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Indepth Arts News:
"Feng Mengbo: PHANTOM TALES - The Latest in the Series of Artists' Projects for the Web"
2001-06-14 until 2001-06-14
Dia Center for the Arts
New York, NY,
USA
On June 14, 2001, Dia Center for the Arts launches Phantom
Tales, a work created by media artist Feng Mengbo for Dia's
series of Artists' Projects for the Web. Mengbo, who was born
in Beijing in 1966 and lives and works in that city, draws
heavily on China's cultural and political history, as well as
his own personal history, filtered through the lens of
technology. Phantom Tales, which examines the violence and
propaganda that permeated the storybooks of Mengbo's childhood,
is the artist's first web-based project.
For Phantom Tales Mengbo turns to the Cultural Revolution,
creating animations based on two widely-known storybooks and a
technical guidebook. In recasting One Silver Dollar, an
account by a soldier of the People's Liberation Army of his
family's tragic history prior to 1949, Mengbo employs cinematic
techniques to turn images appropriated from a static
black-and-white picture book into an engaging and dynamic
experience. The Bloody History of the Three Stones, a
chronicle of the conditions suffered by workers in Tianjin City
in the 1940s, is presented by Mengbo in a style analogous to
the manual slide shows of his childhood, which, in the absence
of television and movies, were a major source of entertainment.
An animation of The Technology of Slides Shows examines a PLA
manual for creating animated effects in slide shows. A
soundtrack, of found music and sounds, accompanies each piece.
Phantom Tales may be seen at www.diacenter.org/mengbo. Dia
and Mengbo will celebrate the project on Thursday evening, June
14, 2001, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., with a party in Dia's
bookshop at 548 West 22nd Street, New York City.
Feng Mengbo
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Feng Mengbo began examining
Chinese popular culture, imbued as it is with political
meaning, and integrating this consideration with Western
iconography. His work often combines the styles and structures
of video games with aspects of Chinese culture, ranging from
traditional stories and legends to opera and film. Trained in
design and printmaking at the Beijing School of Arts and Craft
and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, in Beijing, Mengbo began
exploring the computer as a medium in 1994, creating first
computer slide shows and later interactive CD-ROMs and videos
to bring his private cultural concerns to a wider audience and
inviting the viewer to imaginatively reshape [his or her] own
cultural participation.
Mengbo's first CD-ROM, My Private Album (1996), an electronic
collage of three generations of his family's pictures and
memorabilia, functions as a metaphor for the nonlinear nature
of memory itself while inviting the viewer into his family's
private history. In his CD-ROM Taking Mount Doom by Strategy
(1997), Feng Mengbo pursues his interest in the game as art,
integrating the stage and film versions of the Cultural
Revolution opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy with the
early 1990s Western video game Doom.
Mengbo represented China in the forty-fifth Venice Biennale in
1993 and in Documenta X, the French Biennial, Korean Biennial,
and South African Biennial, all in 1997. In the fall of 1998,
the Holly Solomon Gallery, in New York, and The Haggerty
Museum, in Milwaukee, collaborated with Mengbo to present his
first United States museum exhibition. Early next year Mengbo
will have an exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago.
Artists' Projects for the Web
Beginning in early 1995, as part of its efforts to facilitate
direct experience between audiences and works of art, Dia
initiated a series of web-based works, and became the first
arts organization to foster the use of the world wide web as an
artistic and conceptual medium. Previous projects, which can
still be visited on Dia's website, include David Claerbout's
Present (2000), Stephen Vitiello's Tetrasomia (2000), Gary
Simmons's Wake (2000), Francis Als's The Thief (1999),
Arturo Herrera's Almost Home (1998), Diller + Scofidio's
Refresh (1998), and Kristin Lucas's Between a Rock and a
Hard Drive (1998). All may be viewed at www.diacenter.org.
Dia's series of Artists' Projects for the Web has been funded
in part by the New York State Council on the Arts. A
tax-exempt charitable organization established in 1974, Dia has
become one of the largest organizations in the United States
dedicated to contemporary art and culture. In fulfilling this
commitment, Dia sustains diverse programming in the visual
arts, as well as in poetry, education, and critical discourse
and debate.
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