I am writing this on the night before tomorrow’s opening of this video screening series’ final instalment presenting Lin Aojie, having thought about it for more than two weeks. Finally done with today’s installation, which took much longer than I had expected, I’m ready to pen down some thoughts on the process I experienced in planning and preparing for this series of exhibitions, specifically on Liang Yue’s part.
Let’s Put Up a Video Show…?
The idea of putting up a video art screening programme sprouted sometime last year, or even earlier in 2019. My former direct boss floated the idea of a video art screening for very practical reasons — it does not cost much once set up, and can continue running for a good period of time while we plan ahead.
More than a year later, it took a pandemic to come and her to leave the job before my ex-colleague and I managed to successfully propose a video art screening show to our bosses.
While we have already went through our list of artists and selected eight of them with their works sometime last year after returning to work, the idea was not met with much approval from our bosses. This year, having no plans after a hastily put together exhibition to start off the year, we finally got to carry out the idea of a video art screening showcase.
Reducing the number of artists from eight to four and refining the theme, we finally settled on Zhu Jia, Chen Xiaoyun, Liang Yue, and Lin Aojie. Four Chinese video artists from four different times, with four different ways of approaching video art.
After some stumbles and bits of back-and-forth, we got to our current title of “Shifting Times, Moving Images”, courtesy of my ex-colleague. While presenting the different approaches to video art, the screening series also presents a loose illustration on the progress of video art in relation to the changing times and advancing technology.
