IFP welcomes Pedro Bakker who is doing a 2-month residency supported by Mondriaan Fund with a grant Proven Talent (Established Artist).
Time and location of Pedro Bakker's lecture:
2017. 7. 29 4:30 pm
@ IFP Studio
Heizhima Hutong 13, Dongcheng District, Beijing (In the courtyard)
Last year Pedro has published his artist book Innocent （《天真无邪》）,which is bilingual. He is fascinated by the rich cultural and eventful history of China. Freek Lomme, the director of publisher Onomatopee wrote on the back of his book: “Some things are too fierce to be articulated; we are expected to remain silent about others, and sometimes we are too afraid to speak”. He aims to go beyond this in figurative reflections on his traumatic family history, drastic political events in the Netherlands and even on his relation with (Chinese) friends.
With his book presentations in China he met the filmmaker and dancer Chen Yujie in Chongqing and they created their first poem film Pygmalion’s Bride. The poem is rather cynical and cold however and written from a feminist viewpoint.
After that he began to explore the idea or illusion of Chinese beauty then and nowadays in a formal manner. Mapping Beauty is the title of a new series of small drawings to draw comparisons between Nala Shi, the model in the Yongzheng Screen of Twelve Beauties (Palace Museum), and Dandan, the young actress in his poem film.
To continue with the research about “beauty”. Pedro will make a second short film with Chen Yujie agin. Probably they will do shooting in the Gangnam district of Seoul. Many Chinese women are treated for plastic surgery in Seoul and 60% of the clients there is Chinese . The Western style double-lidded eyes are very popular. He is considering his own case of plastic surgery, suppose he wishes Chinese slit-eyes in his own face. He imagines that he will walk in the Gangnam district wearing an Uniface with ‘monolids of steel’.
Before Pedro started this residency he has made a series of drawings to create his first Chinese handscroll in Beijing. He is drawing short stories of the complex Chinese novel Honglou Meng (c.1760), which is full of tragic beauties and amorous suicides. His starting point is a detail from the picture book by Sun Wen (1903) and he mixes up the best of two different CCTV series (1987 and 2010) as well as drawing and spotlighting the novel’s hidden material which you can easy overlook. For example to relate the homosexual scenes in the novel to images from the LGBT scene in Beijing today.
