在这个冬天，民生现代美术馆将带来由侯瀚如策划的法国著名录像艺术家罗伯特·凯恩个展《旅行/相遇》。凯恩出生于1945年，曾就读于巴黎国家高等音乐学院，师从皮埃尔·沙费 (Pierre Schaeffer)，从而成为著名的实验声音团体GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales)活跃成员和作曲人。除音乐创作以外，凯恩从70年代开始关注视觉图像与录像，试图将具象音乐的实验技巧和语言运用于影像创作中。在当时，录像还是一种非常少见且极具实验性的媒介，因此凯恩无疑成为了这个领域的先锋。一直持续到今天，艺术家仍坚持着在影像领域的各种尝试，不仅创作了大量记录旅行的影像作品，同时也始终探讨着自身和周遭世界的关系。通过与来自不同地域和不同文化背景的人们打交道，凯恩找到了新的艺术创作源泉。其作品的特点是超慢速镜头，对声音、图像之间关系的探索，以及抒情诗意的境界。

凯恩的作品至今已被广泛展出。除了在各大国际艺术机构和电影节中作为影像展出外，他的作品也同样作为装置艺术在各大美术馆和其他公共空间展出。尤其是在某些地方作为影像装置展出时，作品仿佛被赋予了全新的生命，在不同的空间中，通过图像和声音进一步加强了作品的表现力。未来的40天，民生现代美术馆举办的《旅行/相遇》，是这位录像艺术大师在中国大陆的艺术空间的首次个展，呈现艺术家上世纪80年代至今的13件重要作品。同样，这些作品是艺术家到全球各地旅行的结果——从法国到亚洲，从南极到中东……凯恩足迹所及之处都为大家所熟知，然而，正如侯瀚如所说“他却用一种极具条理的方式展现了它们最令人疏远的一面，让我变成自己‘地盘’上的陌生人”。

此次展览中，中国观众也能找到地理上的共鸣——《旅行/相遇》收入了2部反映凯恩在中国旅行的录像——1989年的《香江颂》， 1995年的《七境观》。“来到中国，凯恩立刻被这里各种元素的穿插转换吸引住了，一方面街道上来来往往的喧闹声，京剧唱腔，心跳声甚至是寂静，构成了凯恩眼中具象音乐最好的素材，另一方面，城市的影像，自然和穿梭的人流也深深的迷住了他”（侯瀚如）。在这些作品中，中国的观众们将被这个漂浮的世界所包围，穿梭在真实与科幻之中，在熟悉与陌生中，体验一次别样的旅行。

From 19th December, 2011 to 29th January, 2012, Minsheng Art Museum will host Voyager / Rencontrer, a solo exhibition of the famous French video artist Robert Cahen curated by Hou Hanru. Robert Cahen was born in 1945. After graduating from the Conservatoire National Supérieru de Musique de Paris, where he studied under Pierre Schaeffer, Cahen became an active member and composer of the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in 1971. Whilst working as a composer, Robert Cahen was drawn towards visual images and video, to which he applied the experimental techniques and language of the school of concrete music. Starting his adventure in the 1970s when video was still a rare and highly experimental medium for art, Robert Cahen is no doubt one of the pioneers in this trend. And he has been persisting on such an endeavour and produced not only a great number of travel-log like video works but also a consistency of such an engagement between the self and the other. Through the encounters with the other – both geographic and humanistic, he has found a new base for his artistic work, and, more importantly, the reconciliation and reformation of the self through such an interactive communion with the other through the particular mediation of the video. Robert Cahen is considered to be one of the most important figures in the field of video. His work is distinctive for its use of slow motion and the way it explores sounds in relation to images to create his poetic universe.

Robert Cahen’s works have been widely exhibited. Besides showing as video projections in screening programs in various international art institutions and film festivals, they have also been exhibited as site-specific installations in museums and other public spaces. Installed in specific sites, these works have gained a new life through diverse strategies of spatialisation to expand the power of their expressions through the radiation exerted by the images and sounds. Bringing together thirteen works, solo exhibition of Robert Cahen Voyager / Rencontrer presents the artist’s video creation since 1980s. It is his first retrospective show in inland China. Most of the works are results of the artist’s travels to various parts of the world. These places might be familiar to the audience, however, just as Hou Hanru wrote in his analytical article Robert Cahen, the video between two sleeps… “The works systematically show the most estrange scenes of life in those locations, and turn me into a stranger in my ‘own’ lands…”

Two works involving Cahen’s travel in China could easily evoke geographical resonance among the Chinese audience- Hong Kong Song(1989) and Seven Fugitive Images (1995). Here, intrigued by the constant movement in-and-out of street noise, opera singing, heart-beating and silence… or the best materials for Musique concrete, and images of cities, nature and people, alternatively appearing and dissolving, one is brought into a veritable floating world navigating between reality and fiction, a quasi bodily experience of travel itself.