The solo show at BRADWOLFF PROJECTS by visual artist Katrin Korfmann is titled Hui’an. It refers to the area of the same name, situated in the province of Fujian in Southeast China, close to the Taiwan Strait. The region is famous for its stone quarries and centuries-old tradition of stone carving.
Korfmann recently visited Hui’an while doing a residency at the Chinese European Art Center. She became fascinated by the skills displayed by the stone carvers, as they freed from the granite a great variety of, sometimes very advanced, sculptures. The carvers get assignments from internationally renowned artists, but they produce decorative carving too, for example for a worldwide network of Chinese-Indian restaurants. Thus, the stone workshops produce works ranging from modernist abstract art to traditional Chinese ‘restaurant-dragons’. It’s a place where no distinction can be made between art and kitsch. The notion of the industrial manufacturing of art versus the romantic idea of the ‘lonely artist’ inspired Korfmann to create a large photographic work called Hui’an.
Korfmann’s method is marked by photographing situations from a bird’s-eye view. She creates montages made up of multiple photographs of the same setting, from which a new reality is constructed and different impressions from one place are connected to form one new work. Korfmann investigates and records the interactions between time, space, memory, and the experience we have of these elements.
This working method can also be seen in the panoramic composition, measuring 150 x 960 cm, which Korfmann created as a site-specific installation for BRADWOLFF PROJECTS. It shows the dust-covered floor of a stone workshop, a grey and monotonous surface, reminiscent of an archaeological site. The male and female workers’ silhouettes seem to have been caught in the image motionless. Korfmann will show the composite photograph along the entire length of the gallery, thereby inviting the viewer to study the image in all its details and sharpness, thus letting the distance of the bird’s-eye view disappear.
Hui’an will also be published as a concertina-folded artist’s book [edition 33], with an introductory text by Taco Hidde Bakker. This publication will be available for purchase at Bradwolff Projects.
Katrin Korfmann [DE, 1971] lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She studied at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where she specialised in photography and continued her research with residencies at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Cittadellarte in Biella and the Chinese European Art Centre in Xiamen, China. Since the late 1990s her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries, museums, alternative art institutions and public spaces. Her work is represented in numerous private and public international collections. She won several prizes for her work, including Radostar Prize (CH), Prix de Rome (2nd prize) and the Esther Kroon Award (NL).