Currents Residency
The Currents residency took place in Beijing, a sectored city, between district 798, an area with a high concentration of contemporary art museums and galleries, and part of the countryside surrounding the city. Without a clearly defined project beforehand, the artist chose to get involved with the local context and the dynamics of the city, which at the time was filled with buildings and works as far as the eye could see, in order to develop his proposal.
Using a bicycle to move between the studio and the nearby neighborhoods, the artist mobilized materials found along these routes, such as a fabric that is ubiquitous in buildings with a striped pattern in white, blue and red, analogous to the colors of the US flag, China’s main economic partner (and rival) at the present time, bamboo brooms, an object widely adopted by the population, a dried-out tree trunk with the roots cut off, bought from a construction site and photographs taken at the Panjiayuan antiques market, printed on a 22-meter roll of silk as a kind of inventory of Chinese history.
The artist then comments on not only his individual perception as a Western artist in the East, but also on the presence of a certain West in the East and, why not, vice versa, since borders, especially in terms of late capitalism, are practically vaporized when we refer to the flow of capital between the world’s two largest economies.
