[ISEA2006] Artist Statement: Xing Danwen — disCONNECTION (2002-2003)

Artist Statement

Theme: Pacific Rim. Container Culture: Beijing Container. Venue: South Hall

disCONNECTION uncovers, through Xing Danwen’s unforgiving eye, the story underneath mountains of electronic garbage. Xing traveled many times to southern China to photograph a population of over 100,000 living on the fringe of life, recycling thousands of tons of electronic waste dumped in China by the West.

Curator Zhang Ga:

Xing Danwen seeks to sketch a visual representation of modernity in the 21st century. She carefully chooses direct and intimate moments to portray the objects that she finds. Since summer 2002, she has traveled several times to South China’s Guangdong Province, one of the most developed areas in the country. Along the coast, more than 100,000 people from Guangdong and migrant workers from Western China make their living by recycling piles of computer and electronic trash, operating in rough environmental and social conditions. This huge amount of e-trash is shipped from industrialized countries —Japan, South Korea and especially the United States— and dumped here.
We are in an information and communication era, and we rely extensively on high-tech facilities for our modern life. These machines become deeply rooted in our daily activities, replacing the old ways of doing things. Millions of newly purchased products follow on millions of trashed ones. Confronting the vast piles of dead and deconstructed machines and the overwhelming number of cords, wires, chips and parts (Article Frontispiece) with clear indications of the company logos, model numbers and even individual employees deeply shocked Xing Danwen.
Modernization and globalization shape urban development. China has experienced and witnessed the changes that have taken place under the influence of Western modernity. These changes have contributed to a strong and powerful push for development in China, but at the same time they have led to major environmental problems and social inequality in remote corners of China.
Xing Danwen has lived in New York and travels forth and back between China and the West. This has made her more aware of the conflicts between modernity and tradition, dream and reality. These have become important themes in her work and a personal concern. This body of work, titled disCONNEX-ION, has more than 40 images. Each individual image has no subtitle but is identified with numbers. The photographs are Chromogenic color prints.

  • Xing Danwen (CN) is active in today’s contemporary Chinese art scene, as well as one of the earliest artists using photography as an art form in the early 1990s in China. She has exhibited widely in galleries, museums, biennales and triennials around the world, including the International Center of Photography, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Centre Pompidou, Arles International Photo Festival 2003 in France; the Yokohama Triennial 2001 in Japan; the Sydney Biennale 2004; Multi-media Art Asia Pacific 2004; and the Guangzhou Triennial 2002 and the Mil-lennium Art Museum in China. Her work is widely collected by museums, institutes and private collectors. Her artistic practice is both rich and varied, and her subjects are extensive: the body, memories, sex, cultural status, globalization, consumption and desire – are all her concerns and personal interests. She projects her artistic approach and critical view onto the circumstances of the era she lives in. The issues of reality and fiction, fact and illusion often play an important role in her works. She was born in 1967 in Xiian, studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and received her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She lives and works in Beijing.