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Streaming Festival 3rd edition Program
Opera
One of the highlights of the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing was a duet performed by a western tenor and a classical Chinese opera singer.
The Video project Opera is a selection of Chinese and Dutch video makers. They all sing the same song – with different voices, intonations and nuances-about longing, based on collective and personel memories.
How to adapt to this crazy Global World. How to keep your identity, values and traditions.
And ... which ones?
Opera is a special program compiled for the streaming Festival 2008.
By SaE (Sino and Europe Cultural Interaction Foundation)
Curated by Xiaowen Ju and Paul Donker Duyvis
- Zeng Tu
- Zeng Tu
- Meiya Lin
- Meiya Lin
- Liang Shuo
- Liang Shuo
- Liang Shuo
- Wu Junyong
- Wu Junyong
- Jerome Symons
- Jerome Symons
- Sonja Wyss
- Sonja Wyss
- Tiong Ang
- Paul Donker Duyvis
- Paul Donker Duyvis
- Marnix Goossens
- Zhifei Yang
- Zhifei Yang
Life is drunk,death is a dream Zeng Tu
from last place to herefrom last second to now
from last breath to this...
between last door and next one
there is my drunk life and my dreamy death
existing in continuing continuing is the only way
continuing to the end I exist by continuing...
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:06:00
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No news is Right news Zeng Tu
Seriously,no joke,
watch TV seriously,
cause people made it
very seriously. Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:05:34
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The Times are Summoning Meiya Lin
The times are summoning is personal memory from the artist's childhood. By filming a bunch of kids who do the morning exercise every single morning. Presenting a matter of fact: strikt rules and simply obey. Conceptually it is a heavy issue to deal with. Moreover there could only be one action, one thought after all. But It happens to the generation nowadays, a completely different, unusually light reaction.In the video the background is taken out – no specific context anymore- and and a cut loose from any individual contact between the students. Like in the video Lost Paradise the space lacks any reference to the normal world and becomes a kind of Nowhereland.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:02:40
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Lost Paradise Meiya Lin
"Lost Paradise", the background sound is mainly the key word for this video which is based on a very popular communist song in China. Singing for the beautiful flower and the nice blowing spring wind. The tone of the song is bright and communistic cheering up. The general meaning is about how joyful to spend the time outside in the perfect communist society, and how bright our future will be.Basically the artist chooses most of the elements that are participating in the song for the structure of this video. The background was transferred artificially to create one non-existing environment in a nowhere space, a space of lost paradise.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:03:00
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15 minutes behaviour Liang Shuo
This Movie contains 3 real life episodes of the life of a Young man: in his room waiting, drinking, smoking, doing nothing and everything.Fifteen minutes precise slow motion acting reduced by high speed play back to one minute normal movement.
The second part is a walk over the local market and the third a close up of a meditative exercise in making fire.
Total playing time 15 min.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:01:08
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Fifteen Colors Liang Shuo
This Movie contains 3 real life episodes of the life of a Young man: in his room waiting, drinking, smoking, doing nothing and everything.Fifteen minutes precise slow motion acting reduced by high speed play back to one minute normal movement.
The second part is a walk over the local market and the third a close up of a meditative exercise in making fire.
Total playing time 15 min.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:11:00
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Physical Material study (Lighter) Liang Shuo
This Movie contains 3 real life episodes of the life of a Young man: in his room waiting, drinking, smoking, doing nothing and everything.Fifteen minutes precise slow motion acting reduced by high speed play back to one minute normal movement.
The second part is a walk over the local market and the third a close up of a meditative exercise in making fire.
Total playing time 15 min.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:01:00
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Opera Wu Junyong
Wu Junyong (HangZhou) makes hand drawn animations with simple contrasting colors. Red is the dominant element. He depicts complicated social and political behaviour in simple images.Not a soft poetic view, but an ironical, raw, sharp and sometimes cynical analysis of the people around him. The play with the red flags and banners is a direct political statement.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:10:00
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Carps Wu Junyong
Wu Junyong (HangZhou) makes hand drawn animations with simple contrasting colors. Red is the dominant element. He depicts complicated social and political behaviour in simple images.Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Animation | 00:10:00
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Paradise Regained Jerome Symons
The compact video's of Jerome Symons are often critical, always poetical. With sober means he handles subjects like elections in Beirut, Indian workers in Dubai or, like here, women's protest in Tehran and the expansion of China.Above all the video's explore the endless space of a short timeline(that's life!).
