箭厂胡同38号(国子监街内)
北京 100007 中国
38 Jianchang Hutong
(off Guozijian Jie)
Beijing, 100007 China

A像B
胡向前

2013.03.20 - 04.30

箭厂空间展出北京艺术家胡向前的三频录像装置《A像B》, 这件作品对时间、知觉和艺术表达的形式进行了探讨。《A像B》将固定了时间段的寻常活动的录像素材结合在一起（从水龙头里流出来的水，煮汤的锅），然后将它们变成了无休止的却又毫无进展的连续曲。一个屏幕上，一锅骨头汤一直在沸腾，没有丝毫趋弱。在另一个屏幕上，水龙头里的水一直向上喷射，与重力相对抗，第三个屏幕上，一个人在风暴中重复做着神秘的挥舞动作。这些取自日常生活的物体和动作，被重新安排进简单循环的情节中，按照它们自身不寻常的频率振动着，没有明确的开始或结束。

除了表现对时间的共同感觉外，每个录像都与具体的艺术媒介发生了联系：倒置的屏幕令人想起了德国新表现主义画家Georg Baselitz倒置的绘画，地上的作品犹如一个雕塑，小屏幕则如一场行为表演。《A像B》训练我们去认清事物之间的不一致性，虽然媒介和形式上存在着相似性。与之前用相机拍摄其表演性质的古怪行为不同的是，《A像B》保留了胡向前率性而为的特点，以及他捕捉细微活动或细节的能力，通过自己独特的世界观将这些反馈给我们。

胡向前（1983年出生于广东雷州）2007年毕业于广州美术学院。他曾在北京长征空间（2012）和泰康空间（2010）举办过展览，2011年参加在英国曼彻斯特举办的亚洲三年展。胡也是广州独立艺术空间观察社的创办人之一。

胡向前的《A像B》是2013年箭厂空间和观察社合作系列的第一个展览。

A Looks Like B

Hu Xiangqian

Arrow Factory is pleased to present A Looks Like B, a new 3-channel video installation by Beijing artist Hu Xiangqian that probes notions of time, perception and forms of artistic representation. A Looks Like B combines video footage of mundane events that have normally fixed spans of time—water flowing from a tap, a boiling pot of soup—and manipulates them into a harmony of endless, stagnated sequences. On one screen, a pot of bones boils continuously, never disintegrating or diminishing. On another, the water from a faucet flows endlessly upward defying gravity, while a third screen features the mysterious repeated flailing movements of a figure in the middle of a hailstorm. Plucked from daily life, these ordinary objects and actions are re-engineered into simple looping scenarios that vibrate at their own irregular frequency and offer no clear beginning or end.

In addition to expressing shared sensibilities of time, however, each video offers a link to specific artistic media: the upside down monitor echoes to German neo-expressionist painter Georg Baselitz’s upside down paintings, the floor piece acts as a sculpture and the small screen references a performance. A Looks Like B is thus an exercise in training our perception to recognize inherent disparities despite similarities of medium and form. Departing from previous works that utilize the camera as a witness to his own performative antics, A Looks Like B preserves Hu’s levity, as well as his wry ability to capture insignificant actions or details and reflect them back at us though his own idiosyncratic worldview.

Hu Xiangqian (b. 1983, Leizhou, Guangdong) graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2007. He has held solo shows in Beijing at Long March Space (2012) and Taikang Space (2010) and has participated in the Asia Triennial in Manchester, UK (2011). Hu is one of the co-founders of Observation Society, an independent art space in Guangzhou.

Hu Xiangqian’s A Looks Like B is the first in a series of collaborations to take place in 2013 between Arrow Factory and Observation Society, an independent art space in Guangzhou.