Connecting people through art 

The exhibition In Search of Global Poetry: Videos from the Han Nefkens Collection, shows a selection of 12 videos at the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, China. Han Nefkens, the well-known Dutch art collector and writer, began building his collection in 2000, and has worked selectively with art museums and other institutions worldwide to exhibit his collection.

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Video art was first born in the West in the mid-1960s. In contrast, Chinese video art began in the late 1980s, almost thirty years after its emergence in the West, though it continues to develop and is coming to match the rest of the world. Cinema has grown ubiquitous, particularly in the 21st century, influencing human cognition in ways both subtler and more profound than ever before.

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The He Xiangning Art Museum has long focused on the environment for contemporary art in China and its advancement, working to foster the exchange and promotion of contemporary art between China and the rest of the world.

The participating artists in this exhibition each offer a different narrative while managing to do so in an unusual way, mixing real life and fiction, sense and sensibility. These works express the artists’ recognition, thought and experimentation as related to the relationship between art and new media in an era of digital technology. Moreover, coming from different corners of the world (including Iran, Switzerland, Lithuania and the USA, amongst others), the artists have completely different backgrounds and origins and belong to very different generations. Their works thus provide a global cultural vision and allow us to clearly understand the ways in which the visual language of video art is employed to express their attitudes, views and transcendental, poetic imaginations in relation to art.