2020
Anchor
Ce Jian & Yuzheng Cheng
2019-20
designed by On Paper Studio, printed in Beijing
folded booklet format: 248.5 x 347 mm, poster format: 694 x 994 mm
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The Anchor project is an experiment that was conducted in collaboration with 20 international authors,
curators, and art historians. Each of them was assigned an artist who was completely unknown but for a
short CV and a digital artwork titled Anchor, and asked to write an interpretive text or comment about the work based only on information from the artist’s biography.
After the authors had written their contribution, it was revealed to them that all 10 male and 10 female artists of different nationalities and backgrounds were fake identities. The digital collage Anchor attached to the different CVs was specifically designed for this purpose – its motif is derived from the logo of the Berlin pub Ankerklause, located in the multicultural area of Kreuzberg, while the ‘anchor’ itself reflects the idea of moving and settling down, finding a new home or cultural roots.
The fictional concept aims to raise the question of how foreign artist identities are perceived by an
insider audience, when they are declared to be unknown, coming from various backgrounds and often
working as outsiders away from the established art scene. How does a CV affect the reception of an
artwork and the range of its readings? What must an acceptable artist CV look like today, when there is
so much talk about outsiders, minorities, and diversity in a globalized art world? How does the idea of a certain cultural or social background feed the ‘exotic’ image, regardless of the individual artwork?
By opting for a flashy, random collage with a pop post-internet look, we are referring to the fact that most artworks today are viewed as digital images, while at the same time raising the question whether digital media are erasing cultural differences through an accelerated migration of popular forms and tastes.
Ce Jian & Yuzheng Cheng
