Field Recordings (Xian Chang Bian) is a collective of New Zealand and Chinese artists who share an interest in social geography and use documentary film processes to explore cultures as they occur in urban environments. This shared practice results in films and video installations that investigate how social interaction shapes and is shaped by land- scape and history, and how culturally specific practices might be communicated between and within cultures. Field Recordings involves the following artists: Guo Zixuan, an artist raised in Beijing now living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland; Li Xiaofei, who works in Shanghai and New York; Tu Rapana Neill, a New Zealander based in London; and the Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland based artists Jim Speers and Clinton Watkins. This exhibition focuses on the works made in China between 2015 and 2017.

Li Xiaofei was born in the Chinese city of Hunan in 1973. He lives in Shanghai and New York. He graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Li has been the recipient of multiple grants and awards, including the Iaspis International Residency Grant, Stockholm, Sweden (2013) and The Sovereign Foundation Fellowship of the Asian Cultural Council, New York, USA (2011). Li initiated Assembly Line in 2010, an ongoing project that records industrialised social change in, not only China, but as it occurs internationally. Through this documentary process, Li explores what lies beyond the orderliness of the assembly line, the capitalist factory, consumer society, social progress and social mores—the reality of the people living in a highly systematic and institutionalised environment.

Jim Speers became interested in moving image because of its potential to capture the phenomenological experiences of everyday life. Specifically, his interest in documentary art is in the possibility of culture revealing itself through small moments and things. His recent works have moved toward a more discursive form of film which aims to record the ways people characterise the physical and social world they find themselves in. Working with Field Recordings has offered him a particular opportunity to consider the ways subjecthood might be understood, not only in terms of outcomes shown to an audience, but in the way it is negotiated within a collaborative process. Speers is an Associate Professor at The University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts.

Clinton Watkins investigates affect through the construction of immersive experiences combining sound, form and scale. His work focuses on the characteristics, structures, phenomena, and processing of sonic and visual material through a minimalist sensibility. Watkins is also an experimental musician who regularly produces and performs, both as a solo artist and collaboratively. Watkins is a Senior Lecturer at Auckland University of Technology teaching experimental time-based media.

Guo Zixuan works in video, video installation and performance art. She is influenced by Eastern philosophy and the aesthetic of Taoism that underpins her culture of origin. Guo’s practice is driven by her sense of being ‘a transitional self’. As someone living in both China and Aotearoa New Zealand, she experiences an ‘in between position’, a dual perspective in relation to the everyday and of art making. Guo is a Masters graduate of The University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts.

Tu Rapana Neill has worked in the media industry for the past decade, as an editor on film projects, then a director of documentaries and commercials. In 2014, he directed the critically acclaimed documentary series Digging in the Carts, which explored the history of Japanese video-game music and its influence on electronic music. His interest in Japanese culture has continued through to the Ghost Selectors documentary project. This combines glimpses of Japan’s history with an introduction to the culture of specialist music bars. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Rapana Neill has worked on documentary projects for Māori Television, including a series about the tribe Nga ti Kahungunu and the lost Māori descendants of Goethe.

https://fieldrecordings.net/about/

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This publication sits alongside the exhibition Field Recordings.