"Art & Sport"-"Made in China" (2008) Painting by Corine Sylvia Congiu

This series was created in 2008 for paintings, on the occasion of the Olympic Games which took place from August 8 to 24 in China in Beijing and six other Chinese cities.
As for the series of photographs, it was born in 2009, and concerns the 2009 World Games which took place in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, from July 16 to 26, 2009. This 8th edition brought together sports not included in the Olympic Games program. . Nearly 4,500 athletes from 99 nations took part in this event. Among them was not TAI CHI CHUAN to which I pay this tribute. This is no longer practiced only by imitators who specialize in a combat “sport”, but is becoming more and more popular as a physical and mental prophylaxis, in a world where the health of Nature and men becomes objective. priority.

Two paintings measuring 200 cm by 200 cm, transparent canvas on a frame made without the central vertical and horizontal elements, so that the painting transparently resembles a screen, and acts as one during a filmed performance from which the photographs were born: the Chinese shadows of a moving body behind the painting draw figures of tai chi chuan, sword, fan, saber.

1) “Games and toys Made in China” paintings
The table is painted with the 5 colors of the 5 Olympic rings, red, green, black, yellow, blue.
Painted on the ground all around without taking into account the traditional verticality, its meaning is readable from all sides, the figures are juxtaposed and superimposed on the edge of the painting, as if the table was placed on the table for lunch. Thus it also finds its coherence by being placed horizontally on the ground.

The objects I used as stencils are almost all objects made in China and purchased in France. A visible emphasis on toxic objects which caused a scandal in the press: plastic cutlery with urea peroxide (potentially toxic when heated) and Barbie dolls with lead paint, its accessories with deadly magnets.

From the Olympic Games to children's toys, these high places for the transmission of values, symbolic and cultural representations are exchanged through the toy trade and the globalization of visual media.

The objects are arranged like hieroglyphic writings whose paradigms are identifiable but the syntax remains mysterious to us. The only reading clue is the arrangement of the table placed all around the square as a sign of conviviality and direct exchanges. Furthermore, the connections between places and things also seem to be made laterally by these USB wire imprints which improvise playful connections.

Our little toy soldiers play war with Batman, and similar lineups of all kinds of fowl, all arranged in collections like tools hanging from the wall of a workbench, evoke their instrumentalization in the great international game of commerce and devouring mutual and random of powers.
Do we sit down at the table not only for lunch, but also for games called "board", in which simple and identical figures move on their base in arrayed armies and advance, identifiable to the opposing parties only by their color in effigy (similar to the pawns of most board games – Monopoly, Little Horses, Goose Game, etc. – where they move on a quadrangular plane support.)

B) The photographs.
Behind the table erected vertically and serving as a screen, in shadow play, in silent performance, a series of actions is projected onto the canvas and filmed, and the photographs are screen copies.
These actions come from the postures of Tai Chi Chuan, as a metonymy of Martial Arts which
come from China.
Tai Chi Chuan is at the same time a game in all its meanings of catharsis, of exchanges between partners from the same world, and of symbolization of combat between adversaries which are the characteristics of all Western team sports; but it is originally like any martial art, much more than a game, that is to say a practice linking all the profane and sacred human functions in an art of living which fascinated the artists of the 20th century; to the point that Asian practices have become a recurring reference and model, in the global craze for primitive ritual practices which oppose Western schizophrenic fragmentation.

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