Four months ago Cathelijn arrived in Xiamen for a 4 month working period at the CEAC. She came to China to explore her ideas in an environment where the subject of her art is an actual topic. In China things change and develop with an amazing speed. This makes it a perfect place to see how technological development is reflected in daily life. For her research she visited big cities such as Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

In her solo-exhibition ‘Delusory hopes’ at the CEAC she will show drawings from several new series made during her stay in Xiamen.

The series ‘Digitalized’ is inspired by modern, busy streets were video screens, billboards and neon signs scream for attention. The moving images and the giants on the advertisements seem to overrule the people in the streets. Even the architecture is colored by the light from neon signs. In these drawings Cathelijn wants to show how the digital world that we humans create slowly seems to take over. Different layers of reality seem to be present.

In the series ‘Delusory hopes’ she also works with the idea of different layers of reality. She drew reflections of skyscrapers in the windows of other high buildings. In these reflections the buildings appear in fragmented and more organic forms. They look like beautiful castles up in the sky and could resemble something we long for, but are in fact only mirages that cannot be touched.

Next to making her own drawings she challenged a group of 7 students from the TKK Art College to think along on her theme about the world slowly getting digitalized. Together with these young artists she recreated a busy street from Hong Kong in a wallpaper sized drawing.

Gallery