Beyond Mountains / RCA and UAL Camberwell Group Exhibition
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Mountain Watching is a well-received motto in Zen, which embodies and symbolises the contrasting and fluid relationship between individuals’ state of mind as well as encounter and objects’ nature. In the eyes of artists, no matter they are delving internally into themselves or gazing at external objects, often it ends with a projection of their own experience, either explicitly or inclusively. When authors leave the party, and only creations are left, we stumble into a Nomadland, rolling and tossing, seeking the intangible neutrality that might be closest to the objectivity and ourselves. Me spectating and spectating on myself, wholesomely by essence, appeal to the truth of self-consciousness and self-consistency.
This exhibition features 10 artists from the RCA and UAL Camberwell. Curated by Marjorier Ding. For more information regarding the exhibition, the artists on show, or the artworks, etc. please email: marjorier.ding@network.rca.ac.uk
About the Artists
Abdollah Nafisi
Abdollah Nafisi is an Iranian artist based in Sussex, UK working with organic materials to create improvised sculptures. With a background in carpentry and art, Abdollah uses locally sourced wood as his primary material, viewing the wood as a time machine. On this basis of objecthood, he examines issues of heritage and temporality with elements such as fire and metal. During his travels with nomads and tribes of Iran, learning mystical Sufi music, playfulness became the door to capturing the spirit of nature. An important part of his work to this date, is exploring tensions between contrasting themes such as spirituality and playfulness.
Hou Jiahui
Hou Jiahui（b.1998）was born in China. Royal college of art 2020-2022. Her work has been featured in a number of group exhibitions held in Shanghai, Chongqing, Hebei, Shanxi in China, and London in the UK.
Hyesu Kim
Hyesu’s work explores uneasy emotions that she experiences through the immediacy of drawing and the expressiveness of colours. The figures that emerge in her practice have the qualities of fictional characters seen in cartoons, conveying difficult emotions to the viewer in a humorous way. Such playful characters and absurd narratives allude to various states such as uneasiness, loneliness, helplessness, and lethargy. In the joy of being disguised, she and her characters provide a space for the viewers to adapt their subjective narratives, empathetically respond and obtain a new understanding of their inner selves.
Matvei Matveev
Matvei Matveev creates works that explore a political language of bondage and fetishism. His imagery speaks of masking, domination and abuse that he aligns with the current politics in his country of birth–Russia. Relying on the context of the work and the politics underpinning it, he playfully argues through a pop-art direct style of image-making. As a multidisciplinary artist, Matvei engages with experimental practices and materials to create work ranging from Painting to 3D objects.
Michaela D’Agati
Michaela D’Agati (b.1992) works with a process-orientated practice, governed by the materials she uses to liberate lines and shapes, using drawing as a way of thinking through doing. This results in a singular pursuit between her works existing as drawing and being an inquiry of drawing practice simultaneously.
Rachel Bungey
After working in the music industry for five years, Rachel moved to Tokyo to start a design studio (Mantis Studio) with a goal to fund her art practice. She has worked as a creative / art director in the music industry for seven years. Working in-house for XL Recordings and as a freelancer, she has worked on many musicians’ global album campaigns. Rachel is now a full-time student at the RCA, Sculpture MA programme. Her work explores questions around new technologies, abstraction, perception and environmentalism. With a focus on form and balance, Rachel explores sculpting as a form of meditation. Exploring these ideas through the physical and digital realm, using new technologies such as 3D printing, VR, 3D sculpting. Rachel is currently working towards a project that will use a six axis robot arm, as well as experimenting with more traditional sculpting techniques.
So Young Kim
So Young Kim is a Korean artist based in London and Singapore. She has been actively participating in the contemporary art scene for about 10years. She holds a (Hons) degree in fine art (2013) and is currently enrolled in the Royal College of Art (2020-2022). Kim’s working process starts with collecting images of fragments and debris from objects on internet platforms, which she then transforms into new compositions.
Tom Harper
Fascinated by old machinery and printing technology, Tom Harper uses one of the oldest printing techniques, graphite rubbings, as a kind of memorial, recording the history of an intaglio printing press and capturing the traces left by the hallmarks of time. Having a physical, tactile engagement with the work, is key in allowing a truly embodied experience that borders on the devotional, producing an intimate engagement that brings that object to life. His use of Scritta paper for the drawn rubbings, used for making bibles, further emphasises the act of recording and preserving; its fragility evocative of fading memories. It is a celebration of the physical encounter with an object, a pivotal but now archaic machine, in as much peril of being lost to a more digital world as the physical encounter itself.
Xinyu Hao
Xinyu Hao (b.1994,) is a visual artist based in London & Beijing. After completing his bachelor’s degree in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he continues to develop his practice on MA photography at the Royal College of Art. His works focus on the relationship between geo-social culture, surrounding environment, and individuals. He deploys photography as the main medium and expression of his works and explores the marginalisation of images by combining sculpture, performance, video, and installation. The fragmented memories, subtle emotions, and perceptions constitute the potential motivation of montage narrative in his works.
Zeng Jiujian
Zeng Jiujian regards all media as channels to bridge matter and consciousness in his practice. Scepticism and insecurities about the objective world have led him to use art as a means of travelling inside and constructing himself, and to explore the inherent relationship between artistic expression and display while searching for a critical point of endogenous emergence at the edge of media communication. How to re-project the new historical perspectives from the present perception, which is derived from individual or collective historical experiences, is also a long-standing subject of his focus. He hopes that all his artistic activities are based on a perspective that observes himself from a distance.