The exhibition Racing Gravels, curated by Tan Yue, assembles a series of new works by video artist Kan Xuan, informed by her parallel career as a commercial video director. Naturally, such continual exposure to brands and technologies has imbued her with related interests, urging her to explore the rites of commerce, technological ethic, and economic policy behind these commercial enterprises. Kan opts to examine the most mundane and seemingly trivial moments from a deeply personal perspective. She relentlessly attempts to expose the devils in the details of our consumerist society, alienated into spectacle.
Video artist Kan Xuan splits her time between Beijing and Amsterdam. Always taking personal experience as point of departure, Kan aims to unveil the complex relations between objective reality and subjective emotion. Precise, witty and biting, Kan’s singular visual lexicon merges playful subtlety with metaphorical profundity. Through her unique artistic language, Kan Xuan articulates vivid situations filled with contradictions: a metaphor for China, for the entire world, for us, living in the society of the spectacle amidst rapid commodification and technological acceleration, heading towards an inexplicable end, like automobiles racing through gravel at night.
