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Koen Vanmechelen (born August 26, 1965 in Sint-Truiden) is a Belgian multi- and transdisciplinary artist who began his career in the early 1990s. He is one of the most prolific and prominent contemporary artists in Belgium. Central to his extensive and innovative oeuvre is the concept of bio-cultural diversity, which he investigates through the ''Gallus gallus domesticus'' or chicken and its ancestral species, the red junglefowl or ''Gallus gallus''. Vanmechelen gained worldwide acclaim with his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP), an international undertaking of crossbreeding national chicken species, in search of a hybrid or cosmopolitan chicken. This super bastard would eventually carry the genes of all breeds of chicken on this planet. His 17th generation of hybrid chickens, the Mechelse Styrian, was born in April 2013 in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana. Vanmechelen has several projects parallel to the CCP: The CosmoGolem, The Walking Egg, and The Cosmopolitan Chicken Research Project (CC®P), all of which he manages from his Open University of Diversity, located in the old Gelatin Factory near Hasselt Harbour. The artist's work is an investigation of and an ode to the beautiful diversity and hybridity of life: Biocultural diversity and the consequent interaction between art and science form the core theme of his oeuvre. Vanmechelen often collaborates with scientists and experts from different disciplines, such as Jean-Jacques Cassiman, Rik Pinxten and Marleen Temmerman. He uses innovative technologies such as 3D-scanning, morphometrics, 3D-printing and interactive 3D visualisation. His works are inherently cross-medial and interdisciplinary. Vanmechelen creates, amongst others, expressive paintings and drawings, photography, video, installation art and wooden sculptures. The common visual theme throughout these various methods of expression are the chicken and the egg. These have, over the years, become important symbols to Vanmechelen, allowing the artist to interconnect scientific, philosophical, and ethical issues, and to frame the subject of debates and lectures.〔(Biografie van Koen Vanmechelen op BAM )〕 A new species of flat worm discovered in Venice (It) during the artist solo exhibition Nato a Venezia at the biennial of Venice was in 2013 named Trigonostomum Vanmecheleni in honour of the artist.〔http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/11250003.2012.754058#.UZSS_oLrZEI〕 ==Biography== Koen Vanmechelen, who lives in the Belgian town of Meeuwen-Gruitrode, is professionally based in Hasselt. He is a self-taught artist who studied hotel management in Antwerp and worked several years as a cook and pastry chef in Belgian top restaurants. His father is an artist, his mother a fashion designer. Vanmechelen’s interest in chickens and birds started at an early age, due to the trips he made with his uncle Louis Gonnissen, a famous Belgian ornithologist and television personality. At the age of five, he says in an interview, he already had a breeding coop in his bedroom.〔(De Standaard Online, 12 november 2005. ''Lees de kip en je weet waar we als mens naartoe gaan'' )〕 Conservators Jan Kenis, Jan Hoet and illustrator Gregie de Maeyer〔http://www.villakakelbont.be/html/auteurs/auteursContent.asp?show=id&id=934〕 launched him into the world of art in the early nineties. His first works consisted mainly of wooden constructions, assemblages and cages for birds. This aligns him with the Belgian tradition of assemblage artists. In the nineties, Vanmechelen quickly evolved into a conceptual artist and later on a multi-, trans- en interdisciplinary artist. During the late nineties, Vanmechelen launched his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP), which occupies a unique place in art history. It gave him fast national and international recognition in and outside the art world. Despite his aviophobia, the artist has adopted a nomadic lifestyle. “''Movement creates opportunities for transformation and mutation''”, says the artist, who is always on the move and spends much of his time abroad. He is constantly trying to connect his projects to different realities planet wide, finding balances between art, science and the world. Vanmechelen: “''I am trying to connect people and ideas, finding the right intersection of space and time to hatch the egg in the infinite collision of beautiful ‘accidents’ created by perpetual movement.''” Hence Vanmechelen’s fascination for biological and cultural diversity, or biocultural diversity. Among the streams that facilitate the ebb and flow of endless motion, migrating people and other animals, he looks for the genes and memes that have always been gathering. Some of these he takes home. In his home base in Meeuwen-Gruitrode, he has collected scores of bird and other animals - and keeps more than one thousand chickens: Gallus Gallus, the 17 breeds of Mechelse hybrids and other species. In total, Vanmechelen has 3,000 chickens on eight farms on three continents. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Koen Vanmechelen」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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