UCCA Beijing

Kan Xuan: Millet Mounds

2012.9.15 - 2012.11.15

2012

Video Installation (detail)

Courtesy of the artist.

About

Location:  Central Gallery, Nave, Long Gallery

Kan Xuan: Millet Mounds is at once a meditation on China's imperial past and a broad survey of its present, in the form of 173 stop-action videos, each of which unfolds before one of China’s known extant imperial tombs. The largest and most significant project by leading female artist Kan Xuan (b. 1972) to date, MILLET MOUNDS is the result of over 100 days and 28,000 kilometers of continuous, on-the-road research and shooting with a crew of four in early 2012. Kan Xuan’s lens claims, catalogues, and personalizes a centuries-long lineage of history and power. Through the process of searching out and recording these ancient sites, some of which are major tourist sites while others linger in disrepair, Kan Xuan engages with contemporary rural China in all its twenty-first century complexity, as a persistent past incorporates itself into the quotidian realities of the present. The exhibition takes its title from the name used by villagers in Northern China to refer to tomb mounds that resemble piles of their staple crop at harvest time.

For more information, please read the “Kan Xuan: Millet Mounds” press release.

News

“Humor, lightness and grace characterize the works of the artist, as well as deep irony and dramatic sceneries. ”

—China Daily

“The pictures reproduce the lost solemnity and mysteriousness of tombs, creating a vague sense of nostalgia for viewers. Earthy brick walls split the exhibition hall into open spaces, accompanied on the side by short intriguing anecdotes about past emperors.”

—Global Times

Works in the exhibition

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Kan Xuan

Millet Mounds

Video Installation (detail)
2012

Kan Xuan

Millet Mounds

Video Installation (detail)
2012

Kan Xuan

Millet Mounds

Video Installation (detail)
2012

Kan Xuan

Millet Mounds

Video Installation (detail)
2012

Kan Xuan

Millet Mounds

Video Installation (detail)
2012

Kan Xuan

Millet Mounds

Video Installation (detail)
2012

Kan Xuan

Millet Mounds

Video Installation (detail)
2012

Kan Xuan

Millet Mounds

Video Installation (detail)
2012

Kan Xuan

Millet Mounds

Video Installation (detail)
2012

Kan Xuan

Millet Mounds

Video Installation (detail)
2012

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