Flex Point

Lexy Liangzi Xiao, Carmilly Yeung, Kuan-Cheng Yeh, Yamaski Tomohumi, Tansiyu Chen, Kaho Suzuki, Soo Jin Park, Jia Ji, Naeun Kang, Su Liao, Yun Hao

Northing and Entrée join forces and invite you to the opening of Flex Point – an exhibition across both our spaces, presenting a group of East-Asian artists and designers who recently graduated from academies in Norway.

Flex Point, also known as an inflexion point, is a point on a curve at which the curvature changes from convex to concave, or vice versa. Figuratively, it is used to describe a pivotal moment at which a major or decisive change takes place. On a graph presenting such a curve, unlike turning points that are easily recognizable to the non-mathematical eye, flex points tend to remain obscure and concealed. When you zoom in on such a point, the curve appears to transform into a straight line, seemingly indicating no significant changes have occurred. However, from that moment onward, something fundamental has indeed changed.

On June 9, 2023, an inconspicuous day on the calendar, the Norwegian parliament passed a law introducing tuition fees for international students from non-EU countries. This seemingly unremarkable day marked a flex point in Norwegian history, carrying significant consequences for the future. This spring, the last group of art and design students with East Asian cultural backgrounds who enjoyed free education graduated from Norwegian art schools and universities. Each of these individuals is now crossing their own flex point as they embark on their journeys to become artists and designers, whether in Norway, their home countries, or elsewhere in the vast world.

The artist focuses on exploring the ambiguous boundaries between living and non-living and the innate spatial properties in the language of the material. This often depends on the context in which the work is constructed. In The Truth of Breathing II, chicken skin, as a biological material, has the natural properties of dividing inside and outside. Screens are often placed at the entrance to separate Spaces in traditional Chinese culture. People in the vicinity of the entrance are inevitably affected by it: it limits the direction of entry and exit, and because of its translucency, others can see the shadow of the person behind them through the natural texture while watching.

Yun Hao comes from Inner Mongolia, China. She graduated from the Oslo National Academy of Arts (KHiO) in Norway with a master’s degree in Fine Arts and holds a BA in Public Art from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.

The glass installation depicted a personal journey of the artist, from getting lost and depressed to planting a seed for self-healing.

Su Liao is a Chinese artist living and working in Bergen, Norway. She describes herself as “a person who wanders between reality and nothingness, always attracted by the little ‘happenings’ in daily life, a lost soul on the way of finding and accepting through art and life, a life liver and art maker.” Su holds an MA in Fine Art from the Faculty of Fine Art, Music& Design (KMD) at the University of Bergen and a BA in Fashion and Accessory Design from Donghua University in Shanghai.

Multi-screen video, photography. This video records Ji Jia counting a flock of sheep. The flock is constantly on the move, a seemingly impossible act. In the literary concept, there is a flock of sheep, but in the mathematical concept, there are 1300 sheep.

The video was shot in Chenbaerhu Banner, Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia, China. This is the only road leading to Ji Jia's hometown. On both sides of the road are endless meadows, herds of cattle and sheep, a typical Inner Mongolian landscape. Ji Jia has turned back and forth on this road for many years. The landscape was etched in her mind.

The conceptual-based practice of Ji Jia involves site-specific installation, performance, and video. She uses her own body and ready-made daily life materials to intervene in space and architecture. Through the construction of subtle interventions, she breaks the audience's habitual cognition and alters the existing environment. She uses black comedy as her aesthetic basis, putting the audience in familiar yet exceptional situations, thus triggering thinking, criticism, and questions.

Lexy chose photographic chemicals in analogue photography for her subjects . She re-visualizes, reshapes and reinterprets them, offering a fresh perspective. Typically, the focus is on the content of the image or its creation process, neglecting vital chemicals like developer and fixer. These chemicals bring analog photos to life but are often overlooked. Lexy aims to make these liquids and powders, stored in bottles, tanks, and bags, more visually appealing to others.

