COBALT HOUR: SCREENING FOR FRIEZE LA 2020
2020 February 14-16
Frieze Los Angeles
The Frieze Film & Talks program focuses on themes of visibility and invisibility – and LA as the perfect meeting place for cultures.
The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes the dawn depicted in the Renaissance painting Visitation by Pontormo, as “laid out like an empty square” or “receding visita”. This patch of light works as an allegory of the screen, an in-between par excellence – a void that irrupts the geometric linearity of a physical space while alienating the audience with its multiple temporalities. “Cobalt Hour” is a screening program about the “in-between” – not a rigid, narrow gap between two opposites, but a deteritorized fluidity, like the blue hour that exists between day and night.
Cyberpunk classic Akira (1988) was set in the post-WWIII Neo-Tokyo in 2019 – already the “past” for us, but it shows a possible future, a speculative reality that is not here yet. The borders of the past-present-future triptych are dissolved by the dystopian distance of non-arrival. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour (2015) is a visual architecture of a dream-state between spectrality, irrationality and romance. Cao Fei’s Haze and Fog pays tribute to zombie films, rethinking the modern “living-death” situation in Capitalist society characterized by over-work and over-production. Cao’s Asia One (2018) takes place at China’s largest logistics centre, where work is mostly done by robots. Through a love story between humans and machines, Cao questions our emotional limits. The robotic movements in the film resonate with the virtual fleshiness in Jon Rafman’s works, Disasters under the Sun (2019) and Poor Magic (2017).
Wong Ping’s Stop Peeping (2014) and The Other Side (2015) move between physical intimacy and social issues, as well as ontological topics such as life and death, in the guise of absurd cartoon characters made of geometrical shapes. Cyril Duval’s Cold Single (2019) draws from visual research on the Taoist semi-deity Han Dan, where redemption is supposed to be achieved through extreme physical experiences, especially pain. In his black-and-white movies punctuated by historical symbols (from ancient Chinese armor to Mao suits to 1930s’ Expressionist makeup), Yang Fudong finds a way to widen the spectrum of visual textures in shades of grey. BCE (2019) by Sophia Al Maria and Victoria Sin unfurls a contemporary myth by placing the dark universe in parallel with an infinitude of identities. Adrián Villar Rojas’ The Most Beautiful Moment of War (2017) frames sculptural moments from everyday life in Yangji-Ri, a village on the Civilian Control Line along the Korean DMZ. A spam email inspires Always I Trust (2014) by Cheng Ran, a work that oscillates between language and glossolalia. Tao Hui’s The Dusk of Tehran (2014) inserts late diva Anita Mui’s conversation with her fans at her last concert into a totally different geopolitical context. An Iranian actress talks to a driver in the enclosed space of a taxi, where the dusk of a performer marks the dawn of another.
related files:
press release
GLOW LIKE THAT
2019 March 27 - May 13
21/F K11 Atelier, Victoria Dockside, Hong Kong
Light is not only a natural phenomenon but also a product of technological advance. It is an empty signifier awaiting a narrative; it is undefined, fuzzy at the edges. Fluid and amorphous, light therefore has endless possibilities. When interacting with light, certain kinds of surfaces take on an iridescent sheen or reflect their surroundings, producing a shimmering or radiant ‘glow’. Presented by K11 Art Foundation as the first contemporary art exhibition held in Victoria Dockside, Glow Like That features 16 artists and collectives from countries including China, the US, and Japan, showcasing an impressive array of paintings, video works, sculptures, and installations. While some of the works demonstrate the various forms of ‘glow’ characteristic of the light-saturated era, others reveal their functions and symbolic significances in contemporary society.
Brimming with beautiful imagery associated with light, Glow Like That also echoes the spectacular harbour view that the exhibition space overlooks. From the vantage point of Glow Like That in Victoria Dockside, visitors will feast on the opulence of the gleam and glimmer of the city. The glistering waves of the harbour and the exhibition shine a light on each other, bolstering one another’s splendour and sparking ruminations on the relationship between light and everyday life.
related files:
press release
ZHANG ENLI | OSCAR MURILLO
2019 March 22 - May 31
chi K11 art museum, Shanghai
On view at chi K11 art museum, the dual solo exhibition of artists Zhang Enli and Oscar Murillo brings together their most recent works, attempting to establish a dialogue between the two artists and explore the conceptual affinity between their bodies of work.
