It is our honor to announce artist Yi Lian’s premiere solo exhibition “The Desolate Timeline” on September 22, at Telescope. Yi Lian has long been using video as his creative language, and his video works show a surrealist, magic style. His lens always focuses on the land, rivers, wilderness, draught animals, people and stories of his hometown. In his video works, days and nights are turned upside down, animals think around the clock, and people always fear their life away, as if they live in their dreams. In his recent works as well as in this solo exhibition, Yi Lian turned the focus of his view to a more extensive theme: the revisits, representations and production of time-space.
The solo show presents three groups/pieces of the artist’s recent works. Each group/piece works in concert with time and space in the show room. In 2012, Yi Lian learnt from a family conversation that his little nephew was having somnambulism: when the family members were sound asleep, this 5-year-old child would wander around in the house while he was dreaming. This odd yet fascinating behavior became the motive of making Undercurrent 2012. In filming this video work, the artist asked his nephew to try to reproduce in the wild the scenes of his somnambulism, while weaving the artist’s own imaginations into them. After five years, the artist made Undercurrent 2016, where he revisited the time-space of the past. Similar yet all different scenes and creatures are interlaced with each other in this group of videos.
The sound installation Eight-Hour Long Conversations in Eight Years records two conversations of the artist with himself in the period of eight years, which both lasted continuously eight hours. During those two conversations, the artist recalled his childhood, and talked about what the situations were like and what he had experienced back then. To be exact, this work is more like a record of an extreme act, the consequences of which are sealed by the artist in two weed-tree chairs that were made together by his father and himself. The two chairs are installed with used furniture that the artist and his father collected from their neighbors in their hometown. Meanwhile, The Palace is a humorous game designed against “reality”: the artist visited the Forbidden City in Beijing and the simulated one at Hengdian World Studios respectively but along the same route, and then transplanted the audio recordings of the environment at the real Forbidden City in Beijing into the video that he filmed at the Palaces of Ming and Qing Dynasties in Hengdian. In Yi Lian’s art, time-space is twisted into a series of broken, isolated islands, and people exist in a temporary and desolate manner, just like everything on earth.
我们荣幸地宣布，艺术家易连将于9月22日在望远镜空间举办其北京首次个展“时间轴上空无一人”。作为长期使用影像作为创作语言的艺术家，易连的影像有着超现实主义的魔幻风格。他的镜头时常聚焦于家乡的土地、河流、野地、牲口、人物及故事，在他的影像之中，昼夜颠倒，动物日夜思考，而人总是惶惶终日，仿若梦中。而在近期创作及此次个展中，易连将关注的视线转交于更为广阔的命题：时空的重访、再现与制造。
此次个展将展出三组/件艺术家的新近创作，而展出的每组/件作品在空间中都有着时间与空间上的呼应关系。2012年易连听家里人谈论起自己患有梦游症的小外甥：每当家人都已熟睡，这个五岁的孩子便会于梦中在家里四处游走，这种怪异却有趣的行为成为了《暗流》的创作动因。影像拍摄过程中，艺术家让小外甥在野外尝试着重现自己梦游的场景，同时也将自己的想象编织其中。时隔五年，艺术家拍摄了《暗流二零一六》，用重访的方式回溯了过往的时空，相似却又充满差异的场景与生物在这组影像作品中交错出现。
声音装置《八年的八小时谈话》记录了艺术家八年之中的两次八小时无间断的自我对话，艺术家在其间回忆着自己的童年，讲述着当时的近况与遭遇。这件作品更准确的来说更像是一次极限行为的记录，艺术家将这一行为结果封存于由父亲与自己共同手工完成的杂木椅子中，两把椅子由父子俩从邻里乡亲手中收集来的古旧家什组装而成。而《宫》则是针对于“真实”而生的一场戏谑的游戏：艺术家采取同样的路线分别游览了位于北京与横店影视城的紫禁城，并将游览北京故宫时录制的环境音移植于横店明清宫的影像中。在易连的创作中，时空被扭结成一座又一座断裂的孤岛，人也成为一种短暂与荒芜的存在，与万物一样。
The solo show presents three groups/pieces of the artist’s recent works. Each group/piece works in concert with time and space in the show room. In 2012, Yi Lian learnt from a family conversation that his little nephew was having somnambulism: when the family members were sound asleep, this 5-year-old child would wander around in the house while he was dreaming. This odd yet fascinating behavior became the motive of making Undercurrent 2012. In filming this video work, the artist asked his nephew to try to reproduce in the wild the scenes of his somnambulism, while weaving the artist’s own imaginations into them. After five years, the artist made Undercurrent 2016, where he revisited the time-space of the past. Similar yet all different scenes and creatures are interlaced with each other in this group of videos.
The sound installation Eight-Hour Long Conversations in Eight Years records two conversations of the artist with himself in the period of eight years, which both lasted continuously eight hours. During those two conversations, the artist recalled his childhood, and talked about what the situations were like and what he had experienced back then. To be exact, this work is more like a record of an extreme act, the consequences of which are sealed by the artist in two weed-tree chairs that were made together by his father and himself. The two chairs are installed with used furniture that the artist and his father collected from their neighbors in their hometown. Meanwhile, The Palace is a humorous game designed against “reality”: the artist visited the Forbidden City in Beijing and the simulated one at Hengdian World Studios respectively but along the same route, and then transplanted the audio recordings of the environment at the real Forbidden City in Beijing into the video that he filmed at the Palaces of Ming and Qing Dynasties in Hengdian. In Yi Lian’s art, time-space is twisted into a series of broken, isolated islands, and people exist in a temporary and desolate manner, just like everything on earth.
我们荣幸地宣布，艺术家易连将于9月22日在望远镜空间举办其北京首次个展“时间轴上空无一人”。作为长期使用影像作为创作语言的艺术家，易连的影像有着超现实主义的魔幻风格。他的镜头时常聚焦于家乡的土地、河流、野地、牲口、人物及故事，在他的影像之中，昼夜颠倒，动物日夜思考，而人总是惶惶终日，仿若梦中。而在近期创作及此次个展中，易连将关注的视线转交于更为广阔的命题：时空的重访、再现与制造。
此次个展将展出三组/件艺术家的新近创作，而展出的每组/件作品在空间中都有着时间与空间上的呼应关系。2012年易连听家里人谈论起自己患有梦游症的小外甥：每当家人都已熟睡，这个五岁的孩子便会于梦中在家里四处游走，这种怪异却有趣的行为成为了《暗流》的创作动因。影像拍摄过程中，艺术家让小外甥在野外尝试着重现自己梦游的场景，同时也将自己的想象编织其中。时隔五年，艺术家拍摄了《暗流二零一六》，用重访的方式回溯了过往的时空，相似却又充满差异的场景与生物在这组影像作品中交错出现。
声音装置《八年的八小时谈话》记录了艺术家八年之中的两次八小时无间断的自我对话，艺术家在其间回忆着自己的童年，讲述着当时的近况与遭遇。这件作品更准确的来说更像是一次极限行为的记录，艺术家将这一行为结果封存于由父亲与自己共同手工完成的杂木椅子中，两把椅子由父子俩从邻里乡亲手中收集来的古旧家什组装而成。而《宫》则是针对于“真实”而生的一场戏谑的游戏：艺术家采取同样的路线分别游览了位于北京与横店影视城的紫禁城，并将游览北京故宫时录制的环境音移植于横店明清宫的影像中。在易连的创作中，时空被扭结成一座又一座断裂的孤岛，人也成为一种短暂与荒芜的存在，与万物一样。
