Why I Stay is an exhibition series with 4 exhibitors who are all with an East Asian ethnic background and working in different creative fields in Norway. Northing Space is offering them a unique platform to demonstrate their creative abilities and eagerness to make contributions to the cultural development in the society they are living in. We will also explore the question together with them: how would native cultures cultivate and contribute to professional life in a foreign/multi-cultural context.
The first exhibitor is Norwegian-Vietnamese illustrator, designer and writer Nhu Diep She was educated in graphic design and visual communication at KHiB (now KMD). And she's also the lady behind all the drawings on the walls in our neighbour Bergen House of Literature.
"My expression commutes between simple and playful, and the opposite,- rich, graceful and dreamy. In both cases, they always start with a pencil and a sheet of paper. And from there, I just let go."
This time she's showing some beautiful screen printed illustrations with limited edition and acrylic drawings on cork boards, as well as a large acrylic drawing on cotton canvas. All works are available for sale.
Our second exhibitor of Why I Stay series is printmaker Cathrine Alice Liberg. She’s half Norwegian half Chinese-Singaporean. The current and historical relations between Europe and Asia have always been a natural point of departure in her artistic practice. She uses photogravure and cyanotype to create images of her ancestors who she never has seen pictures of.
“All my life I have wished to recreate the face of my Chinese great-grandmother. We have no documents or photos pertaining to her. We do not even remember her name. All I know is that she was born in China around 1905, and that she moved to Singapore where she lived as my great-grandfather’s concubine before dying in poverty at a young age. Over the years, she has become an increasingly mythological figure to me. As a child, I always imagined her to look like the elegant ladies from Chinese vintage commercial posters. I made up stories of her life based on stories of Chinese concubines from movies and books. Perhaps my great-grandmother was like Li Gong’s character in Zhang Yimou’s film Raise the Red Lantern (1991), a young concubine who descended into madness? Or maybe she was like An-Mei’s mother in Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club (1989), a concubine who decided to end her life with opium in order to pass her spirit on to her daughter?
I started merging photos of myself, my mother and my grandmother – layering images of our faces and blending our features in an attempt to work my way backwards through the generations, “invert” our genetic heritage and reconstruct my great-grandmother’s forever lost face. It was the only way I could go about trying to manifest her and make her real. Later I began to dress up as her, attempting to recreate the different stages of her life in front of the camera –from a young girl in China to a concubine in Singapore.
By creating my great-grandmother’s portrait, I wanted to honour her, to give her a voice and a place in history which had been erased. What I did not realise, was that by trying to restore her image, I was also embarking on a quest in which I would be forced to scrutinise myself. I could not make her image without also rendering visible, and confronting, my own role as a female artist in contemporary Europe, my childhood fantasies about China and my prejudiced view of her role as a concubine.
Franz Kafka is claimed to have once said “We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds.” To me, this was my chance to drive my lifelong obsession with my great-grandmother out of my mind once and for all, and pin down her ghost that had haunted my imagination.”
The third exhibitor of our exhibition series Why I Stay is Vanessa Gong. She is a Chinese-Australian Visual Artist & Designer. Born in China, shaped in Sydney Australia, with a combined background of Fine Art and Visual Communication, Vanessa has been practicing a broad medium of visual expressions in Norway for a decade, like the kind of Painting, Sculpture Painting, Leatherwork, Digital Art and Motion.
'Anything can be boiled down into simple truths. I tell mine through colour, form, with time.'
Vanessa applied her knowledge of colour theory and skills with material and digital means to different themes of science and games and other things that inspired her while working with people.
The exhibition consists 4 series of her works:
Series 1 - 'It's about Time':
Series 2 - The Chess Game
Series 3 - The Watercolour Paintings
Series 4 - Digital Art (Art Prints)