A celebrated Chinese painter today, Zhang Enli is best known for his minute portrayal of the lives of ordinary people and the intrigue of everyday objects or happenings. In recent years, Zhang has devoted himself to exploring alternative ways of experiencing painting by drawing inspiration from architectural surfaces, spaces, and environments. This new direction in his practice is reflected in this exhibition through a succinct presentation of three of his recent works. The highlight of this exhibition is Studio, a painting installation that the artist created during his residency at The Royal Academy of Arts last year as part of the artist-in-residence programme co-presented by K11 Art Foundation and the Academy. This installation is a room-sized wooden structure with Zhang’s paintings inside. Visitors are invited to enter it—and hence they can travel between the past and the present—to trace the marks that Zhang left in it as he painted; at the same time, new marks are created by the visitors as they walk in it. Zhang’s second work, Untitled (Tiles), is a series of red-and-white checkered paintings, installed on the ground to resemble the tiles commonly used for flooring in the 1920s and 1930s Shanghai. Also on display is Wall 1-4. This work sees the artist apply gouache directly to the walls of the museum to create an immersive environment with a nostalgic touch. Crucially, with their sheer volume and lack of a traditional canvas frame, the three works effectively transform spectatorship, leading the audience to explore the layers of ‘marks’ in different ‘painterly spaces’.
Similar to Zhang’s works, Murillo’s are concerned with physical environments—in his case, these environments are places like planes and hotels because he is constantly in transit. For example, his flight series, which is suspended from the ceiling in the museum, was made when he was travelling on the plane. These drawings by Murillo echo Zhang’s work with their obsessive mark-making. The Institute of Reconciliation, also on view at the exhibition, is an installation comprised of canvases that are hung like laundry on clotheslines. The canvases are brushed with thick black oil paint before being cut and then sown into new compositions. From stitches canvases to drawings on paper to oil paintings, Murillo’s works allude to the disorienting movements shaping our contemporary conditions: capital flows, flight paths, and migratory routes. Murillo is interested in opening processes of globalisation to an artistic inquiry, and thereby articulating a nuanced understanding of the specific conditions therein. In this light, his frequent references to his home country Colombia through such materials as Mateos (in collective conscience) and corn (in Human Resources and The Institute of Reconciliation) should be seen not as a call for localism, but a metaphor for the displacement and flow of objects and ideas amidst global capitalism.
Katharina Grosse: Mumbling Mud
2018 November 10 - 2019 February 24
chi K11 art museum, Shanghai
K11 Art Foundation (KAF) and chi K11 art museum are delighted to present Mumbling Mud, internationally acclaimed German artist Katharina Grosse’s first solo exhibition in China. Using the spray gun as her primary painting tool, Grosse has applied variegated swaths of paint across the walls of exhibition spaces, her own bed, an entire house and its surroundings, and arranged objects such as piles of soil and tree trunks to create large-scale site-related paintings. She has thus been able to liberate the application of paint from its immediate connection to both the painter’s body and any predetermined surfaces of the Western painting tradition. With colour, she traverses the established borders between objects and architectural settings, and ultimately offers models for imagining reality in ways previously unconceived by semiotic conventions, hierarchies and social rules.
