Donglai Meng (China) Residence: August 2019
Donglai Meng is a multi-media artist, currently living and working in the Netherlands. She had her Bachelor of Painting at the Academy of fine arts of Rome (IT), and a master of Fine arts at Master Institute of Visual Cultures AKV St.Joost (NL)
When we close our eyes, what do we see? For me, a dream is the reality that I see after closing eyes, and countless latent content within dreams reflect our real inner mental state that we cannot see. Taking this as the starting point, I combine psychoanalytic theories with painting, text, video, etc, to capture and re-organize those mental wandering moments in real life. In my reconstructed dreamy worlds, hidden expressions, subtle emotions and suppressed desires are captured and amplified.
At the same time, by collaborating with people who have similar psychological motivations but behave in different ways, I interpret and depict the complex psychological experiences in contemporary human daily life from an artist’s perspective, gradually moving towards minority groups in contemporary society and related subcultures. With closed eyes, we see our own hidden awareness, from the individual to the society and can eventually arouse the resonance and re-recognition of this phenomenon to the audience.
During the stay at studio Kura, she would like to continue her current research (which is about dream and reality), but combine it with the traditional Japanese animism culture. Explore the connection between those surreal products and real life through video and painting.
– website: https://mengdonglai.com/
