The 2002 Beijing festival and exhibition of Multimedia Art Asia Pacific InC (MAAP), an Australia-based non-profit organization that promotes excellence in art and technology in the Australia/Asia Pacific region, is currently underway at the art gallery until Sunday.

Known as "MAAP in Beijing," the festival and exhibition explores the nexus of contemporary art and technology across a range of art forms and practices, emphasizing projects integrating media including interactive multimedia, CD Rom, Internet Art, animation, digital video and video installation. It features works by 17 artists from Asia Pacific countries including Australia, China, Japan and India.

This is the first time the annual festival and exhibition of MAAP is being held outside Australia since the organization was founded in 1998 in Brisbane. The event in Beijing is jointly sponsored by the China International Exhibition Agency, the Beijing Gehua Cultural Development Group, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and MAAP to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Australia.

A 'Moist' Exhibit

"The theme of MAAP in Beijing is 'moist,' an evocative adjective suggestive of conditions relating to life, growth, humidity, seepage and residue. 'Moist' suggests a conductive environment of cultural ideas recognizing the characteristics of contemporary art, culture and society where we look to artists as mediators and explorers of our maturing and evolving networked understanding," said Kim Machan, director of MAAP and chief curator of the Beijing festival.

"The artists in the exhibition are highly regarded internationally for their innovation and conceptual maturity in the field of new media arts. The works interrogate and push our understanding of media technology," Machan said.

Besides expressing themselves through the universal language of technology, the artists also added their unique points of view from their different cultural backgrounds.

Among the exhibits are video installation works by Chinese artists Zhang Peili, Wang Gongxin, Zhu Jia and Chen Shaoxiong as well as a mixed installation work by Chinese artist Wang Peng.

Zhang, who made the first video art piece in China in 1989, is now a teacher at the New Media Art Centre at the China National Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang Province. Zhang's work Broadcasting At The Same Time is developed from one of his former pieces composed of 31 TV screens with images captured from news presenters all over the world greeting the viewers.

In his new work, the programmes are broadcast on a huge video wall with 56 monitors.

Each broadcast is in a different language and can be clearly heard when watching them one by one. But when played simultaneously, the news presenters' voices merge and became unrecognizable. The work is seen as an attempt to deconstruct the concept of individualism in a contemporary world using the context of increasing globalization, where all voices, all cultures become the same.

Beijing artist Wang Gongxin's work My Sun is a multi-screen panoramic work that investigates sublime questions of humanity, society, and the individual. The image of an old rural Chinese woman standing in a remote northern field is reproduced mainly with digital techniques on a DVD. The work delves into the relationship between human beings and the environment, generating a perplexing aura of hope, defeat, bewilderment and acceptance.

Equally impressive is Australian artist Jeffery Shaw's multi-disciplinary work Web of Life which is a project composed of a book, a website and five networked installations. The work allows visitors to interactively influence the performance of an audio-visual environment by using their palms.

Also noticeable is Non-broadcasting Time, a work with computer images and a website produced by the Candy Factory, an independent art space that opened in 1998 in Yokohama, Japan, which organizes collaborative projects through its website and gallery space. The project represents a non-broadcasting moment from a local TV studio set in Beijing as a scene of modern life.

New Media

According to Zhang Yu, president of the China International Exhibition Agency, multimedia art is the new trend in international art.

Compared to traditional mediums of art, multimedia art contains more information with images and easily shows the fast-paced life of the modern world.

Multimedia art is also a supplement to mass media which goes even further to separate itself from movies, television and photography to form its own linguistic characteristics.

With the popularity of computers and the Internet, this art form is widely accepted by younger generations, Zhang explained.

While this art form is gaining popularity, for a few, it takes some time getting used to. Su Juan, a Beijing oil painter who visited the exhibition, said the pieces were hard to appreciate, even for an art professional.

"It's fascinating to see all these works made with totally new types of media and methods. But it still takes time for people to really understand the ideas behind the images without illustrations explaining the artists' intentions," Su said.

Fan Di'an, vice president of the Beijing-based Central Academy of Fine Arts and chief curator of the exhibition in collaboration with MAAP, said the differences between multimedia art and traditional art bring many interesting issues to light.

"Humanistic ideas in (multi)media art and maintaining independent human thinking in the human-machine dialogue are the preconditions of preventing (multi)media art from falling into the trap of just technology," Fan said.

"(Multi)media artists must also study the ever-evolving technical language in the creative process. Without good technology art will surely be dull, and mediocre technical levels and ordinary production qualities can only change the original creative impulse into a shallow monologue."

(China Daily October 29, 2002)