Kasseler KunstVereinsHeim - Program September - Yingmei Duan
Saturday, September 15, 2007, 8 p.m.
Yingmei Duan (D)
"Konzept der Ausstellung 'Yingmei Duan' im 'Museum für Moderne Kunst' in Beijing, 2008 - ein Traum"
Performative lecture
“Time” and “space” are the main themes of the performances and performance installations of the Chinese artist Yingmei Duan. She is a member of the Chinese avant-garde who positioned themselves in the artists' colony of East Village in Beijing in the 1990s. She participated in the famed performance “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” (1995), which was also shown in the Hamburger Kunsthalle on the occasion of their great retrospective on modern Chinese art.
Duan can often be seen as a dreamer or a sleeper during her performances. She will appear as such in her work “Paradise” in a modified version of which she will perform at the Kunstvereinsheim. There is but a bed and a night table with a glass and a lamp in the room. All objects, including the floor and Duan herself, lying dreaming on the bed, are covered with Chinese rice paper. The artist's intention is to transform the atmosphere of the room. The visitor may penetrate the melancholy world of the artist and come to terms with his own desires and fears, thus becoming an interactive part of the installation.
Yingmei Duan, born in Daqing, China in 1969, first studied “petroleum exploration” and worked as a free-lance artist in the artists' colony of East Village in Beijing from 1993 to 1998. In 1998 she came to Germany and studied performance/film with Marina Abramovic, Birgit Hein, Christoph Schlingensief and Michihiro Shimabuku at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig. She finished her studies as a master student in 2006. Yingmei Duan lives and works in Braunschweig.
Curator: Susanne Jakubczyk
