Kan Xuan is a Chinese born artist and who resides between Beijing and Amsterdam. Her video and installations often incorporate static objects and enduring landscapes. Kan Xuan’s work explores the relationship between individuals' subjectivity and the external world, how these relationships form and dissolve, and whether art can help forge new connections.
Kan Xuan is a former resident of the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2002-2003). Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at UCCA, Beijing (2012); IKON museum, Birmingham (2016); Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou & Berlin (2019) among others. Group exhibitions include M+Museum, Hong Kong (2024); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Guggenheim Museum, NY (2018); Venice Biennale (2007 & 2013); Gwangju Biennale (2011) and Istanbul Biennale (2007). She is the recipient of the Contemporary Chinese Art Award (2014) and the Award of Art China (2020).
A Slope by the Sea (2020-2024)
5-channel video installation
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
A Slope by the Sea is a mapping, through videos composed of still images, of China’s 72 river mouths. From 2020 to 2024, Kan Xuan embarked a series of journeys to shoot the estuaries of every place where a river meets the sea, traveling China’s 18,000km coastline from the Beilun River on the Vietnam border in the south to the Yalu River that forms the border with North Korea.
Rivers have shaped many fundamental aspects of China’s culture, economy, and history, and have been frequent subjects of artistic and literary depiction. In recent decades, dense population clusters and industrial production have emerged around certain river mouths, shaping them in line with human activity. Landscapes today are the result of a series of different policies, shaped by the events and powers of successive eras. To look at these rivers through Kan Xuan’s lens is to see ancient phrases being washed out and erased before new contents are filled in. She believes that rivers themselves have an impact on the conception of time and inner rhythms of people’s hearts. By depicting the movement of rivers and the horizon lines in space, A Slope by the Sea locates individual subjectivity in the flow of time. Taking river mouths as a starting point, Kan Xuan traces a singular world of perception through her sustained observational gaze, and positions it within and against larger national and global histories.
A Slope by the Sea continues in the mode of poetic geography that characterizes Kan Xuan’s most ambitious projects over the past decade. Like many works in the Collection Hartwig Art Foundation, it speaks softly to the specificities and tensions of our current global moment. She travels the landscape with the ostensible grand aim of making a comprehensive atlas, while her eye instead settles upon the tiny details that comprise the world.
– Philip Tinari
The work was selected by the Commissioning Committee and acquired through the Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund. It will subsequently be donated to the Dutch state, becoming an integral part of the national art collection (‘Rijkscollectie’), available for institutions in the Netherlands and abroad.