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Artist draws inspiration from ‘in-between’ spaces
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DUTCH artist Berndnaut Smilde is the subject of solo exhibition at LIAN Contemporary Art Space in Shanghai. The show consists of earlier photo, installation and sculpture pieces as well as more recent works created in Shanghai during his residency at LIAN.
Smilde is perhaps best known for his “Nimbus” series of indoor “cloud” photos. In 2010, the artist hit upon a method to create artificial clouds using little more than smoke and water vapor. Smilde releases these clouds in venues all around the world, often taking hundreds of photographs of each puffy “creation” before it vanishes into thin air.
“They move so fast that it is very difficult to grasp them,” Smilde explains to Shanghai Daily. “That is the interesting part of it, that I can’t ever take total control. It moves into space and I only partly control how it evolves.
“They are like temporary sculptures, building and falling apart at the same time, like many of my other works.”
Smilde also created a similar series involving rainbow bands projected onto various surfaces around the world.
But while some of the artist’s best known works feature effects which mimic natural phenomena, Smilde notes that he is not necessarily interested in nature itself.
“What people don’t understand about nature is that we have created all kinds of ideas and stories to explain it. And that’s what I’m interested in.”
The sites where he unleashes his artificial clouds and rainbows are also important to the stories he seeks to tell.
“The spaces function as a plinth for the work and provide a scenario. They provide a context for the work, which reacts to the history and traditions of the location,” the artist says.
Smilde continued his “Nimbus” project in Shanghai at the Himalayas Museum in Pudong. The artist was intrigued by the space’s unique architecture as well as its place in Shanghai and its history as a former factory building.
For his cloud work in the museum, he picked a spot with a window in the background, through which are visible the high rises of Shanghai.
Smilde saw this venue not as an exhibition space, but “somewhere in between.”
Such in-between spaces and transitional states are reoccuring themes in the artist’s ouevre.
“Many of my works have the suggestion of function, but if you get close enough, you realize that they don’t,” he says. “In-between state appeals to me as it doesn’t have a function yet, and is therefore open to interpretation.”
“False Firmament”
Date: Through February 5
Venue: LIAN Contemporary Art Space, Unit 23, 1436, Jungong Rd
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