OBJECT SHOW

A barge slowly travels along the Huangpu River near Shanghai... Maridet creates his own music for Huangpu River using the original ambience recorded on video.

Huangpu is an audio-visual exploration of the rier Huangpu flowing NE past Shanghai into the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) at Wusong. It is a major navigation route and has an intense traffic flow of all sorts of vessels. The result is a dense, textured work that explores micro and macro aspects fo this river environment.

QUOTES OF adjudicators’ review, HK Art Biennial 2005 catalogue:

Ms Yuko Hasegawa Artistic Director, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan:

“In Huangpu (2005), the award winning video work by Cedric Maridet, the camera is moving slowly and smoothly maneuvered to capture the close-up of the body of a ship anchored at port, light, and its surrounding landscapes. In this work, these elements are beautifully woven together with the air of Hong Kong which itself is a place where the flow of the air of gigantic and historical Mainland China and differing cultures are blended together.” (p.30-31)

Ms Betti Sue Hertz, Curator of Contemporary Art, San Diego Museum of Art, USA:

“... one of the strongest works in the exhibition, a multi-channel video titled Huangpu (2005) (p.54-55) by Cedric Maridet, is a visual essay on the ships along the Huangpu River where it flows northeast past Shanghai into Chang Kiang at Wusong. The video uses the concept of “transsensorial perception” (via sensory channels that include dimensions from other channels) and merges the visual aesthetic of painting with the daily life of an industrial waterway in the
middle of China.” (p.32-33)

The composition of this work not only achieves aesthetic qualities, but also aims to be a constant dialogue between music and images. An immersive experience is achieved through the close morphological elements of audio-visual data, and the creation of new topological and spatio-temporal perspectives. The sound/images not only reflect a reality of the environment (i.e. barges, cargo, motor sounds, sounds of workers, etc) but also the transformation of the sound and images creates another dimension built on the aesthetic treatment of the audio-video recordings. There is an emphasis on spatio-temporal elements, through the structure of the work, from micro to macro, the panning movement of the camera due to the movement of the boat, and the sweeping images, and their canvas-like shapes.

Moreover, both musical and video colors and tones are also at stake in this work, where each movement plays on different colors and musical compositions. Using Bill Seaman’s idea of recombinant poetics, this work explores an interaction between computer-processed audio-visual data, and offers an original journey on the Huangpu river.

Courtesy of Cedric Maridet and Experimenta