Art Collaboration Kyoto 2024

As memories shape our identity and cognition, this exhibition aims to offer an immersive journey through artworks with a variety of media, encouraging visitors to reflect on how past experiences inform our present and future. Takahiro Iwasaki creates ephemeral landscapes from daily items, while changing its scale, thereby undermining our fixed perceptions and changing our awareness. Miyuki Tsugami explores how people grasp the external world and then construct! standards and values from their perspectives in landscape paintings, derived from her daily sketches. Likewise, Yifan Wu”s creations are autobiographical in nature, observing the subtle relationship between the city and the individual, and draws inspiration from memory and reality and memory. Imaginations and memories about hometown trigger Qiulin Chen”s creation, dealing with ever-shifting time and cities, leading her to those unforeseen reunions and returns. Hardy Hill’s prints reveal anthropomorphic figures from his faint memories, creating complex fantasies that explore tension and uncertainty, yet imply a unique perspective on contemporary issues; while Jiyoon Chung explores corporal punishment across generations by using ordinary objects, and questions the reliability of memory by examining how the language of love is used to justify violence. Jeman Seo is trying to reappear the memories from the distant to the near past with personal experience through drawings.

This exhibition not only mentions memories but also boosts a dialogue concerning shared experience to evoke the interconnection of viewers, even if we live in different environments and backgrounds!

The summary of project Peppermint

by Chen Qiulin

March 2018

I think I’m actually a swordsman.

It’s probably because I’ve lived in this wharf city since I was young, also because I studied Martial Arts back in my childhood. That city is pretty close to the riverside. It is as ordinary as any other small towns in China, and the difference is that the river contains a huge volume of water with various type boats shuttling back and forth. However, this scene disappears. My grandfather used to an employee of the earliest shipping company on the Yangtze. After Liberation of China, that warlord boss became an employee of the state-run shipping company after he was “beaten away”. According to my grandfather, the fleet that transported supplies during the War of Resistance (the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression) was stationed at the Wan Xian Wharf. Then my grandmother came to this city, and the city became my hometown. My grandmother kept only a few color photos of her with “Quiff” taken in Nanjing, and two large suitcases, one of which contained her books. On the river where my grandfather lived all the year round, he retained the temperament of many old gang brothers. Besides those frequently going to the opera and drinking the wine, there were several sworn brothers they have known each other on the ship. Therefore, my father is the only child in the family, but we have many relatives in this city. My refined father loves Kung Fu novels the most, and when I was at certain age of reading novels, the first book he let me read was Seven Swords Under Tianshan written by Liang Yusheng. That book became the first novel I had ever read in my life. I think I was the youngest reader of Mr. Liang at that time.

Later, the shaolin temple was released nationwide. At that time, people all over the country loved martial arts. Unlike today, the hobby signifies which age group you belong to, that time, surely nothing like this. The cinema was full of audiences, and the Martial Arts team became more much welcomed. That’s the timing I was pushed into Mr. Huang’s Martial Arts team by my father, a refined Martial Arts amateur. In his words: girls learn Martial Arts, not to be bullied later. In fact, the routine we learned was the legendary “Style and No Substance”, a style practiced always for competition. By practicing this style, I literally could not win anyone, except for the agility I have learned over the years. At that time, I didn’t think it was of any use to hit people with this legendary style. On the contrary, I was beaten several times by my male classmates in the name of learning martial arts during the break. However, fortunately I had a number of good brothers, they would find the troublemakers then hit them back for me. The whole primary school passed along with fights and bustles. Then I did not continue to practice Martial Arts, and the Wu Xia dream that my scholarly father wanted me to come true was unfortunately extinguished.

Then I learned a lot of things and went to many places. Thirty-year long is just like dozens of minutes in the film. One day, when I got a call from my senior who I’ve known many years ago, something from my memory just came out. Like an old dusty movie, it needs to be rewound manually. The shadow on the blurred film that stays every time always stirs all sorts of emotion. I rummaged through my suitcase in order to find a photo, a photo showing that I just participated in a Martial Arts competition as a child. Looking at the photos seemed to smell that summer: fresh, clean, sunny and peppermint-like. I’m still nimble, and the marks of that summer’s stay on me never fade. It’s just an invisible invasion of the skin. These marks stay with me for decades. It’s the trace that affects my mind and becomes my Vitruvian password. All of a sudden, I realized what my father had expected of me.

In this work, Martial Arts is just a hook that serves as a clue for me to find those friends in those year and the marks that the years have left for each of us. In addition, I still think the so-called Martial Art is a spiritual thing. We cannot use “win or lose” or a set of rules in the field as the standard of Martial Arts. If “appearance” is a result, “routine” should be a practice, but the practice is not for that “appearance” result. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand the truth.

Therefore, when teacher Huang asked me: how did you come back after all these years? I said: because I have grown up, so I am willing to look back, in fact it’s still be there.

I forgot to say: the single-broadsword was the equipment that I used for the competition.