Divided into five zones at chi K11 art museum, Mumbling Mud leads visitors through an immersive, labyrinthine passage. Upon entering the first zone, they immediately find themselves surrounded by a constructed landscape made up of building materials and piles of soil, all covered with colourful paint. Spectators are invited to meander through the five zones by following the painterly traces that Grosse left when she worked her way through the museum. The amorphous, multicoloured forms and shapes sprayed across the varying structures and draping cloths installed at the museum may also create an experience of wandering on the peripheries of the familiar, inviting rumination into the quintessential strangeness of a metropolis that is ever-changing and impossible to be delineated in simple contours.
related files:
press release
CAPRICIOUS STRUCTURE: BRENDAN FOWLER, ANDREW LUK, SHEN XIN, WU JUEHUI
2018 August 11 - September 14
chi K11 art museum, Shanghai
The universe is an endless hoax, in which everything is perpetually mutating. In the creation of art, medium can be regarded as a tool, which allows for the unconventional transmutation of materials that lies beyond the naked eye. It is imbued with potentials to probe behind appearance and shatter pre-established frameworks.
The exhibition Capricious Structure features independent projects by four young artists from both China and abroad, including Andrew Luk (Hong Kong), Brendan Fowler (Los Angeles), Wu Juehui (Hangzhou) and Shen Xin (London/ Amsterdam). The works presented reflect on the mutual intervention between the artificial and the natural, the interstices of interior and exterior, and the fictionality of video, all contesting the capricious nature of medium.
Artists from various backgrounds use their idiosyncratic perspectives and visual lexicons to reconstruct narrative space, exploring ideas around urban conditions, industrialization, technology, economy, and race. Emerging from and yet operating outside of the mainstream culture, artists have orchestrated a series of heterogeneous temporalities. They can be seen as a manifestation of the dynamic worlds envisaged by the artists as well as a mind game with the viewer.
The exhibition is curated with the assistance of Jeannie Huang and Sun Qian.
related files:
exhibition brochure
KEIICHI TANAAMI: SOLO EXHIBITION
2018 June 16 - September 2
chi K11 art space, Guangzhou
The artistic practice of Keiichi Tanaami is like a mirrored pattern seen through a kaleidoscope - elements of different cultural contexts are reflected in his works. Forming a mosaic that is ever-changing. Tanaami’s silkscreen print series No More War (1967) references the spiral patterns typical of psychedelic art, on art movement that emerged between the 1960s and 1970s in the West. Alongside the prints are large, compositionally symmetrical drawings and multi-limb, humanoid sculptures by the artist, and together they create a spectacular panorama of mirroring effects. Those who are familiar with Tanaami’s works know that there are a lot of recurring images in his works. Some of them (such as the ring) are inspired by his personal interests (such as boxing), others from his dreams and memories, especially traumatic experiences. The goldfish that frequently appear in his two-dimensional works comes from the fish scales that he saw glittering in the flames of war. The twisting pine trees in his sculptures and paintings originate from the drug-induced hallucinations that he had during hospitalisation. For Tanaami, the visualisation of these ‘scars’ is not so much a form of self-healing as a process of reconstruction of personal memories. Ancient Greek philosopher Plato likens memory to inscription on wax tablets. Tanaami’s stylistic choice for piecing together his memory fragments is different from this kind of inscription, which stresses faithful representation, or any kind of linear narrative that serves as an archival record. He extracts his memories like an alchemist, transforming them into a visual language that reminds of us of horror vacui. In his diptych World and Hermit (2017), the colourful, swirling tails of the roosters are like whirlpools, and the space beneath them is filled with delicately contoured waves. The picture plane is also full of eccentric characters resembling widely known cartoon characters, such as Astro Boy and Betty Doll; spiders that are reminiscent of the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein der Jüngere’s famous painting Ambassador take up same space as well. The eclectic range of elements, crammed onto the same plane, converge and collide. All linear memories seem to have become small iron balls in a pachinko machine, bouncing between different scenes.
While Tanaami has mentioned that his practice is heavily influenced by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, his research on popular culture and mass culture began earlier than his ‘encounters’ with these pop art masters from the West. References to cultural products for the masses are discernible in his works - examples include tatebanko, a popular craft of the Edo era, kamishibai, a form of street theatre of the Showa era, and Japanese traditional trademarks. Tanaami is often referred to as a ‘pop artist’, but his works are never just about the appropriation of popular cultural symbols; rather, they manifest the interweaving of the life of an individual and the collective aesthetic consciousness of society at large.
