东亚录像艺术的兴起|金曼：对录像媒介展开全新的思考和观看
重新聚焦媒介：东亚录像艺术的兴起
展览前言
策展人：金曼（Kim Machan）
研究型展览“重新聚焦媒介：东亚录像艺术的兴起”（Refocusing on the Medium: The Rise of East Asia Video Art) 首次汇集来自日本、韩国和中国，开创了录像艺术实验之先河的重量级艺术家，旨在重新审视艺术家在东亚录像艺术兴起之时对于这一媒介的处理方式，并以期为跨国性当代艺术媒介的录像艺术在全球范围内的历史梳理做出贡献。
自1965年可携式摄影机索尼Portapak在日本发明以来，各大洲的艺术家都获得了接触这一全球性媒介的机会，并为其发展做出了贡献。在过去的十年中，有关录像艺术历史的展览在亚洲各地举办。当这些材料逐渐积累到一定程度，特定国家录像艺术史的深度和细节逐而浮现；更值得赞赏的是，这些展览和相关的研究材料亦扩充了既有的全球录像艺术之历史，并对录像媒介的实验性实践和国际交流进行了学术性阐释，激起人们更彻底地反思录像艺术的解读方式。
作为一种特征鲜明的新技术和实验性艺术媒介，录像艺术的到来没有文化传统的先行铺路，也没有重要的艺术惯例或历史前提——但它却成为了一种全新的全球性当代艺术工具。
这种媒介观使我们有理由来重新调整思路，重新评估东亚艺术家对这段仍有争议的历史的贡献。东亚艺术家是如何举起录像设备、并对这一新兴的全球媒介展开实验的？这是否会改变我们看待录像艺术史的方式？
从白南准（Nam June Paik）所牵涉的韩国、日本、欧洲和美国的全球艺术网络开始，东亚艺术家便开始利用这种文化非特定性的媒介，进入到新的交流点和同样复杂的跨区域、跨国界网络中。在二十多年的时间里，录像艺术将全球的艺术家勾连起来，特别是1968年以来的日本、1978年以来的韩国、1983年以来的台湾地区、1985年以来的香港地区和1988年以来的中国大陆。在很短的时间内，前所未有的录像艺术实验跨越了各大洲和文化领土，在工业化和发展中经济体中出现，使录像艺术成为第一个全球性的当代艺术媒介.
在OCAT上海馆举办的首届展览中，通过与韩国白南准艺术中心的合作，以互联网直播的形式展出白南准最具代表性的录像装置作品《电视佛》[1974(2002)]。在展览的语境下，这一作品颇具挑衅姿态地质疑了录像媒介的——现场性；对时间和空间的扭变；幻象、现实和真实体验之间的紧张关系；同时颠覆着这一媒介的观念策略；并连接起本地和全球期待的动态网络。
展览主题“重新聚焦媒介”旨在激发人们思考录像媒介的使用，以及我们如何看待录像媒介。当我们开始比较这些基于录像媒介的艺术作品，我们就会以不同的方式激活自身的感知，这些方式超越了以电影和电影史为根基的叙事性推理。展览以处理闭路电视监视器的艺术作品为起点，揭示了录像与传统电影及影像之间的巨大差异，以试图重塑观众对录像媒介的预期和假设，以及我们体验录像作品的方式。闭路电视的决定性特征是其画面的现场感。它不是对过去时间的记录，而是对当下时刻的体验；它以电子形式呈现，并且在实际体验和空间中展开的错位体验之间制造出一个间隙。对艺术家来说，这个间隙成为一个观念的“宝库”，使他们在便携式录像设备面世之际，得以对这些技术以及录像所独有的其他特征——例如录像机内编辑、覆盖重录、实时监控和持续录制等——进行思考和实验。
我们以白南准的第一件录像作品《扣子偶发事件》（1965）作为本次展览的开篇之作。该作品拍摄于艺术家获得了他的首台便携式录像机的当天。这段难得一见的录像向我们展现了白南准对创作录像作品的最初反应和冲动。从那一刻开始，大量的艺术作品在一个屏幕文化始终存在、并且占据主导地位的时代在全球范围内涌现出来。
进入展厅，观者首先看到的是几件使用闭路电视展示的作品，如山口胜弘的录像装置作品《宫娥》（1974-1975）、小野洋子的《天空电视》（1966-2020）和王功新的《两平方有效空间》（1995-2020），邀请观看者作为积极的参与者与作品建立空间关系或进入到作品中。这种空间意识——不仅是在闭路电视监视器的作品中——在所有的作品中都是值得考虑的。每件作品都具有一个延伸的背景，换言之，即一个超越了单个屏幕、显示器或投影的空间关系，它们揭示了物理和观念上的空间策略。每件作品都对录像媒介采取了一种不同的处理方式，鼓励人们对录像媒介的独特性，以及东亚艺术家所做的实验性贡献进行深入的思考。
此次展览中的许多作品，如饭村隆彦的《这就是拍摄了这些的摄影机》（1980）和张培力的《焦距》（1996），通过颠覆摄像机及显示器的传统用途，对影像设备进行解构，同时也向观者对屏幕表征及空间的体验发起质询。
本次展览所呈现的作品，仅仅是从东亚艺术家在录像领域所取得的巨大成就中选取的典范之作。我们希望观众能够通过这些作品，对录像媒介展开全新的思考和观看。
Refocusing on the Medium: The Rise of East Asia Video Art is the first exhibition to assemble key protagonists that initiated experiments with the medium of video originating from Japan, Korea, China, Taipei and Hong Kong. The exhibition proposes a re-examination of the artists approach to the video medium rising from East Asia and contributes to the global history of video art as a transnational contemporary art medium.
