Rainbow Fong
Rainbow Fong is the Artistic Director of China Golden Rooster Awards/Film Festival in foreign films.
She is a member of NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema), an exclusive network of 100+ members of international film curators and veteran film festival executives.
She is also a member of China Film Association and has served as consultant and jury member to various international film festivals including Hawaii International Film Festival, Film Critic Awards for Arabs Films.
She is the Associate Producer of “100 YARDS”, a martial arts drama by Xu Haofeng that was most recently invited to the Shanghai International Film Festival 2023, and to the forthcoming Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2023.
As a writer, Rainbow has published widely on culture/film in both lifestyle magazines and trade journals from Esquire to Fipresci’s.
Nature & Order
Rainbow Fong
Installation Collaborator
Curator of International Film Festival
Spring 2014 Beijing
A flick of conscious.
This is the continuum of a beginning.
Since the show of “MOUNTAIN VASTNESS” took its debut in Vancouver (August 2013), the work seemed to discover its own natural discourse in a fast forward mode somehow - MOUNTAIN VASTNESS: BLACK Series was exhibited at The Fringe Club, Hong Kong, in Autumn of the same year. This exhibition drew involvement from different people and evolved from the sole display of charcoal drawings to include new complimentary installation pieces.
Subsequently, MOUNTAIN VASTNESS: WHITE Series that is presented currently at the atrium gallery space of The Opposite House in Beijing (Spring, 2014) is another new release compiled of mega size serial drawings and scalable installation/sculpture. Traveling down this road of various exhibitions is indeed a magical exploration to ourselves, we cannot help but rethink our contents and redistill our messages until its means and meaning have become clearer to us in terms of appropriate scope.
The larger venue where the exhibition space is, The Opposite House, is the focal point of Swire Properties in its Sanlitun Village development that has successfully upgraded the area into a sophisticated commercial ‘community’ of metropolitan style. The creation of MOUNTAIN VASTNESS: WHITE Series exhibition, in the spirit of “public art”, has the unique characteristics for this particular ‘community’/privately owned public open space and its users in mind.
We do not mind hijacking this open space which is more approachable than that of a formal museum to offer and share our timely personal view of the world in a narrow sense that we live in. Hopefully, this will strike a dialogue between ourselves and those affiliated to the said community/social sphere.
Mountain is the foremost iconic figure for nature, it has a universal language. The first association of mountain, whether to people from the east or the west remains spiritual. It is mysterious, out of the world and sacra. The second association of mountain is the scale, grand presence and eternity. No matter it is the former or later association that relates, the emotional essence always points to fearful regards.
Strange enough, it also frequents the first crayon drawing of kids in all nations. One can safely acknowledge the mass appeal of a mountain for its representation of the nature.
Mountains have the most complicated yet intrinsic structure, each being unique and wears a different air, they are massive and cannot be waived.
Ironically, under the waves of urbanisation today, less those who actually live in mountain cities, mountains are becoming more and more remote in most of our heart or we have come to ignore their existence altogether. They now only reside in still or video images and in our imagination.
The three charcoal drawing series and the installation/sculpture are inseparable alliances. Technically, the drawing series is deliberately primitive in execution, it took only the creator and the simplest tool, a charcoal, to nakedly pour the painter’s emotion into shaping his mountain. In comparison, the sculpture/installation employed 3D scanning/modelling, architectural software programming, and mixed materials fabrication, a much complicated process that reflects another aspect of the production culture of today. Yet, the two sat harmonious by each other.
The series of charcoal drawings and set of installation/sculpture play up the valid vs. void, relativity making a bolder statement on the partial/whole relationship, substitution, irreplaceable quality in comparison to what the Hong Kong BLACK series exhibition (2013) was exploding; it draws one into the infinite study of instinctive abstract representation that calls upon our reflection on time, space and humanity.
The intention and execution approach of the installation/sculpture Floating Mountain (2014) embrace our public art philosophy: sees a mountain through a metropolitan eye, simplified to reconstruct itself using modern day city grid and system, it is orderly, modular and civilised.
By deploying architectural ratio, measurement, esthetics and appreciation standard, it strikes to achieve rational logical coherence. To such end, whether there is a skill innovation or artistic breakthrough is not even in the consideration, but rather a kind sarcastic notion of how urbanites are receiving the mountain and our mother nature.
We also created different grids of reading: viewed horizontally and/or vertically, from various intersecting angles and perspectives, top down and bottom up, to demonstrate and promote multiple interpretations of such.
RESPECT is about no imposing, no elbowing and an acceptance to dissimilarity: that being one of our key messages of MOUNTAIN VASTNESS — the ‘Preface’ of any true civilisation.