Belgium

HEIDI VOET (b. 1972, Belgium) one of the most esteemed feminine voices of contemporary art, splits her time between Brussels and Shanghai. Her artistic enterprise can be characterized by a wondrous engagement of everyday life and materials. She often infuses her quirky assemblages and images with a luminous sense of feminism and pop cultural motifs. Her work is currently showing at the Power Station of Art, Shanghai and is on permanent display at K11, Shanghai. She has also shown at MoCA, Shanghai, Kasteel Beauvoorde, Belgium, The Beauty Room, Paris, and IT Park Taipei. 

“The plastic bag is a vessel for an ever-changing content” 

It is predicted that it will take approximately 500 years for a disposable plastic bag to fully decompose. This demarcation of time is a catalyst for Belgian artist. Through flags, figurative sculptures, and masks the plastic bag becomes both the medium and means to explore the past 500 momentous years of human civilization. 

Painstakingly weaved out of colored plastic bags and hanging in the main exhibition space are flags of countries that no longer exist. Within the life span of a disposable plastic bag many nation states have formed and collapsed, changed and reconfigured. In a world where the history of war and strife is predicated on nationalism. Voet’s colorful flags examine the transient and impermanent nature of this nation- al identity. 

Voet repeatedly positions the plastic bag as a shifting actor in her work. The whimsical quality of the plastic bags is seen throughout Heidi Voet’s earlier work. Voet imbues common, overlooked objects value and meaning - such as cheap digital watches transformed into a carpet, or Chinese magazines folded into floral arrangements- through the simple act of making and playing. 

Heidi Voet splits her time between Shanghai and Belgium. Her work is closely linked to the construction of her identity as someone living between two continents and cultures. While her signature language reads far beyond stereotypes associated with the female artist in history, her strength lies in how she takes common objects out of their original context and imbue them a broader meaning and a new identity.