Opening: May 28, 2022, 20:00
May 28 - July 8, 2022
Synnika e.V.
Niddastraße 57
60329 Frankfurt am Main
Opening times: Fridays 3-7 pm and after prior appointment.
Behind the frontal window of Synnika, artists Yifei Chen and Feihong Ou present a new video installation, a magazine display, and woodcut prints. The Prickly Paper magazine was first published in the exhibition "The First Borderless Architecture Season" at the Fei Art Museum in Guangzhou in 2019. The cover for each issue is made with woodcut prints by different artists. The article submissions and layouts of each issue depend on the different themes. As part of their Synnika project, Yifei Chen and Feihong Ou will produce a special issue titled "Escaping Involution", which will integrate a range of other ongoing collaborations between Guangzhou and Frankfurt/Main (see below).
Prickly Paper is a way of connecting with friends by selling a small number of copies to keep it going. Yifei Chen and Feihong Ou hope to bring woodcut-printing and zine-making to a wider and more diverse group of people through workshops. The Prickly Paper workshop has so far visited fifteen cities and regions and has been held in art institutions, independent bookstores and self-organized spaces.
In March 2021, together with Flight Club, the Prickly Paper editorial team rented a new space in Xiaozhou Village, Guangzhou – a living room and an open studio with a reading room and accommodation space.
Yifei Chen works and lives in Guangzhou. Chen studied Printmaking at China Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, initiated Jasagala Art Group and is now the chief editor of Prickly Paper magazine. Chen developed artistic contributions for exhibitions in various institutions, a.o.: Goethe-Institut, Beijing; Gallery of Yangtze University, Jingzhou; Ying space, Beijing.
Feihong Ou lives in Guangzhou, he is also known as Kan Ton Yellow and CEO of Benguangda Gallery. He is a member of Soeng Joeng Toi and also the chief editor of Prickly Paper magazine. Ou graduated from the Department of traditional Chinese painting of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2003. He contributed to numerous art shows in China, a.o. at the Leaf Art Museum, Guangzhou, the Changjiang Academy Art Museum, Jingzhou, and the Goethe college, Sinochem, Beijing, China.
The installation is part of ESCAPING INVOLUTION, a transnational collaboration project of a group of artists, curators and writers from Guangzhou and Frankfurt/Main unfolding through various interventions and openings in the two cities.
"Involution" is translated from the Chinese word 内卷, Neijuan. The term went viral in Chinese social media in April 2020, describing a social environment that is both stagnant and restlessly busy. Neijuan is the feeling of having to run faster and faster just to avoid falling behind. It means endless overtime and late evenings behind office desks. Neijuan means being overwhelmed by competition at schools, universities, factories or on the marriage market. It refers to the social pressure of buying real estate and entering the property ladder while housing prices rise much faster than wages. Neijuan means parents spending their free time taking their four year old to private tutoring classes for ballet, table manners, piano, oil painting, karate, Lego school etc. Neijuan means having lost hope of changing the society for the betterment of all. The word 内卷 Neijuan is composed of the characters for "inside" and "roll" or "to roll" and is intuitively understood as something like "turning inwards" – "Involution" is the opposite of evolution, and it makes sense to see more in it than just a curious Chinese phenomenon. Johannes Agnoli used the concept of Involution to describe the "regression of democratic states, parties, theories into pre- or anti-democratic forms." Is Involution a global development in a world of stagnation and reinforcement of reactionary tendencies? In search of individual as well as collaborative and collective measures the project is flashing lights between two distant cities, to the contributions of Yifei Chen and Feihong Ou, Xiaotian Li, Christoph Plutte, Qiangyang Zuo, Naomi Rado, Tetsuro Pecoraro, Jeronimo Voss, Vanessa Opoku and Philisha Kay, Martin Stiehl, and their interventions in Guangzhou and Frankfurt/Main.
ESCAPING INVOLUTION is a collaboration between Times Museum's Huangbian Station Contemporary Art Research Center (HBS) in Guangzhou and Synnika in Frankfurt/Main, supported by the Visual Art Project Fund of the Goethe-Institute, the Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst and the Kulturamt Frankfurt/Main.