WATW is short for We Are The World. The song (written by Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson) was originally written for a 1985 campaign against famine in Ethiopia, and later hijacked for a multitude of purposes, commercial as well as non-commercial, addressing the issues of solidarity as well as mutual responsibility.
WATW looks at various aspects of our globalised, consumption driven world. It combines the works of Chinese and Dutch artists in a travelling exhibition and website (http://watw.nu) that can be defined as montages of artistic, journalistic, and scientific observations. The area covered by WATW is vast, ranging from economic growth to the environment, from energy production to capital flows, from migration to consumption. In our globalised world, all these phenomena are linked and pointing to the fact that we have a trans-national, shared responsibility to cope with them.
WATW is a the montage of both the artists’ works and the projected infographics that provide real-time running data such as how many days are left until the end of oil, or the daily CO2 emissions, amongst many others, aim to invite the viewer to consider our impact on world around us. After all, as the old Kenyan proverb goes, ‘the earth was not given to us by our parents. It was loaned to us by our children.’
Paradox (Edam, NL), The Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (Beijing, CN) and The Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangzhou, CN) present: WATW – 天下一家, Photography from China and The Netherlands. The travelling exhibition, curated by Bas Vroege, Stephanie Tung and Tsai Meng, features selected works by Chen Xiao, Jin Jiangbo, Mo Yi, Song Chao, Xiong Wenyun, Zhao Liang, Zeng Han, Jacqueline Hassink, Theo Niekus, WassinkLundgren, Henk Wildschut, Frank van der Salm, Gerald Van Der Kaap, and Ad van Denderen.
Paradox is supported by the Mondriaan Foundation.
WATW – 天下一家, Photography from China and The Netherlands was made possible thanks to the generous support by The Netherlands China Art Foundation, The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Art, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB), The Royal Dutch Embassy in Beijing, the Royal Dutch Consulate in Shanghai Guangzhou and TNT.
