Joey Syta
06/09 - 27/09/14
Opening Saturday 06/09 from 17-19:30

The Chinese European Art Center (CEAC) is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Joey Syta titled The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den. This is the American artist’s first solo exhibition in China.

Syta approaches artwork with a sensitivity akin to a linguist. The intricacies and limits of language serve as inspiration to explore the capability of objects acting as communication devices. Through minimal, calculated gestures he alters the structure of familiar forms to unlock or accentuate their latent messages. Logistical constraints, whether material or intangible, often direct those processes. Past works have taken the shape of self-forming molten plastic as well as experimental homemade bismuth crystals. Other more explicitly language-based pieces exposed morphology and syntax as modulated elements. In the works on display at CEAC Syta favors bare methodologies of displacement to strip objects of their functionality yet maintain readability. This propensity towards controlled, non-authoritative simplicity honors his viewpoint that materials and objects come loaded with innumerable subjective characteristics. Analogous to poetry, the most subtle metamorphosis of vernacular, be it visual or experiential, can yield unique formidable presence.

The exhibition title is an homage to the late Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao, whose poem of the same name is a famous example of constrained writing. The modern yet classically written 92-character verse utilizes just one repeated syllable that phonetically varies ever so slightly between the four separate Mandarin Chinese tones. When this cacophonous tongue-twister is only read rather than spoken it relays a grammatically-sound, coherent story. The works in Syta’s exhibition aim to reach a similar paradox of expression: to exist within distinct modalities simultaneously. 

Joey Syta was born in Rochester, NY and lives in New York City. He earned his BA in film and video at The Pennsylvania State University and was granted admission into the Dieter Roth Academy by Pétur Kristjánsson during his residency with the Skaftfell Center for Visual Art in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is the culmination of Syta’s summer residency with the Chinese European Art Center in Xiamen, China.



The Chinese European Art Center 
3rd Floor, Siming South Road 400, Xiamen, Fujian, China
Open Tuesday to Saturday 12:30 – 17:30
T/F: + 86(0)592 2180850 Mobile: + 86(0)13806021762 

info@ceac99.com // info@ceac99.org // www.ceac99.org