Artist in Residence Screening Night @ Stiftung Starke

Since October 2007, the UK-based Taiwanese artist Feng-Ru Lee has carried a video camera with her while walking around various cities in the UK, constantly looking towards the sky and spotting the incidental relationships that form between elements of architecture, set against the skyline and air traffic. Partly developed from Lee’s 2006 solo exhibition at Periscope Artists Project Space in Birmingham, UK, Lee views these urban landscapes as a massive transformer, often adding small installations and interventions in and around the city.

Through this process Lee has been developing her work using the moving image as a medium with which to further her adventure in the search for the phenomena that bring a city’s architecture to life. In search of the compositions created by the relationship between person, building and sky, she connects herself with the city’s urban skyline, adding an element of human perspective to the vision of the city. Lee is aware that her sometimes strange and unusual behaviour draws people’s attention to her presence and, in doing so, allows them to see the city from a new and curious angle.

Feng-Ru Lee’s residency with the Stiftung Starke has been divided into three stages. The first stage took place in Birmingham, UK; the interim stage and residency takes place in Berlin. During her residency in Berlin, Lee has found herself both encouraged and overwhelmed by the architecture of the city. With this overload of stimulus she has returned to performance-based video work as a way of exploring the issues with which she is concerned.

So far Lee’s journey has been described as ‘a journey into space’, a venture into the unknown, searching for things that may both surprise and amaze. To this end Lee has been working on a video to document this journey, culminating in sending her alter ego, a sheep and a recurring figure in her work, to the moon. Lee’s double figure as a sheep reflects humanity’s current condition of being able to clone millions of pure humans as products. This ongoing project is due to be completed on her return to the UK, which will serve as the final stage of this residency.

For this special work-in-progress screening, Lee will be presenting two bodies of work. One is a series of moving images that she has been documenting over the last four months. The other is a collection of footage from her new scripted, performance-based video work.