Born and raised in Beijing, Lexy (also known as Xiao Liangzi) is an artist and researcher, currently based in Bergen and London. She works with alternative photographic processes, textile, and moving images, regarding photography as performance and action above the content of the image. She sees her artistic practice as a way to reach self-awareness and self-transcendence. She is interested in repetitive gestures, durational performance, materiality, exploring how time, perception, and repetition can produce a form of visibility and aesthetic experience. Her practice is about experimentally performing the making processes- a repeated working process, investigating the ways to interpret pairs of paradoxical ideas around repetition, such as degradation and superposition, interruption and continuity, permanence and impermanence. She tends to interpret her investigations in a philosophical way, trying to build a connected, consistent and poetic theory system through her artistic practice.

The project ‘He Had Such a Perfect Body - Heartbreak Volume 1', takes a loosely auto-fictional form, where it has some elements from the artist’s personal life and the rest of it fabricated or exaggerated. Works are made from a perspective of a person who is still in the state of longing after a fresh heartbreak, observing the symptoms of the heartbreak; stewing in certain emotions for too long would wrinkle your being, just like a bath would do to your fingers. and pain is dramatically likened to a medical condition, where the fuzzy memories are lodged inside the heart. Time doesn't stop but is marked by the one who is absent, and strange dreams grow out of the empty space in the once-shared twin bed. You even miss the bad things, like not being able to get proper sleep when sharing a small bed together, because it was part of being in a relationship with them.

Naeun Kang is a Korean artist currently based in Oslo. She is interested in exploring human experiences, interpersonal relationships, general awkwardness of existence, and fleeting things such as emotions and daydreams. Her practice is driven by an urge to communicate complex feelings and situations visually because these things are often difficult to convey through words.  She holds an MA in Fine Arts from the National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) in Oslo, Norway and a BA from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, Netherlands.

Lydia, as a ceramist, has a deep contemplation on the genre of ceramics and its main component - clay. Through clay and ceramics, she approaches diverse subjects, including comparisons between Western and Eastern culture, traditionalism and modernism, 2D flatness and 3D spatiality, and practicality and impracticality. People live in an ever-changing time and space in which they experience various emotions. She intends to capture the fleeting sentiments and express them in abstract forms with the medium of clay.
In this selection, she is to present works that have been made with wood, different kind of paints, glass, and ceramics in order to deliver her thoughts on the tradition and future of ceramics.

Lydia Soo Jin Park is a ceramist from South Korea. She came to Oslo to pursue her studies with the love of nature. She has developed a new perspective towards her artistic practice and personal philosophy, while finding the originality of an object or a phenomenon or nature from everyday life. Her value on memories and emotion from all situations are the driving force in her practice. She holds a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a MFA at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Image 2 by Lexy Liangzi Xiao

Japanese illustrator Kaho Suzuki, with this project, explores ways of storytelling without words and the social value of illustration. TRANSITION is a silent book, that is, a picture book that the story is told only with illustrations.
The story relates to the issue of “uniform society” and “majority and minority.” It is about a man who moved to a city and tells how he becomes “anonymous” in their society. There are many different visual clues in the story, and they encourage the reader’s visual literacy. In other words, it might change into different stories depending on how the reader interprets them. Also, the story has no specific ending, and it would be created by the reader.

Kaho Suzuki is an illustrator, graphic designer, and visual artist from Tokyo, Japan. She took a master’s degree in Visual Communication at Faculty for Art, Music and Design (KMD) at the University of Bergen (UiB) in Norway. Before that she also studied at Nordic Art School in Finland and Tokyo University of the Arts in Japan.

Images by Lexy Liangzi Xiao

Drifting is a series of works telling the stories Tansiyu witnessed in China, her home country, where art is strictly censored. During the period she worked as a volunteer for an NGO, she witnessed people suffering from stark poverty and exploitation. Since literary documentation of what actually happened is prohibited, she started using her artistic practice as her language to tell the stories and criticise authority. However, her art couldn’t escape censorship as well.

