Flower No Flower Meandering, Spiraling, Unraveling Screening

Flower No Flower Meandering, Spiraling, Unraveling Screening

Featuring Work by Yu Ji, Dong Longyue and Wang Xiaofu; Huiqi He; Cici Wu, and Yuan Yuan

Curated by Siyu Chen

Join us at Accent Sisters for the screening program Flower No Flower, a screening of “3” (2023, 20 minutes) by Yu Ji, Dong Longyue, Wang Xiaofu, “The Love of Fog” (2024-, 20 minutes) by Huiqi He, and “Belonging and Difference” (2023, 24 minutes) by Cici Wu and Yuan Yuan.

In conjunction with the exhibition Meandering, Spiraling and Unraveling, on view at Accent Sisters through October 12th, 2024, this screening program further explores the devastating erasure and removal of experiences of marginalized bodies within knowledge production. Selected works delve into topics of displacement, estrangement, and restoration, grounded in a time of territorial cracks.

Derived from Bai Juyi’s poem, the phrase 'flower no flower' captures the transient moment between arrival and departure through the passage of time and different hegemonic orders. Instead of resorting to escapism or defensiveness for personal and collective liberation, each work suggests a relationship to the outer reality with continuous observation, interaction and expression at its core.

The event will be introduced and moderated by Siyu Chen, and end with time for conversation, refreshments, and relaxation.

About the Artists

Yu Ji investigates the geography and historical narratives of a specific location, with a strong interest in the intervention of space with the body. Yu’s practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, and video. She takes the materiality of the medium as the starting point to enrich her vocabulary of art. Her performances, in parallel with the exhibitions of her sculptures, often intend to turn the space of art into a site of labor, working to reflect and moderate the fragile co-presence of humans and objects. In 2008, she co-founded AM Art Space—an artist-led space in Shanghai, promoting experimentation and exchanges between artists, curators, and the public.

Yu's work has been exhibited at various art institutions across the Asia, Europe, and North America, including Orange County Museum of Art, the High Line in New York, CCA Berlin - Center for Contemporary Arts, Chisenhale Gallery in London, Palais des Tokyo in Paris, CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, West Bund Museum in Shanghai, and Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou, and major perennial exhibitions such as 5th New Museum Triennial (New York, 2021), 58th Venice Art Biennale (2019), 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016), and 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016).

Dong Longyue creates video and performative works featuring written text as the main subject. He extracts and plays with the structural rules of language, such as structure of Chinese characters, pattern of word formation, and pronunciation, to activate the imagery implied by the words and makes use of this information as materials to transform a written story into a construction of plastic arts or sound art. His practice also explores the clarification and interactivity between language, grammar, and the construction of the artwork. Dong has participated in many exhibitions and performances, such as RAM Highlights: The Good Life (tgl) (Shanghai, 2022), The Dwelling Place of the Other in Me (Shanghai, 2022), Spontaneous Decisions II (Shanghai, 2021), and Night Flowers = 141 km (Shanghai, 2021). He has contributed to publications such as LEAP (2021), A Basket Of (2021), and Fine Art-Modern Media Art (2020). Dong moved from Beijing to Shanghai after graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 2020.

Born in Wuhan, Wang Xiaofu now lives and works in Shanghai. Having received her artistic training at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing and subsequently, at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Wang observes and describes the existence of things, her perceptions, and the boundaries between existence and perception, and explores their overlapping, folding, dissolving, and covering through painting, writing, and video. She has recently participated in exhibitions including OffSide｜Youth Artists Breaking and Practicing (Yixing, 2023), Night Dimension: The Night of the Gifts (Shanghai, 2023), Layered Surface (Shanghai, 2023), the 2021 Chengdu Biennale (Chengdu, 2021), Rituals in Rituals of the Future (Shanghai, 2021), and THere (Shanghai, 2020). She has also organized The Park (Wuhan, 2019), a community-engaging art project, at Wuhan Xinrunkang Psychiatric Rehabilitation Hospital.

Huiqi He is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice is rooted in local experiences, rituals, and memories, She lets fluid experiences and practices disperse, touch, and connect within the interstices of forests in cross-cultural spaces. Huiqi’s recent work focuses on the shamanistic practices and narratives of southern China, combining ethnographic research methods with personal bodily sensory experiences to create multimedia works such as video, ink painting, installation, and performance. Huiqi graduated with a BFA in Chinese Painting from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, an MFA in Art Practice from the School of Visual Arts, and an MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths.

Cici Wu was born and raised in Beijing and Hong Kong. Reducing filmmaking to its most humble and elemental components, Wu creates texts, drawings, videos, objects and installations which extend the imaginative and structural premises of cinematic language across a wide range of media. Often taking local microhistories or archives as a point of departure, she uses the cinematic frame as a means to negotiate and reflect on the ways in which transpersonal narratives of social, cultural and historical belonging structure our experiences of self. Combining historical research and material experimentation, her works aim to explore and interrupt dominant narratives on a multitude of subjects, including memory, cinematic history, nationalism, belonging and identity, and relationships between humans and non-humans.

Yuan Yuan, formerly based in Beijing, currently living and studying in the Netherlands. With a background in literature and language, writing serves as the foundation of their artistic practice, often evolving with their image practice parallel. Their works explore the intersection of the collective unconscious and the cosmos, delving into themes of belonging and displacement, with an ongoing focus on minority groups.

Host or Publisher Accent Society重音社