CHENG RAN Studio at Rijksakademie OPEN 2013
November 30th through December 1st, 2013
Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam
In international language testing there are usually four standards by which proficiency is assessed: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Hence, these have become the rules to judge whether a certain person possesses the elementary ability to communicate with others and whether they have the capacity to live overseas. On top of this, they represent a certain kind of defining dimensionality to one’s personal identity, and through examination papers and data, they infer one’s personal ability to control and balance the emotional and the rational. In his one year of residence at Rijksakademie, Cheng Ran employed video installations, sounds and a novel as his creative media, to query these fake, emotionless standards and, from an opposing perspective, to attempt to re-discover the interaction between the primitive instincts of one’s human body and the social fabric in order to describe this state of mania with its corresponding physical disorders, possessing a rebellious personal identity and values. From this, the title is taken.
Before a child going to sleep, the parents will often tell him a bedtime story. Frequently, the child will fall asleep before the story is finished. In medicine, there’s a kind of disease called hypnagogic hallucination. It’s not a state of dreaming, but rather it lies in a grey area between reality and the realm of dreams. Before Falling Asleep uses well-known classic fairy tales told at bedtime as inspiration. Shot in Amsterdam on Super 16MM film and using four-channel video, it employs an anthropomorphic perspective to show four conversations between actors from the natural world: the dialogues between a river and a pond, two doves, a fire and a tree act as metaphors for several basic philosophical truths, including progress and stagnation, truth or lies, to choose or to miss, and danger and safety.
Born in the Wild uses a piano as material for the installation. The idea was inspired by a CD of an Emil Gilels’ performance in 1972 of a Beethoven sonata, with a cover image of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), The Sea of Ice. From this, Cheng Ran directly transformed the cover and contents of the music cd, its exterior and its core. Throughout, he kept Mikhail Bakunin’s famous quote firmly in mind: “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.”
Circadian Rhythm is a 130,000 character detective novel based on both reality and fiction. Its title comes from the daily cycle of human physical processes and emotions Meanwhile, it’s also a metaphor for the passage of meteorological changes between day and night. The novel follows a detective who slowly begins to question his own identity after he meets obstacle after obstacle while trying to seek the truth behind a vicious crime. Woven into the narration are opera lyrics, poetry, endless soliloquies and dialogues and depictions of dreamscapes and fantasy. The novel has an imaginary author, whose unfamiliar and indistinct identity is used to imagine the structure of the novel’s world.
Meanwhile, special excerpts from the novel that act as clues are exhibited around the dozen or so public toilets at Rijksakademie. Titled Piss Time, they explore the relationship between reading and space.
Vinyl LP, HIT-OR-MISS-IST, is a work from Cheng Ran’s 2013 solo exhibition, The Last Generation, at Galerie Urs Meile. The exhibition utilized words, sounds and images as its core creative media. This LP was produced using ambient recordings made by Cheng Ran during his travels: on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, in Amsterdam and Paris. Further editing and compositions were done in collaboration with Shanghai artist VALLEY. Time and space, carried on the different sounds, were interwoven: day and night, city and wilderness, were merged into one. The clamor of footsteps in a subway abruptly become a solitary dance of a pair of stiletto heels; and then, in a park under a tree, the strains of a lonely drifting singer in decline are, in a split second, detached from their surroundings and turned into a hushed solo. Natural sounds are repeatedly amplified and reproduced in real space and in emptiness as an exploration of lost time and kept memories and the relationship between truth and nothingness. HIT-OR-MISS-IST is a collection of dreamt-up words by Cheng Ran to describe an aimless state of continuous extension and growth, like a chapter of “adventure”.
Visitors can buy limited edition copies of the published novel and the vinyl record from the library, reception and exhibition space at Rijksakademie.
Include works below:
