Studio in Kunming, China. And the third at Kyoto Art Center in Kyoto, Japan. We wanted to push ourselves by placing ourselves in an unfamiliar situation and see how this would effect our ideas and artworks. We wanted to try to understand, learn about and adapt to a new country. In our artworks we use people and their surroundings as a starting point for our work and we try to find a theme we think most suitable for the place we are at. By inviting locals to join us in workshops, happenings and lectures we try to make the art experience more accessible to people that normally don’t visit art museums or galleries. We are interested in letting participants being part of and shaping the artwork. The theme works as a tool for communication and the participants create new relationships with each other and with us. We want to encourage relationships that otherwise would not occur, making the projects dynamic and collaborative. In January 2010 we travelled to China, we landed in Beijing only to find out that our plane to Chongqing had been cancelled due to the worst snowstorm in 40 years. After standing in line for more than 5 hours trying to rebook our tickets, we sat down on the concrete floor when we noticed how people were giggling and getting
ready for this massive group sleepover. 36 hours later we finally landed in Chongqing, a huge industrial city where the Jialing meets the Yangtze River. We were overwhelmed with all the people, the sounds and the smells. After an hour long taxi ride we arrived at Huangjueping, the art district of Chongqing. Here, we were going to live for one month in a small apartment on a street where every house was covered with colourful paintings and where we at the end of our stay would know everybody and everybody would know us. The residence program was arranged by Organhaus Art Space, the only artist run organisation and exhibition space focusing on contemporary art in the city. Living in such a huge city we became interested in how one presents oneself and how this affects ones identity. In ancient China, the way in which one wore ones hair told a lot about ones social position and status. Drawing inspiration from ancient Chinese mythology, we created seven hair-hats. The hats were shaped like different animals and each hat represented different characters in the human feature. We then invited people of all ages and from all parts of society to come to a photo studio where we asked them to choose the hat that symbolised who they were. Fifty people participated, and the photographs were ex-
hibited at Organhaus Art Space. The people in the photographs were no longer divided by age, gender or social status but instead united because they had the same dreams, interests or goals as the other people wearing the same hat. In July we travelled to China once more, this time to Kunming in the Yunnan province in the south. The Yunnan is on the border to Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam and is home to 25 of Chinas 56 ethnic minorities. We were interested in the music traditions of the region and we wanted to meet the people performing the music and hopefully collaborate with them. Musicians and dancers meet at the Green Lake Park, a huge park in the middle of the city to perform and play their music, thousands of people participate every day. The musicians told us about their instruments and about the traditions in the park. How some of the groups had met at the same place every day for several years. This was not only about music, this was a social movement. We decided we wanted to make our performance together with one of the groups from the park. Whilst visiting a drawing class for children, we asked them to make drawings of characters they wanted to see in a Chinese opera. This drawing task was unusual to the pupils as the children were mainly taught