Process based painting and removing on the glass window in response to writer Eleen Deprez’s texts typed on paper, then shred the paper, 2022.

Performances: WE TALK by Jingwei Bu and Eleen Deprez, 2022, ArtPod,SA

Stop and See: Jingwei Bu and Eleen Deprez

Over the course of a four-month residency, Jingwei Bu and Eleen Deprez collaborated on a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural durational live art performance. Stop and See invited the residents and passers-by to consider how language is shared and human connection is enacted in an extended visual and literary encounter that celebrated difference and parallel practices.

Characterised by observation, playful response, and absurd conversation Jingwei and Eleen established a process and method of engagement with the aid of a few simple props: paints, a desk with a typewriter and a shredder. The collaborative exchange relied on Eleen recording what she observed in writing, passing it to Jingwei who would read her words, passing the paper through the shredder and respond in kind using paint, mark-making on the glass surface in response to the movement of people and flow of traffic, gradually covering the surface in an increasingly dense layer of paint. Once covered, Jingwei repeated the action in the negative, scraping paint off the glass to reveal new forms and shapes untill all is removed. Everything is back to normal.

Punctuated by two participatory events, the residency featured the two residents engaged in a conversation in their native languages, Chinese and Flemish. In the second performance, the two invited the audience to join them, creating a multi-lingual cacophony in the space. At the residency’s conclusion piles of shredded paper and curls of scraped paint, form an artifact of time shared.

Stop and See: Jingwei Bu and Eleen Deprez
1 July – 31 October 2022
ART WORKS Artist & Writer in Residence at ArtPOD, Adelaide
A Guildhouse initiative in partnership with the City of Adelaide.