October 24, 2009 – February 14, 2010 / Kress Gallery
Lawrence, KS – As part of an in-depth website presentation for the exhibition Extra/Ordinary: Video Art from Asia, the Spencer Museum of Art has published an electronic version of the exhibition brochure. Visitors to the SMA website may view the publication online or download it to their desktop. The brochure includes an introductory essay by Curator of Asian Art Kris Imants Ercums, plus individual thematic entries on the art work, and artist biographies.
Extra/Ordinary, which opens this Saturday at the Museum, assembles recent work by video artists working in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Afghanistan—all of whom share a common interest in the meaning of ordinary, day-to-day lives, especially within the context of Asia, where an immense reevaluation of historical consciousness and cultural practices is occurring under the guise of “development.”
The exhibition investigates new ways of transforming familiar experiences and daily routines into moments of expanded meaning, contemplation, and humorous reflection. By repositioning constructed notions of the “everyday” as cinematic recreations, comical interventions, or meditative actions, Extra/Ordinary explores the imaginative potential embedded in the ordinary stuff of life.
Organized by Ercums, Extra/Ordinary features recent video work by artists from across Asia: The Xijing Men’s Collective—Chen Shaoxiong (China), Gimhongsok (Korea), and Ozawa Tsuyoshi (Japan)—bring new meaning to “play” in their alternate world of Olympic competition; in Invisible Cities (2005-2008) Taiwanese artist Tsui Kuang-yu creates action videos that blur “correct behavior” in urban environments; three short videos by Tokyo-based Izumi Taro offer an odd realm of comical daydreams; Lida Abdul seeks healing in the spatial realities of war-torn Afghanistan; and Korea’s cine-magician, “Mr. Wonderful” himself, Jung Yeondoo, produces sweeping vignettes at the confluence of remembrance and imagination in Handmade Memories (2008).
“Together, these artists uncover the potential of daily experience and explore the material stuff of the world as mutable and laden with potential,” Ercums says. “The use of moving images in this exhibition to restore a lost memory, capture the present, or remake life through cinematic effect, further reflects the fleeting qualities that make the everyday so extraordinary. In the process, ordinary moments are uprooted, transformed into wondrous encounters and, through the ‘poetics of noticing,’ restored as artifacts of memory and meaning.”