Artist's Statement

In my artwork over the last 20 years, I have explored thetheme of an ambivalent stance toward travel, including feelings of both ecstasyand guilt-the artwork has been about people who dream of Africa or China,Victorian lady travelers who take their own culture with them and explore theNile, the Rocky Mountains, or Tibet, a woman who goes over Niagara Falls in abarrel, a bearded lady who dreams of being a stenographer.

In my video and video installation series, HEAP, I come backto my life-long fascination with China. My visual imagery combines footage fromthree trips to China with footage created by constructing China through objectsand performances. I am interested in playing with documentary and travelfootage, reinterpreting, reinventing, and reenacting the experience ofcross-cultural contact. Instead of a search for roots, I explore imaginaryidentities and the empathy that arises from putting yourself in the other'sshoes.

My installations are created for a particular space, takinginto account both site and potential audience. In April 2006, at DDM Warehousein Shanghai, HEAP was centered around the idiom: "bringing coals to Newcastle."After all, I was bringing images of China back to China. It seemed like I wasjust adding water to the ocean. Using largeprojections and small flat-screen monitors, images piled up, creating anenvironment in which the viewer could contemplate fantasies and facts of Chinaas seen by the Western eye.

My installation at the CUE Art Foundation is centered aroundanother idiom, a Chinese idiom: tou shi wen lu. Literally, it means "throw rock ask road." In English,we say, "testing the waters." One friend told me that it is most commonly usedto describe a new project. When you aren't sure you understand what willhappen, you "tou shi wen lu," you try it out first.

This project is about more than travel. It's about anon-going cultural encounter, about learning a new language, both the words anda language of images and gestures. When I was in Shanghai this spring, I was ina market shooting video of bags of rice. A woman put her hand in the rice. Hergestures were unconscious; she was sweeping her hand back and forth over therice, then picking at individual grains. I wondered if this was a test of somesort, a way of determining if the rice was fresh, for instance. But it soonbecame clear that she was totally unaware of these actions. She bought someeggs and walked away, without looking back at the rice. 

I've looked at that image over and over again. The gesturesof a hand in a bag of rice. It is beyond my understanding. I can't unpack it.That's the kind of image I like to question. If I imitate those gestures, Imight begin to learn the language of a culture other than my own.

Curator's Statement

by Eleanor Antin

Earlier in her career, Ellen Zweig did a series of performances and installations shecalled Ex (centric) Lady Travelers based on that particular Victorian type, theindependent woman unencumbered by family who explored the exotic lands to theeast so beloved by the Victorian romantic sensibility. Their  "spinster" status made them outsidersto the standard Victorian female domesticity of family life, and the mostadventurous of them used this fortunate state of affairs to live a more mobile,liberated and intellectually interesting life than their sisters backhome.  It is within this historicaltradition of the female "outsider" negotiating a foreign landscape and culturethat Ellen Zweig's Chinese works belong. Of course, the major difference isthat she is a totally modern avant-garde, American artist, so she is notsubject to the orientalism of her predecessors. She is neither destroyed by theself-immolating, deliciously languid, if somewhat creepy romanticism of artistslike Jane and Paul Bowles, nor, despite her research, passionately devoted tothe selfless scholarly study of an ancient, great culture like Fenellosa was, and not atall interested in the fervent, spiritual practice of poets like Ginsberg. Aboveall, Ellen Zweig's Chinese works are cool, ironic, beautiful, aloof and perhapsstrangely removed from the desperate breakdown of that culture in its headlongrush into the 21^st century.

Ellenis basically an artist of images. They are seductive and often mysterious evenwhen they are colloquial and appear to be merely descriptive. Except for theoccasional magic of tourists walking briskly through the fog, or the fossilmarkings and wrinkles on the surface of small, undistinguished stones, or oldboats floating down a river in the foreground of a great city, they are rarely,if ever, surprising or especially significant images.  But there is a very distinctive poetry to Ellen's camera.The pictures flow by with a cool, elegant musicality carrying with them an undertowof an unexplained sadness. It may be the sadness of the outsider or as Ellenherself said about her camera's so-called objectivity, in a conversation with thefilmmaker Leslie Thornton, "there is a kind of ecstasy of looking and anembarrassment (You're not supposed to be looking)."  At the core of Ellen's art is the bemused irony that despiteher attraction and affection for China she can never really possess it. She istrapped in what is basically the paradox of an amiable globalism that can neverattain to more than an imperfect fit with the object of its desire. And Isuppose that that will be China's fate as well. No matter how aggressivelywestern she may try to be, she will always, like Ellen, be thousands of milesfrom home.

