Shortlist 2021 Hong Kong
Julien Creuzet was announced as the tenth BMW Art Journey winner. His journey combines histories with fantasies, and ancestral connections with cosmopolitanism.
For Julien Creuzet, a member of the Caribbean diaspora in Paris, the BMW Art Journey – the tenth in the series – will mark a return to his ancestral home, a place he calls “the heart of my imagination.” In a poetic journey that intertwines personal discovery with profound concern for the environment and a generous spirit of sharing, he will center his travels around a geographically and culturally distinct region.
In Martinique, he will work closely with a community of art students from Fort-de-France, as well as musicians and filmmakers. His plans include creating hybrid sculptures of Antilllean fauna and plastic as well as industrial objects, in a gesture of circularity. In Guadeloupe, he will film underwater and drone scenes. Often neglected in the metropolitan imagination, the Antilles are for Creuzet not just homeland but a site inviting consideration of the legacies of colonialism, conflict, and marginalization. During his journey, Creuzet will meet with cultural actors and collect visual materials and music for a “Caribbean road movie” that merges fiction and documentary augmented by poetry and 3-D art.
Julien Creuzet (b.1986) lives and works in Montreuil, France. In his work he creates protean artworks incorporating poetry, music, sculpture, assemblage, film and animation. Evoking trans-oceanic postcolonial transactions in relation to multiple temporalities the artist places his own inherited past, present and future at the heart of his production. Eluding generalized narratives and cultural reductions, Creuzet’s work often spotlights anachronisms and social realities to construct objects of irreducibility.
In addition to Julien Creuzet, the shortlisted artists for the BMW Art Journey 2021 were: Kelvin Kyun Kun Park (represented by Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai) and Alice Wang (represented by Capsule Shanghai).
Kelvin Kyung Kun Park
born in 1978; lives and works in Seoul; represented by Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai. He is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist who works primarily in film and video, photography and installations. His work frequently takes inspiration from the cultural anxieties, myths and narratives that form South Korea’s identity. His first full-length film, “Cheonggyecheon Medley” from 2010, has been screened at various international venues, including the Berlin International Film Festival and the Los Angeles Film Festival. His second film “A Dream of Iron” also premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2014. It won the NETPAC Award and subsequently played at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2018, he won the BIFF Mecenat Award and was nominated for “DOK Leipzig 2019”. His recent solo exhibitions include Shanghai Museum of Glass; Sin Ricoh Gallery, Seoul as well as Gallery Hyundai, Seoul. Furthermore, his work was on view at group exhibitions at Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul; Busan Biennale 2018, Korea; Buk Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul.
Alice Wang
born in 1983; lives and works in Los Angeles and Shanghai; represented by Capsule Shanghai. The artist works at the intersection of film and sculpture, two independent and simultaneous practices, where one medium decenters the other. Over the past several years, Alice Wang has been working with a mantra stating that the planet Earth is plummeting towards the Sun while just missing it. Bringing together physics, geology, astronomy, and ecology with phenomenology, Eastern metaphysics and the practice of meditation and yoga, Wang examines ontological questions related to the nature of being through a materialist conceptual approach in the exploration of sculpture. Alice Wang has presented solo exhibitions at Capsule Shanghai as well as 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles and participated in group exhibitions, screenings, and performances at the K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Taikang Space, Beijing and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She is an assistant professor of arts at New York University Shanghai, and co-organizes The Magic Hour, an outdoor exhibition platform in the Mojave Desert in California.
