Zhang Yang

    zhangy49@gmail.com

    MOST people associate Switzerland with skiing, army knives, watches and UBS. However, this summer, a group of Swiss female artists will show the best of Swiss art.

    A Swiss women’s contemporary art exhibition opened Sunday at the He Xiangning Art Museum in Nanshan District and will last for two months. The exhibition features 50 works by 10 Swiss female artists including Chantal Michel, Delphine Reist, Elisabeth Llach, Katja Scheker, Klaudia Shifferle and Pipilotti Rist.

    Titled “I Am the Space Where I Am,” the exhibition will give visitors a taste of the artists’ experiences and thoughts, their artistic concepts and methods, and confusions and problems they face.     

    Cultural and artistic exchange

    “One of the main purposes of this exhibition is to build a bridge between China and Switzerland in cultural and art exchange,” said Wang Dong, one of the curators of the exhibition.

    Wang said they visited Switzerland to select artists and creative works that can best represent Swiss culture and Swiss women artists’ inner world.

    Michel fit the category well. Her work on display is a series of photographs in which Michel locates herself in various messy rooms with Western-style decorations. By transforming the bizarre surroundings with her presence, Michel intends to discover how a body relates to the space around it.

    With an emphasis on Western elements, Michel’s work gives people a strong sense of Western contemporary culture and reminds Chinese viewers of our own art, Wang said.

    Another interesting work is a collage of female nude paintings by Llach. Llach focuses on the female body. In her works on display, Llach fuses her own views on the female body into some well-known male artist’s paintings.

    “Women’s bodies have been used by male artists throughout history,” Llach said. “I want to create a new meaning to women’s bodies by combining my thoughts with the violent elements in portraits of the female body by masters like Marcel Duchamp, Gustave Courbet and Leonardo Da Vinci.”   

    Experiences and confusion

    Art often reflects its creator’s life. Stepping into the exhibition hall on the second floor of the art museum, people will be astonished by a series of dark-colored paintings featuring death and fear. The painter is Marie-Fran<00E7>oise Robert.

    At 73, Robert is the oldest of the artists featured in the exhibition and has recently endured the death of her mother. She said elements, such as ghosts, skeletons and blood in her painting, reflect her thoughts about death and life after losing her mother.

    “I turned my sorrow into artistic creation as a way of commemorating my mother,” Robert said.

    Luo Mingjun, who immigrated to Switzerland from China’s Fujian Province in 1987, sees art as a way of expressing her homesickness and confusion.

    In her oil painting “Absent,” Luo depicts a banquet on a traditional Chinese New Year’s Eve with no one attending. Luo said this work was inspired by a phone call to her family several years ago. When she called home on the Chinese New Year’s Eve, the family in China was enjoying a reunion banquet and Luo, in Switzerland, was the only absentee.

    “As soon as I hung up the phone, I burst into tears,” She said. “The empty chairs around the banquet table are the reflection of my situation in these years.”

    Another painting by Luo, named “The Way Home,” shows a ravaged country road in China. Luo said when she went back to her hometown of Changde, Hunan Province, three years ago, she found that the road to her home was in ruins. Her heart was broken and she had an identity crisis.

    “Where is the way to our spiritual home? Where to start to rebuild our home?” she questions in the painting.

    On the opening day, Esther Maria Jungo, a Swiss art historian, delivered a lecture on 20th century Swiss art and explored the role of female artists in history.

    During the exhibition, other forms of art, such as installations and videos, will offer visitors a glimpse of the unique experiences and concepts of Swiss female artists.

    The exhibition is free of charge and ends July 22.    

    Add: He Xiangning Art Museum, 9103 Shennan Boulevard, Nanshan District

    Metro: OCT Station (华侨城站), Exit C