Artist's Bio

Ellen Zweig is an artist who works with video, audio, installationand performance. Her most recent work is the video series, HEAP. As aninstallation, HEAP (Shanghai version), was at DDM Warehouse, Shanghai, China,from April 8-28, 2006. The video series, HEAP, has screened at Millenium FilmArchives, New York; and at Electromediascope (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,Kansas City). Parts of the series have been shown at international filmfestivals including: (tongue tongue stone) G. W. Leibnitz at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (worldpremiere, 2003), (The Chinese Room) John Searle at Viper Basel (world premiere, 2003.) Three sectionsof HEAP were shown at the Thailand New Media Art Festival, 2004. (unsolved)Robert van Gulik screened at theAthens International Film & Video Festival, 2005. a surplus of landscape screened at the New York Video Festival, 2005 and at ImagesContre Nature International Festival of Experimental Video, Marseilles, 2006;and many others. Zweig is also working on a related series about her father.The first in the series, precarious, screenedat the San Francisco Art Institute International Film and Video Festival, 2005,as well as at the Thailand New Media Art Festival, 2005 and Images ContreNature International Festival of Experimental, Marseilles, 2004.

In her previousinstallations, Zweig has used optics to create camera obscuras, videoprojection devices, and miniature projected illusions. She has also createdmulti-channel video installations that have toured the US. Among the soloprojects are the following: She Traveled for the Landscape (New Music America, Houston, 1986); A Barrel ofHer Own Design (Artpark, Lewiston,New York, 1988); Such Ruins Give the Mind a Sense of Sadness (permanent installation, Exploratorium, San Francisco,1989); The Invisible Woman... (P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 1993); Botanizing on the Asphalt, (Art in General, New York, 1993); Hubert's Lure, (42^nd St. Art Project, Creative Time, NewYork, 1994); Critical Mass(jointly with Meridel Rubinstein: Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, SantaFe, 1994; List Visual Arts Center, MIT, 1995; Museum of Contemporary Photography,Chicago, 1997) among others. In the 1980s, she toured the U.S, Europe and Australiawith a series of performances, including the ones at the Institute of ModernArt (Brisbane, 1982); Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 1984); San Francisco Art Institute(San Francisco, 1984); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne, 1986);The Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, 1986); Festival de la Batie (Geneva,1990); Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 1991) and others. Zweig was anArtist in Residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where shecreated a performance on the Internet in 2000. 

Curator's Bio

An artist workingfor many years in photography, video, film, performance, installation, drawingand writing, Antin has an international reputation.  She has had one-womanexhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art,NY; the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, CT, as well as a major 30-yearretrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA which published abook Eleanor Antin byHoward Fox. Her retrospective also traveled to Washington University in St.Louis, MO and toured the U.K. She has been in major group exhibitions atthe Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art, LosAngeles, CA; the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; the Sydney Biennale, the CentreGeorges Pompidou, Paris, among others. She is represented in major collectionsincluding The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Whitney Museum of American Art,NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Jewish Museum, NY;  the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA.  As a performance artist she hasappeared in venues around the world including the Venice Biennale and theSydney Opera House. Several of her mixed media, groundbreaking works such as 100Boots; Carving; ATraditional Sculpture; TheAngel of Mercy; Recollectionsof my Life with Diaghilev; The King of Solana Beach;The Adventures of a Nurse are frequently referred to as classics of feminist postmodernism.  She has writtenfour books, Being Antinova (Astro Artz); Eleanora Antinova Plays (Sun & Moon Press); 100 Boots (Running Press); The Man Without aWorld: a Screenplay(Green Integer, Sun & Moon Press).  She has made nine videotapes,among them Representational Painting, 1971; The Ballerina and the Bum, 1973; The Little Match Girl Ballet, 1975; The Nurse and the Hijackers, 1977; and  From the Archives ofModern Art, 1989.  She has written, directed and producednarrative films, such as The Man Without a World, 1991; The Last Night of Rasputin, 1989; and video installations including Lovesof a Ballerina, 1986, andVilna Nights, 1993.The first of her new large scale photographic works, The Last Days ofPompeii, premiered at RonaldFeldman Fine Arts, Inc. in NY in 2002 for which she won a Best Show AICA Award(International Association of Art Critics) and Roman Allegories opened at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc. in2005. Other recent awards include an AICA Best Show award in 1999 for her LosAngeles County Museum of Art retrospective; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997;National Foundation for Jewish Culture Media Achievement Award in 1998; and theWoman's Caucus of the College Art Association for Lifetime Achievement Award in2006.  Antin is an EmeritusProfessor of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego.  She is represented by Ronald Feldman FineArts, Inc.

Current Work

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