Newman Huo

THE four foreign artists participating in the Second OCAT International Residency Program this year have big plans for their period of stay at the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT).

Alistair Gentry from Britain, Jesus Palomino from Spain, Arahmaiani from Indonesia, and Thanos Zakopoulos from Greece will be artists-in-residence at the OCAT in Overseas Chinese Town (OCT) for two or three months as they complete their proposed projects.

Their final works will be displayed at the Sixth Shenzhen Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, which is scheduled to be held in the OCT this December.

British artist and writer Alistair Gentry, 34, plans to make a very short film, a minute or two in duration, every day.

"I envisage showing the collected work publicly at the end of the residency period, either daily with the studio space used as an exhibition space, or in one or more specific events," Gentry said in an interview Tuesday.

Gentry has been trying to familiarize himself with Shenzhen since his arrival at the city Sept. 15.

Born in England, Gentry has been living and working mainly in Scotland of late. His previous works include novels, stories, performances, animation, films and installations.

Last spring, while working with in a crew of Chinese students aged 16 to 19 in Qingdao, Shandong Province, Gentry made a film, "Qingdao 58 Middle."

In the film, Gentry has tried to explore differences and similarities between British and Chinese students by identifying important things in their lives.

"British and Chinese students are not so different from each other as many people imaged," Gentry said.

"Today, they are basically doing the same things, although the details of those things they are doing are different," he added.

The film has been well received in both Britain and China. It now can be watched in full on his Web site www.alistairgentry.demon.co.uk..

Gentry said he believe the time he spent in China last spring had a profound influence on him in many ways.

The influence most relevant to his project for the OCAT residency program, he said, was "the idea of working in a more 'real' or documentary-driven style that nonetheless doesn't attempt to mimic news or factual television programming, leaving the work free to be impressionistic, partisan or even brazenly untrue."

Spanish artist Jesus Palomino plans to make five six-meter-long and 1.5-meter-wide banners of different colors, printed with Chinese words such as "Xingwang (boom)," "Changsheng (flourish)," "Fanrong (prosperity)," and "Chenggong (success)," during his stay at the OCAT.

"In China, banners are common objects and it is a good way to send a message to people through a banner," said Palomino. "I want to do the project outdoors, instead of in a museum or a gallery."

Palomino came to the city at the beginning of September. He bought a bicycle and has traveled a lot around the city on the bicycle in the past few weeks.

Palomino plans to hang the banners on trees along a street in the OCAT before he leaves at the end of October.

Born to a free-minded Catholic mother in Seville, Spain in 1969, Palomino said he didn't believe in any religion.

When he was a child, Palomino attended a Catholic school but had bad experiences in the school.

"The teachers in the school were cruel to me, and they didn't practice what they preach," Palomino.

After studying for five years study in a fine arts school at Cuenca, Spain, from 1988 to 1993, Palomino became a professional artist.

Over the past several years, Palomino has worked on site-specific installations around the world, trying to reflect the socio-political environment around him.

"It is a quite experimental way of doing art here in the OCAT because it responds to the whole experience of my living and thinking in Shenzhen," Palomino said.

Indonesian artist Arahmaiani will also use artistic banners to express her views on cultural conflicts that exist between the Muslim people and non-Muslim people today.

Arahmaiani has been working on issues related to the Islamic culture and its fusion with non-Islamic cultures since the bombing of the World Trade Center in the New York City on Sept. 11, 2001.

Arahmaiani brought six 1.8-meter-long and 1.45-meter-wide banners with her when she came to the OCAT three weeks ago.

These six banners of different colors, carry the English words like "capital," "freedom," "sell" and "truth."

Beginning from last year, these banners have been displayed in various art exhibitions in Indonesia, Germany, Japan, and Austral.

For her project in the OCAT, Arahmaiani plans to make two more banners bearing the Chinese words "zhihui (wisdom)," and "xinfu (happiness)" and 16 other banners with names of world-class corporations and international brands.

"I certainly have my own criticism on today's world, which is controlled by big companies, but I don't impose my personal thinking onto people," said Arahmaiani, who was born in Bandung, Java in Indonesia, in 1961.

"I want to make a big picture with my banners in a public place here, which may cause us to rethink of the problems facing us around the world and try to do something to solve them," she added.

In his project, Greek artist Thanos Zakopoulos plans to represent the concept of time and space with the help of semiotic and narrative tools. The medium he has chosen is photography and the subject is the urban landscape.

Born in Athens, Greece in 1978, Zakopoulos had been interested in undertaking an art residency in China especially since participating in the Second Beijing Art Biennale in 2005.

"One of the things that amazed me during my brief stay there at the time was the tremendous development that China was having in many diverse fields in a very short amount of time," said Zakopoulos.

"The tremendous growth that China has at present made it a perfect case study as to how time can acquire different meanings in different contexts," he said.

"In other words, the cultural and economic growth that most European countries had in the span of 100 years, China is having in 10," he explained.

"Time is compressed, in a sense, with the repercussions to the cultural and physical environments," he said.

Zakopoulos plans to mainly use photographic documentation while implementing research materials such as notes, images, and found objects, in order to construct a semiotic visual narrative.

"The end result will have the form of an installation where the viewer will play an active role as the connecting link between each one of the transitional points of the visual narrative," he said.

Caption:

1. Alistair Gentry examines a map of Shenzhen in his workshop at the OCAT on Tuesday.

2. Alistair Gentry describes his project in his workshop at the OCAT on Tuesday.

3. Arahmaiani shows one of her banners in her workshop at the OCAT on Tuesday.