Exploring new territories outside the workers paradise.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:01:56
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Silk Road Jerome Symons
The compact video's of Jerome Symons are often critical, always poetical. With sober means he handles subjects like elections in Beirut, Indian workers in Dubai or, like here, women's protest in Tehran and the expansion of China.Above all the video's explore the endless space of a short timeline(that's life!).
Tribute to the brave ladies demonstrating on International Women's Day.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:01:42
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Die Krähe Sonja Wyss
In "Die Krähe" (the crow), Sonja Wyss lets a number of elements interact with each other. Images of a screaming girl, black crows against a blue sky, and a snow-covered woodland landscape are edited together in slow-motion. With this sequence of images, fragments of the song of the same name (Die Krähe), from Schubert‘s Winterreise, can be heard. This music reinforces the heavily fraught tone of doom and desire, the more so because the sound has been manipulated and creaks and falters, as if the needle has got stuck on the record. The atmosphere on this video is one of vagueness; suggestions of innocence, violence, love and death, intermingle and are played off against each other. These are the snippets of a possible story, but there is no beginning and no end. It is as if we are in the girl‘s own world, where the laws of language and logic do not apply, but where, as in a dream, images and feelings mix freely with each other. What she really feels is not defined, and ultimately remains a secret.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:07:00
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Hoch-Zyte Sonja Wyss
"Hoch-Zyte" ("weddings", but also: "high times"), shows in a dreamlike setting three women and their fantasies and yearnings about marriage. An 11 year old girl is knitting a weddingsavingsock (Hochzeitssparstrumpf), and it is getting longer and longer, since a wedding is not in sight. She is dreaming and waiting for her prince, but he is not coming, not yet. A woman, she could be the girl's mother, dreams about her wedding long ago.A young maid, she could be just an illusion, but could also be the bride, dances with a man in a wedding dress through some scenes. Pictures of the conscious are mixed with symbols from the unconscious, parallel to reality there is a dream world, illogical and absurd.
The goat, dead crows, eggs, which are being bred under a table, a dancing couple and a girl, who is lying on the ground like sleeping beauty: these are symbols, which remind one of fairy tales and legends or ghostly dreams.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:06:00
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Two Women Drinking Tiong Ang
On the morning Pim Fortuyn was murdered in The Netherlands, I was having a cup of coffee in my friend Roelandt’s kitchen in his apartment in Kunming. His wife Weili suffered from eye problems and she was drinking some herbal medicine from a bowl.My friend Diego took me to a rehearsal of an experimental theatre group in East London. I watched all actors having a good time, also during lunch break, although they didn’t speak much.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:01:03
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Candles Paul Donker Duyvis
The two video's form a diptych: an old serious woman slowly moving and young girls full of laughter jumping around.An old woman performs a daily ritual in a church.
She does it with devoted gestures and creates a happy atmosphere
She is always the only one in the church.
If she disappears this generous space will vanish with her...
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:07:30
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Guilin Girls Paul Donker Duyvis
A Story of an Encounter without Words about watching each other with curiosity.The beautiful music comes from a cassete given to me by a traditional Singer living in Inner Mongolia. I heard the woman singing and I was moved. She saw it and gave me a cassete with her songs. A few days later these Guilin Children jumped upon me with a generous smile.
I decided to combine these two precious gifts to memorize these moments of communication without words. Listening to them still makes me feel good and than I wonder what happened to the young girls and the Mongolian woman singer.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:07:30
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Airpacker Marnix Goossens
A space fully packed with transparant balloons filled with air.Watching the room through the window from outside give s a view of hundreds os of frozen milky soap balls. Then suddenly comes a hand with a sharp pin and lets the air free...
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:06:00
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Untitled Zhifei Yang
A repetition of similar shots of a sleeping girl dressed in white.Zoomed in the camera shows an innocent young woman sleeping in a long white dress on a clean white cushion and sheet.
When the camera zoomes out the cushion is enormous...and the background becomes more and more prosaic.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:04:20
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Day dream Zhifei Yang
A white bed in a dark space.The sound around tells that we are outside in a garden or parc.
Slowly a white creature approaches through a long soft yellow tube and climes in the bed.
Loud noise of airplanes flying over...fadeout...black
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:07:15
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