The Knife’s Edge: video recently seen in Beijing

The Knife’s Edge featured the work of seven Chinese artists who used video as an art form, and who all live or actively exhibit in Beijing. Perth-based curator Erin Coates developed this exhibition during a six-month residency in Beijing in 2010. Drawn to artists practicing on the fringes of China’s mainstream art-market, Coates’ research took her to studios in the hutong labrynths and outskirts of Beijing’s ever-expanding boroughs.

The resulting exhibition provided a unique insight into contemporary video art practice in China, and a meditation on the processes of transformation, time and the everyday. The selected artworks each articulated strikingly individual ways of perceiving and being in the world. Displacing simple acts and daily rituals from familiar contexts, these videos suspended time and drew us into moments that were intensely subjective, visually poetic and ultimately celebratory in their assertion of the individual.