Since the Sony Portapak portable video recorder was invented in Japan in 1965, artists on every continent gained access and have contributed to the development of this global medium. Exhibitions exploring the histories of video art have featured across Asia in the past decade. The cumulative results have enhanced detail and depth to specific national histories laudably expanding an existing world history of video art. The exhibitions and accompanying research expose scholarly accounts of experimental practice and international exchange that provokes a more radical review of the way video art is considered.
As a new technology and experimental artistic medium with distinct characteristics, video art arrived with no specific cultural traditions, no significant conventions or established history – a new global contemporary art tool.
This view of the medium gives reason for a recalibration of thinking and reassessment of the contribution that artists from East Asia have made to this still contested history. How did artists in East Asia take up the apparatus of video and experiment with this new global medium and can this change the way we might approach the history of video art?
Beginning with Nam June Paik’s entangled Korea, Japan, European and American global art networks, artists from East Asia took up the culturally non-specific medium to enter new points of exchange and equally complex trans-regional and transnational networks. In little more than twenty years the video medium was channelled by artists living in Japan commencing from 1968, followed by other countries in East Asia. Within this relatively brief period first hand experimentation was occurring across the industrialised and developing economies straddling continents and cultures, situating video art as arguably the first truly global contemporary art medium.
In the first iteration of this exhibition at OCAT Shanghai, a partnership with the Nam June Paik Art Center in Korea enabled a streamed a live broadcast of the iconic Nam June Paik video installation TV Buddha, (1974-2002) that was projected in the entry foyer of the exhibition. The projection was a provocation to question the video medium within the context of the exhibition – the liveness of the medium, the distortion of time and space, the tension between illusion, reality and authentic experience, the conceptual strategies used to subvert the medium, and the dynamics connecting local and global aspirations.
The frontline title “Refocusing on the Medium” is intended to trigger thoughts about the way the video medium is used and how we might observe it. Once we begin to compare the art works use of the video medium, we are activating our perception in different ways that extend beyond a narrative reasoning that is the basis of film and cinematic histories. The exhibition begins with art works engaging with CCTV in order to demonstrate the greatest contrast between video and the traditions of film and cinema thereby resetting audience expectations and assumptions about the video medium and how we experience it. The defining quality of CCTV is the liveness of the imagery. It is not a record of time past, but an experience of the present moment, electronically rendered, creating a gap between the actual and an altered experience in space. This was a conceptual ‘treasure chest’ for artists to consider and experiment with when the technology first became available along with the portability of the video recording apparatus and other characteristics unique to video such as in-camera editing, record-over, live monitor viewing, and durational recording.
We open this exhibition with what is credited as the first video artwork by Nam June Paik, Button Happening, 1965. Made on the first day the artist acquired his first access to a portable video recorder. This rarely seen video shows us Paik’s initial response and impulse to create a video artwork. Since that moment a prolific number of art works have been produced globally in an age where screen culture is ever present and dominant.
Entering the exhibition works using CCTV such as, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi’s installation Las Meninas (1974-1975), Yoko Ono’s Sky TV (1966-2020), and Wang Gongxin’s Two Square Meter Space (1995-2020), call to attention the viewer as an active participant with a spatial relationship to or within the artwork. This spatial awareness is something to consider in all the works, not just the CCTV artworks. Each of the works has an expanded context, in other words a spatial relationship that exceeds the individual screen, monitor or projection demonstrating physical and conceptual spatial strategies. Each work puts forward a different approach to the video medium prompting further questions about the mediums’ unique characteristics and the experimental contributions made by artists with their origins in East Asia.
Several artworks such as Takahiko Iimura’s This is a Camera that Shoots This, (1980), and Zhang Peili’s Focal Distance, 1996, deconstruct the camera apparatus, the experience of screen representation and space through subverting the expected use of the video camera and monitor.
The works in this exhibition are but a few select examples coming out of an enormous field of accomplished video experiments by artists rising from East Asia. Through these works I hope viewers will tune into a fresh way of thinking and seeing the video medium.
关于策展人
Kim Machan is founding director of MAAP (Media Art Asia Pacific) developing curatorial projects in Australia and the Asia regions through this organization since 1998. In 2014-15 LANDSEASKY: Revisiting Spatiality in Video Art toured major museums and galleries in Shanghai, Guangzhou in China; Seoul, South Korea, Brisbane and Sydney. Machan has curated solo exhibitions of major artists including Zhang Peili, Wang Gongxin, Shilpa Gupta, Yeondoo Jung, Patty Chang and David Kelley. In 2016 she co-curated Zhang Peili: From Painting to Video and is a contributor to the exhibition’s publication of the same name, published by the Australian National University Press in 2019. She is currently writing a PhD exploring the rise of East Asian video art at the University of Queensland.She has written a PhD exploring the rise of East Asian video art at the University of Queensland.
相关链接
“重新聚焦媒介：东亚录像艺术的兴起”即将在北京民生现代美术馆展出