the artist to believe the invisible, and not the visible to believe in the future, and not the now" -- Pak Sheung Chuen
English and Chinese | Concept: Hu Fang, Pak Sheung Chuen, | Sizes: 26 x 14.2 cm (Appendix:26 x 13 cm)| Pages: 64 P (Appendix: 24 P)| Vitamin Creative Space 2010|ISBN 978-988-17864-0-1 | Price: 12 Euros
