Yingmei Duan: a suitcase for arts and life

Last Wednesday, the performative artist Yingmei Duan started her session “Yingmei Duan and Katie Hill: a dialogue between the artist and the art critic and the curator” in the Faculty of Geography and History with a performative conference. While she moved around the room with a suitcase, the artist showed a biographical story in which she described the relationship between each of her life stages to some of her most important works. She told, for instance, about her approach to art, her first contact with the performance in the Beijing East Village group, the creation of collective works, migration to Germany and lessons with the artist Marina Abramović, and about her professional career so far. The performative conference combined the artist speech with audio-visual samples from her performances, material to interact with the audience and several sound elements that went with the narration of the story.

Yingmei Duan showed who she was by narrating her experiences and explaining her artistic work, creating a story between object and subject, between the memories of the past and the present, in order to set a link between art and life, one of the main objectives in her works. This connection between the artistʼs life and her creations was one of the outstanding elements in the dialogue she later set with the critic and curator of Asian art, Katie Hill.

Following Hillʼs questions, the artist talked about the importance of life experiences in the everyday nature of her creations. She highlighted her will to talk from the individual view to refer to aspects of the community through an empathy process that connects the author and the audience. Katie Hill highlighted aspects such as the condition of isolation that marked the first creative phase of Yingmei Duan due being a woman in a man-world, and highlighted the relationship between changes in style regarding her creations and the different life moments of the artist. One of the most commented works, by Katie Hill and the attendants, was the project Yingmey created in Bluebell Wood Childrenʼs Hospice, a child hostel in the United Kingdom where she worked with art-therapy together with the kids. This project, presided by the relationship between art and life -present in the authorʼs career, materializes the voice of children in a pictorial series that shows the need to empathize with the pain and life of the others, which is received as one of the main cores in life regarding community.

The presentation of the event was carried out by Laia Manonelles, lecturer of the bachelorʼs degree in History of Art of the UB, expert on Chinese contemporary art and organizer of the session, as well as the director of the Confucius Institute of Barcelona, Javier Orduña. The presentation counted on the collaboration of the Department of History of Art of the UB, the Confucius Institute Foundation of Barcelona, the Research Group Art, Architecture and Digital Society (AASD) of the UB, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona East Asian Studies and Research Centre (CERAO), and the Research Group InterAsia.

Yingmei Duan (1969, Daqing, Heilongjiang) was member of the Beijing East Village from 1993 to 1995, a period of time in which she started her activity as performative artist. In 1998 she moved to Germany, where she began her artistic career internationally and worked with Marina Abramović and Christoph Schlingensief. The body is the main material in Yingmeiʼs creations, in which spontaneity and audienceʼs participation play an important role.

Katie Hill is the director of the Office of Contemporary Chinese Art (OCCA), a consultancy on promoting Chinese artists in the United Kingdom. She writes, edits and talks about Asian art in collaboration with institutions such as the Tate Modern and the Hayward Gallery of London.