Akira Kurosawa
「Rashomon」1950
Rashomon is a film directed by the famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and was made in 1950. The main plot of the story is adapted from Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa's novel "Takeshidou-aka", which recounts the story of a samurai and his wife who are intercepted and tied up by robbers on a long journey, whose wife is raped by the robbers, and then the samurai dies for unknown reasons; the scenes and parts of the plot take place from Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "Rashomon". The film conveys the idea that "you can't trust what people say" through the different accounts of the events.
I was inspired by the composition and the overall tone of the film. The darkness of human nature and human suffering depicted in the content of the film is also very relevant to the themes I am currently studying. Some of the filming techniques, including those depicting the body and the real or unreal, gave me a new understanding of suffering. And the way in which some of the darker areas are shot gives the whole film a sense of being shrouded in a dark fog. And this feeling is very similar to the kind of image I wanted to present, so I remember this film very well.
MEHMET ALI UYSAL
Uysal's artistic practice gives a palpable presence to these ideas. What exactly is the role of the artist? Confronting Don Quixote with his windmills, for example, he challenges the laws of nature through sculpture, video and installation. He materialises concepts that cannot be represented theoretically. He twists, shapes and distorts reality so that it transcends boundaries. He offers concrete solutions to abstract problems.
The artist is known for his ability to subvert time and space: "Space, as we perceive it, is an illusion, he says. Our eyes allow us to reconstruct reality in only two dimensions, while we grasp a third dimension through movement. Space is not something we can really see. We feel it."
BERLIDE DE BERUYKERE
Berlinde De Bruyck, the daughter of a butcher, places physical pain and wounds at the heart of her work and in doing so explores the duality between life and death.
minimalist sculptures made of stone, wood, steel and concrete; instead, she used more organic and plastic materials to represent more metaphorical and realistic scenes. Cages, various blanket-covered isolation cages, conceal the objects within. Inspired by images of the Somali famine, the Kossohun war and the Rwandan genocide, the blanket symbolises for the artist warmth and protection, but also vulnerability and fear. It recalls the ultimate refuge for suffering creatures during flight.
I was greatly inspired by the extreme depiction of suffering and pain in her work. As well as the many poetic metaphors that make me reflect on my work itself. Thinking about what it means to express suffering at times. Her work feels to me more like an expression of the wounds themselves. An expression of the self itself. This alone inspired me to focus more on the work itself in my subsequent work. Focusing on the expression of pain itself.
JIRI ANDERLE
Born in 1936, Jiri Anderle is a highly regarded Czech master of copper engravings. Anderle's main artistic production is painting, which sensitively depicts illusions, legends or the present moment, urgently and powerfully expressing the eternal suffering of man in a particular context and in everyday circumstances. His work is based on the contrast between the real and the fantastic, logic and absurdity, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, embodying not only the art of a bygone era, but also the flow of a turbulent historical process of human consciousness itself. For me his work has some relevance to my dreams, apart from the theme of depicting illusion. I think his delicate copperplate technique is also very fascinating to me. His paintings are not particularly rigid and delicate like keying. His images are very airy and fluid. In fact, many of his painting techniques are similar to my painting habits. So I think there is still a lot of room for improvement in his paintings.
LOUIES BOURGEOIS
(LouiseBourgeois, 1911-2010) She created a J-inspired group of sculptures, paintings and installations containing domestic fabrics such as clothing, linen and tapestry fragments, often drawn from her own family and personal history. Many of these later works return to and recalibrate the core concerns and formal devices of her earlier art, exploring sexual ambiguity and harrowing psychological and social relationships. However, Bourgeois' use of soft materials, including the 'second skin' of her own clothes, often infuses these works with a sensual quality and an almost tactile sense of vulnerability and intimacy. She sees the act involved in making them metaphorically, linking the notion of cutting, tearing, sewing and joining with the notion of repair and the physical expression of mental tension. As the daughter of a tapestry restorer, the artist's turn to textiles in her 80s can be seen as a re-exploration of her past. Whether making large-scale installations or compact-sized figures, Bourgeois creates new parties to give form to past experiences and emotions that continue to haunt the present through these means. As if reminiscent of the fragmented nature of memory, her fabric figures often appear as fragments, missing limbs or extra parts with abnormal movements. Viewing her exhibition gave me great resonance. I could even understand why the figures in her work were fragmented. This is because in many of my projects I use a lot of mutilated limbs or organs when exploring or metaphorically expressing the psychology of pain. I was very inspired by her work, and it reinforced my belief that the theme of suffering that I am working on is not a sickness. Rather, it is a necessary expression.
At the same time, her fabric work invites us to re-imagine what it means to mend, including the notion that an emotional repair rather than sewing everything together neatly can expand and refresh our perspective.
ZENG