In Transit

10 April - 28 August 2014

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Transit implies movement, a state of flux, and the process of going from one place or status to another. Each of these short videos conveys an artist’s unique experience of being in transit within a different Asian city.

Y. David Chung
Crossing, 2014
4 minutes, 50 seconds Music by Jin Hi Kim
Vocals by Kang Kwon-soon

Crossing mixes scenes of street life in two country’s capital cities: Seoul, South Korea and Pyongyang, North Korea. Free to record in Seoul, Chung’s film was confiscated in communist North Korea. Using his cell phone, however, he secretly filmed pedestrians crossing the bridge over the Taedong River in Pyongyang. Captured on foot, bus, and subway and accompanied by the haunting composition, “Jupiter’s Moons,” Crossing evokes a feeling of collective rootlessness, of passing through places without arriving at a final destination.

Y. David Chung is an artist and filmmaker known internationally for his drawings, prints, videos, installations, and public art. He is a Professor and Director of the MFA Graduate Program at the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor .

Serge Maheu
Hong Kong – Upside Down, 2013
2 minutes, 45 seconds

For a class assignment called “Image and Motion,” Serge Maheu edited footage that he shot on a visit to Hong Kong, a city where he says, “time warps seem to be the norm.” Hong Kong – Upside Down captures this impression of the surreal, as Maheu imagines Hong Kong as a place of no gravity, where dimensions merge, split apart, and collide, and where both people and buses pulse and move forward and backward to the beat of time.

Based in Montreal, Quebec, Serge Maheu is an artist and designer who is currently studying computer science and electrical engineering. A self-described “geek,” Maheu approaches each of his interests – electronics, graphic art, interactive technologies, music and sound design, photography, programming and video – as an opportunity for creativity.

Xaver Xylophon
For Hire! – Bangalore Rickshaw, 2011
4 minutes, 3 seconds

The drawings that comprise For Hire! – Bangalore Rickshaw were done during the artist’s month-long visit to city of Bangalore, India. His animation captures the tough workaday life, as well as the humor and humanity of a rickshaw driver as seen through the eyes of a European visitor. Says Xylophon:
“Green, yellow, black. They are the blood in the veins of Bangalore: the 450,000 rickshaws and their drivers. Knocked together from bits and pieces, decorated, ready for the junk heap or carefully maintained like antique cars, the vehicles are as charismatic as their owners, who brave the monstrous traffic of this metropolis daringly, sleepy, chattering or stoic, making sure the passenger’s trip from A to B will be full of memorable experiences.”

Xaver Xylophon is an illustrator and animator living in Berlin, Germany. His clients include Audi, Deutsche Bahn, The New York Times, and VW (Volkswagen).

Rice Gallery presents In Transit as part of My Voice Would Reach You, an Asian Arts Festival organized by Tani Barlow, T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Asian Studies, for Rice’s Chao Center for Asian Studies. Other arts festival participants include: Asia Society Texas Center; Matchbox Gallery; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Rice Public Art; and Taikang Space, Beijing.