Image: Jingwei Bu, Life Maps solo exhibition image at the Mill Adelaide, 2021. Photograph Morgan Sette.

Jingwei Bu and Eleen Deprez will be the next Artist and Writer in Residence at the City of Adelaide ArtPOD. 

Following a competitive call for applications, the second ART WORKS Artist & Writer in Residence pairing has been selected to undertake a four month residency from 1 July – 31 October 2022. 

Jingwei Bu is a multidisciplinary and performance artist, her work explore themes of culture heritage. Her intuitive mark-making is guided by the study of Buddhist teachings, connection to nature, and an instinct for artistic risk-taking and spontaneous experimentation. Eleen Deprez is a philosopher of art and a curator, she is currently working on the uses of Augmented Reality (AR), researching the interaction between painting, photography and curating an exhibition on the contemporary grotesque.

Throughout their residency in the ArtPOD Jingwei and Eleen will collaborate to create a durational live art performance, with in person, virtual and published outcomes. The project, ‘Stop and See’, is a form of visual and literary play between two differently cultured individuals and two different practices. Creating ”a stop”, a moment of standstill, for both the residents and the audience. Jingwei will make marks to create an externalised document of her spatial and temporal observations. The marks becoming – a recording or map-making – of her attentive and embodied experience of the moment and those around her. Eleen will record in writing what she sees: the space, the flow of traffic through the lane, people. The loop between Jingwei and Eleen, stop and see, activity and observation, text and shredding will be ongoing throughout the residency.

Delivered by Guildhouse in partnership with the City of Adelaide, ART WORKS is a collaborative program of residencies, curatorial mentorship and creative engagements, designed to provide a city-based platform for artists, curators and writers to pursue new ways of working and engaging with audiences.

Now in its fifth year, ART WORKS presents three Artist & Writer in Residence opportunities within the City of Adelaide ArtPOD. These extensive artist engagements deliver on the City’s Cultural Strategy 2020-24 for Adelaide to be recognised as a cultural incubator where people, enterprises and audiences flourish.

Jingwei Bu

Bu is a multidisciplinary and performance artist who was first trained in the Chinese traditional technique of charcoal powder portrait drawing as a teenager, and later at a contemporary artist atelier in Germany. In 2021, she was awarded James Martin Award for a high-achieving Bachelor of Visual Art graduate with BVA from Adelaide Central School of Art. These different learning backgrounds have been providing the technical underpinnings of her varied practice. Her works explore themes such as time, memory, culture heritage. Her intuitive mark-making is guided by the study of Buddhist teachings, connection to nature, and an instinct for artistic risk-taking and spontaneous experimentation. Movement, informed by her study of Tai-chi, adds an additional dimension and duration to object-based installations and performance. Bu has exhibited in China, Germany and Adelaide, including Collective Haunt Inc, FELTspace, the Mill Adelaide, the Main Gallery and upcoming art residency at Nexus Art. Calibration with other artists is an important part of Bu’s practice as well as sharing her Life Maps intuitive mark-making workshops in the community.

Eleen Deprez

Eleen Deprez is a philosopher of art and a curator. She moved to Australia in 2020 and is currently based in Tarntanya/Adelaide. She teaches History and Theory of Visual Culture at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford (UK) and Critical Literacies at the University of South Australia. She is a co-director of FELTspace, an an artist-run organisation supporting, developing and presenting emerging, experimental, and diverse exhibitions and public programs. Before moving to Australia she was curator of Studio 3 Gallery at the University of Kent (UK) where she also taught history and philosophy of art. She was co-editor of Debates in Aesthetics, a peer-reviewed journal published by the British Journal of Aesthetics, until 2021. Eleen has an MA in Philosophy from the Free University of Brussels (Belgium) and an MA in Fine Arts focusing on installation art from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (Belgium). She completed a PhD in History and Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent, examining the nature and origins of curated exhibitions. Eleen is currently working on the uses of Augmented Reality (AR) in museums and gallery spaces, researching the interaction between painting and photography, and curating an exhibition on the contemporary grotesque.

 

Images (L-R): Jingwei Bu. Photograph courtesy the artist; Eleen Deprez. Photograph courtesy the artist.