But in Norway, Tansiyu was finally able to enjoy artistic freedom and tell the stories she wanted to tell with her multiple skills. As a marginalised person fed up with tons of propaganda throughout her early life, she taught herself the tactic of making political art less triggering. The heavy use of symbols and metaphors also gave her art a unique style.

Tansiyu Chen is a Chinese artist currently living and working in Oslo. She graduated from Oslo National Academy of the Arts with a master’s degree. Before coming to Norway, she worked as a volunteer for an NGO that advocates gender equality in Yunnan. Her diverse working experiences provided her with multiple skills, such as painting, drawing, sculpting and animating. Her topics focus on individuals as well as political criticism. She has had several exhibitions in public spaces in Oslo, including Deichman Bjørvika (Library) and Kunstnernes Hus.

“You Are My Northern Lights” “You Are My Northern Lights” is a film and performance work about the dreamland of Northern Lights. Dominique is a bartender who makes 6 cocktails of different colour and falls asleep. In his dream, he enters into a dreamland and visits 6 imaginative cocktail worlds. The purpose of the journey is to see the Northern Lights. He cannot come back to the reality until he sees the Northern Lights. The film is an assemblage of several characters /techniques including drag performance, mythical creatures’/animals’ dance, ceremony and
animation.

Dominique Nachi is a Japanese artist from Kochi who mainly works with performance and film. He performs several characters, incorporating with dance, animation and the story of fictionalized reality. In his work, Dominique explores the idea of appropriating cultural forms, hybridity, and multi-naturalism.
Dominique has an MA in Fine Art from the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD) at the University of Bergen and a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design at the University of the Arts London, where he also received the First Class Honours.

Images by Runa Halleraker

The project is rooted in the memories across generations. By using memory as a validation to understand the cultural context and personal identity, Kuan-Cheng opened up an internal dialogue through animations and book design.

Kuan-Cheng's grandmother is at the centre of his project, guiding the development, as he was intrigued by the daily objects she uses throughout her entire life. He explored how his grandmother’s river of inheritance has flown through generations and how it has shaped his cultural identity.

Daily objects can serve not only as tools or items, but also as carriers of memories, mementoes, social contexts, family histories, and identity. The project aims to uncover the cultural context hidden in daily objects and encourage people to preserve their cultural identity through visual communication design.

Under The Roof Tiles is also a metaphor for home, showing the appreciation for the people and the artefacts in the family; it is the beginning of self-discovery and serves as a reminder for others to explore their culture and history.

Kuan-Cheng Yeh is a Bergen-based motion designer, graphic designer, and a happy guy who loves dogs, coffee and nature. He has a BA in filmmaking from Taipei National University of the Arts, School of Film & New Media and an MA in visual communication design, University of Bergen, Faculty of Design. Storytelling is the core of his practice. His works traverse between digital and analogue mediums through the use of different materials, colours, and shapes.

Made with Steel, wood and porcelain. This is a kinetic sculpture that explores on identity. The base looks like a travelling human figure, carrying porcelain figurines that represent different cultures and histories. With a motor that introduces a wobbly movement to the sculpture, the porcelain figurines would crash into each other, symbolizing the clashes and merges of cultures in oneself.

The inspiration came from the waves of migration in my home city -Hong Kong, and the discussions of how we view our identity when we move to new places: that we carry our histories and cultures while adapting new ones, which creates complicated multiple identities. The figurines in the sculpture were mostly found, and three were made to tell the history of Hong Kong.

Carmilly Yeung was born in Hong Kong, and currently living in Bergen, Norway. She received her bachelor degree in Visual Arts from the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2018. She just graduated from the MFA program at MA Fine Arts at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University of Bergen.

Yeung's works are usually in the form of sculpture or installation. Her inspirations are always from the observation of humans and their identity (socially and politically), sometimes her works ask questions as simple as "what it means to be a human?". Impacted by the social unrest in Hong Kong during 2019 and 2020, she started a series of political works as a record of the events that happened in the period and mockery of social injustice.