Introduction

“The Grand Voyage” is a long term creative project founded by GUO Xi and ZHANG Jianling, and supported by Imagokinetics Lab in Hangzhou. In 2014, the artist duo compiled and released 12 prophecies. And then they began a long voyage to witness the prophecies, collecting evidence and stories along the way to bring back to the mainland. The artists try to work on the edge of fiction and reality, presenting the audience with a narrative maze of works of art, objects and text.


Guo Xi

He was born in Yan Cheng, Jiangsu Province in 1988. After graduation from Department of New Media Art of China Academy of Art in 2010, he joined a two-year program at the Rijksakademie in Netherlands as artist-in-residence. In 2015, he graduated from New York University with Master of Fine Arts degree.

What Xi is mainly concerned with is the ideologies with which people perceive and interpret their world—specifically, the toughest-to-crack nutshell grown out of the convergence of these ideologies. By means of a dramatized sense of humor, Xi attempts to soften, or even break open this nutshell a bit, such that a trace of absurdity and uneasiness can be introduced into his audience’ s daily life. He likens an artist’ s work to an act of “piercing”, making little pores on the hard husk of ideologies, through which people will be given a chance to glance at the Truth hidden within. In his view, the visual form is but a medium for the transmission of message, and that justifies his extensive use of a variety of artistic forms, such as installation, painting, performance, sculpture, text, et cetera, to try to convey his messages as faithfully as possible.


Zhang Jianling

Born in 1986, Zhang Jianling graduated from Wuhan University in 2008 and then studied in institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thoughts of School of Inter-media Art, China Academy of Art. After graduation with MA degree in 2013, she now lives in Shanghai. Previous art programs she participated in include: Tales from the Taiping Era, co- curator, Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2014); One Meter Theater, executive curator, Imagokinetics, Hangzhou (2013); Limited Knowledge, executive curator, City University of Hong Kong, HK (2013); Greenbox: Remapping – the Space of Media Reality, co-curator, Media City Research Center, Hangzhou (2013); The Surprise of Existence - A Moment of Youth Image, executive curator, Lianzhou Foto, Lianzhou (2012); Limited Knowledge, executive curator, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou (2012) etc.