this is the next song (The livings)

“This is the next song” is a typical sentence the singer of a band would say to introduce the title of the coming song, after which the audience would be silent and expecting… Jianan Qu “writes” the sentence with a wet cleaning rag on the white museum wall. Leaving the audience to the fading sentence, the piece questions the role of expectation in the art space. As it dries, the wall itself becomes the performer.

Documentation: Dominik Galleya
Performance / 2017

 

The livings 
- A series of performance work for the art space
In the series, The livings, Jianan Qu performs in the blank spaces that surround art works. In so doing he asks: Could the act of observing art be turned into art itself? What makes the art space perform? How can we approach the accompanying descriptive text in these spaces?
This rethinking of the space for art is not only conceptual, but also physical and visual. By providing artistic answers to theoretical questions with the works screening, view/ers, paperplane, Jianan Qu opens up new areas for understanding, alongside possible misunderstandings, that relate to the white cube.