Nomad in the Homeland: Forewords of 2016 Chinese Short Film Festival in Ulaanbaatar  

 

By curator Gu Zhenqing

Cows and sheep can be seen as the wind blows and grass lowers and in the white clouds is a village, where people have their homes. There is no denying that the naturally growing plateau in Mongolia is one of the cultural homelands of human. The ecological highland and the traditionally old-fashioned way of nomadic living that the Mongolians live by, in every way, are presenting a naturally realistic life scene of human’s homeland in the boundless universe. However, the Mongolian civilization in the globalized era has encountered various problems and confusions in front of the transformation of modern times. Standing under the blue sky of Ulaanbaatar in 2016, my questions remain, where is the homeland? And where is the future?

Can human beings save themselves and search a spiritual way out in today’s world? This depends on how humans disinterestedly view their own cultural genes and the fundamentally cultural needs and how they consider the inclusiveness and possibility of today's civilization and its evolvement. When facing kinds of challenges, taking action is by all means foremost to people. Revisiting the Eurasian old haunt of civilization and observing, intensively understanding and exploring the essence of the diverse traditions and cultures, stressing and sharing the spirit of human's homeland, finely polishing and updating the formal language of contemporary art, all of these elements well explain why I came up with the “Project of Artistic Nomad” in the global context. And the “Project of Artistic Nomad” centers on action and highly esteems artistic activity of artists. The most precious experience of an artist is not technical knowledge such as the transforming from concept into standard, from language to form, from regulation to technique as well, however, it is the profound knowledge and deep insight that the artist accomplishes from creative practice, including the reflection on motivation, updating and spontaneous innovation. As a matter of fact, artists usually take challenges of a variety of technical limitations and cultural boundaries by means of their own artistic activities, on the basis of it, they continually push the boundaries of the fixed concept, standard, language, form, regulation and technique as well. Artists’ natural way of artistic expression, in fact, suggests a sense of human nature of their own. Once the artists perceive and thoroughly apprehend the human nature of themselves naturally, they are bound to resonate, interact, integrate and connect with laws of nature in the universe. Based on the “harmony between human and nature”, in the context of artistic practice, the homeland is the future.

 The 2016 Chinese Short Film Festival in Ulaanbaatar means a beginning of the “Project of Artistic Nomad”. Therefore, I wish more and more people could be going on the way to the homeland.