Editor’s note: Themed on “Chasing the Light”, 2025 CAFA Graduation Season kicked off at CAFA Art Museum in early summer. Surrounded by diversified creations, visitors may find that some of graduates chose performance to burst their inner impulses, some chose to interact with the space to build their visual tension, and some got inspired from traditions to bring about more contemporary creative appearances. More young creators are paying their attention to drawing materials from the life around them, trying to capture the multiple realities of emotions, experiences and thoughts...
In these cases, the collisions between individual experience and the external world, between new and old media, as well as between virtual life and real life have repeatedly inspired their creativity that may not be perfect but fresh. CAFA graduates who believe in “light”, follow the light in their hearts and present their initial explorations of “what art is” that have been honed for several years at their degree shows. Featuring interviews with graduates at Phase B Undergraduate Students Exhibition, “CAFA Graduates Who Believe in ‘Light’”, invites graduates to talk about their creative stories from a more microscopic and in-depth perspective, and we would like to share and convey the “light” in the hearts of young people through these candid and vivid narrations.
Essential Skills
By Zhao Xuanfei, School of Experimental Art and Sci-Tech Art
My work originated from a rebellious feeling that I had when I got prepared for the entrance examinations of art schools, and it was also because of the despair that I was heading towards a seemingly destined future that I began to do performance art and understand contemporary art. In recent years, I have visited various live art festivals, once a foreign artist saw me sketching and he told me that he found that all of Chinese artists can paint, and they paint very well. It reminded me of entrance examinations that I experienced, and I think it is something with Chinese characteristics, so I chose to convey my thinking in this way. From the perspective of “the highest form of theater is an event”, in “Essential Skills” as a performance, I have done what I can.
Exhibition View of Essential Skills
My choice of a gypsum“cruciform cone” came from my intuition and I felt that this shape appealed to me. On the other hand, this is a shape that does not work in other fields, artificially designed to serve only the basic training of modeling, and it can fit my theme. I did not realize that the “cruciform cone” was featured in the main visual poster of 2025 CAFA Graduation Season until I finished the installation at CAFA Art Museum.
Exhibition View of Essential Skills
I believe that there is no definite path to contemporary art, and it can even be said that making art is to create a path. With this in mind, I came up with the question: “Is accumulation of essential skills important?” It seems that there is only the so-called “progress” on a clear and known path, but actually I feel more confused in daily creation.
A Leap over the Welcome Post, Screenshot
Group work x Cement Park LIVEHOUSE 327th
Group Passage: Behavioral Image Collection I
Hardware Micro Scene 17th, Screenshot
Dongxing-Hanoi International Live Art Festival
Break | Chaobai River Exhibition on Ice
The implementation of my plan was actually very simple: from the opening to the closing, performance is my first choice, conducted from modeling through to posture. I agree with the view that “performance art exists on the boundaries of any field”. Maybe I just like to test the boundaries, meanwhile I am also a highly domesticated and alienated artist who always wants to find my own frontier. I have always been encouraged by Prof. Zhang Yanzi and Prof. He Beili to do what I want to do and they tolerated my “errant” behaviors, which matters a lot for me.
Exhibition View of Essential Skills
I don’t think it’s the light that keeps me going, but there are a lot of tenebrous things. Maybe in pursuit of “light”, I cannot help but want to become “a moth to the fire”,which I may not be able to bear in the end. In this way, “light” is more like a “hidden pain” of mine. It fulfilled some constitutive exception within and beyond my expectation.
Zhao Xuanfei and Her Classmates
Text and Image Courtesy of Zhao Xuanfei, edited (EN) by Sue/CAFA ART INFO.
