Yingmei Duan CD Album| Forty Eight Years Ago, the Road an Ocean

  • 10 JUNE 2018


Hanmi Gallery is pleased to announce that Yingmei Duan’s first CD ‘Forty Eight Years Ago, the Road an Ocean’ is now released.


Motivation


Yingmei Duan has been making art for many years, her artwork involves and incorporates people from different cultures and parts of society. Improvisational singing, sound, language and collaboration with different musicians are often part of her live performances and performance installations. Yingmei has always wished to combine performance art with more pure singing in order to attract a wider audience. She believes this is also a way for more people to learn about performance art. Making this album is like a dream come true for her, as well as an extension of her performance art.


In 2016, Yingmei joined the project “Strolling along the Discernible Min Jiang” in Chengdu, and she met sound artist Yanzeng Li and Xiaoguo Xu. there. Influenced by these two artists, all the artists there listened to many interesting music, and it reminded Yingmei of her life in the 90s, when she was living with American rock music from the 60s and 70s and her improvisational participation in Zuoxiao Zuzhou’s album. In the same year, at the Shenyang Performance Music Festival, Yingmei met contemporary composer Xiaohan Han. It occurred to Yingmei that she could ask Han Xiaohan to help with her album after her deep communication with him. Then in September 2017, they began to make the album.


The lyrics of this album are basically a supplement to some of Duan Yingmei’s performance art works in the past. Therefore, Xiao Han’s inspiration comes mainly from the description of Duan Yingmei’s works, based on which, Xiaohan composed for the album combining Yingmei’s impromptu singing, related image recordings, and her personal experience as a performance artist.As Yingmei didn’t receive any professional training, plus her inborn speech impediment, some problems showed up during the recording, but luckily, the recording was successfully completed under Xiaohan’s encouragement and help, Yingmei was so spurred on by the whole album-making process that she decided to go on creating contemporary art with the combination of music and sound.


Bio


Yingmei Duan was born in 1969 in Daqing, Heilongjiang Province of China. She is currently living and working mainly in Braunschweig, Germany and Beijng, China. Yingmei Duan is part of the Chinese avant-garde art. Living and working in the legendary art district Beijing East Village for many years, in 1995 she participated in the performance “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” ,which is considered to be one of the classics of Chinese contemporary art. The life in East Village between 1993-1995 prompted YIngmei’s curiosity and interest in performance art and laid great influence on her later art career. The turning point came in 2000, when she was in The Braunschweig University of Art (HBK), Germany, learning art from the celebrated performance artist Marina Abramović. Under Marina’s guidance, Yingmei Duan became a dedicated performance artist.  During her studying in Germany, she also learned from and worked with the filmmaker and action artist Christoph Schlingensief, participating in several of his large-scale video performance installations.


Yingmei Duan is an insightful observer who has great interest in all facets of life and asks various questions about it. In the past seventeen years, she has concentrated her energy and creativity on making and researching performance art. Based on her art practice, Yingmei Duan has developed four concepts which she describes as “Daily Live Art Performance” (DLAP), “Equal Collaborative Performance” (ECP), “Solo Performance”, “Performance Installation”, and “Changing Exhibition”. She often used different media in her performance works. Sound, video and installation are often showcased in one work. Besides her solo projects, Yingmei loves to work with people from different cultures, ages and areas of life. Now she has realised over eighty collaborative performances and was invited to numerous art exhibitions in 40 countries.


Yingmei has made her name both at home and abroad with her great influence on contemporary art. Her performance arts and installations have been shown in, among others Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (2005), La Biennale di Venezia in Italy (2007), Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Germany (2009), Guangzhou Live in China (2010), Lilith Performance Studio in Sweden (2011), Hayward gallery in London (2012), Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea in Wales (2013), He Xiangning Art Museum in China (2014), The 19th Biennale of Sydney in Australia (2014), Solyanka State Gallery in Moscow (2015), Wiener Festwoche in Austria (2016), and Chengdu Up-on International Live Art Festival in China (2017).