CHEN WEI: WHERE ARE YOU GOING TONIGHT
2018 March 31 - May 20
chi K11 art space, Guangzhou
Contemporary artist Chen Wei shows his great interest in the intervention of lights in urban life. Exhibition WHERE ARE YOU GOING TONIGHT utilizes 5 sets of photography and installation which simulate the dance floor spotlights, LED signs, neon lights and other artificial light sources appearing in the city nightlife to build a space for the young to release their passion and vitality under lights and shadows. The exhibition shows the fact that in the rapid development of the city, urban culture, consumer culture and individual survival status have enhanced each other; it also reveals the desire for self-cognition of young individuals under the erosion of consumer culture.
Lights and shadows in space, human and cities are the main factors of Chen Wei's creative works. By constructing light sources, the artist has transformed the abstract concept of "public sphere" (in German, Offentlichkeit, and Jurgen Habermas, 1962/1989) into a perceivable entitative space. Just as the citizens in ancient Greek poleis practicing public life in the agora, audiences in the exhibition space with mottled lights and shadows can share an improvising and poetic sense of closeness. At the moment when globalization is causing emptiness and alienation among individuals, the artist starts from the aesthetic experiences of the nightlife and explores the public nature of intimate spaces.
Since the first establishment of a public space lighting system in Paris, big cities, one after another, have lit artificial light sources under the twilight. The natural environment and human physiological circulation have been broken day by day and the cultural vitality of a city can be caught a glimpse of by how rich its nightlife is. The theme of the exhibition WHERE ARE YOU GOING TONIGHT originates from a daily greeting of the young people in Guangzhou. The normalization of nightlife vividly reflects the city's features of high density of young population, convenient transportation network, diversified community life, etc. As a new cultural landmark of the Pearl River Delta, chi K11 art space holds its opening exhibition in a way that is not limited to the imagination of cultural concepts, but returns to the space containing everyday memories and gathers perceptive experiences of the city community in the practice of retracing the local nature of geography.
EMERALD CITY
2018 March 28 - April 22
K11 Art Foundation Popup Space, Sheung Wan
2018 March 28 - May 31
chi art space, Central
Since the birth of Euclid’s Elements, geometry has evolved into new branches of knowledge beyond mathematics and science to explain our spatial relations with the universe. In the 1980s and 1990s, a new wave of expansion of communication technologies and trade flows accelerated international integration, ushering in the introduction of the concept of ‘globalisation’ to cultural, economic, and academic discourses. Artists, at the same time, started to invent their own visual lexicons for the re-thinking and re-conceptualisation of the interconnectedness of places; geometric elements were used in art as metaphors for social space, as exemplified by Neo-Geo Conceptualism in America, Rational Painting in China, and the art styles preceding the Superflat movement in Japan.
Emerald City examines the idea of translation within geometry and compares two important concepts in cultural translation—‘transparency’ and ‘opacity’—by bringing together around 40 works created by artists from China and other parts of the world, including paintings, videos, sculptures, and site-specific installations. Beginning with basic geometry concepts that represent relations, such as dots and lines, ratio, and distance, the exhibition looks into the structures and meanings of the cosmos and ungroundedness, lands and seas, architectural environments, the human body, and other physical and abstract spaces to shed light on the possibility of coexistence between different cultures amid globalisation. The world as we perceive it is hardly symmetrical to the world as it actually is. In the literary classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, everyone in Emerald City is required to wear a pair of green-tinted spectacles intended for filtering the radiance of the utopian. Our pursuit of an idealistic universality through geometry nonetheless prevents us from seeing the things we want to know. Apart from showing how geometry shapes our imagination of spatiality, the exhibition also encourages viewers to look at the world outside the confines of geometric thinking.
The exhibition is curated with the assistance of Zoie Yung.
related files:
press release
BETTY WOODMAN: HOUSE AND UNIVERSE / ZHAO YANG: ALAYA
2018 March 19 - June 17
chi K11 art museum, Shanghai
chi K11 art museum Shanghai is proud to present renowned American artist Betty Woodman’s first exhibition held in Asia from March 19 to June 17, 2018. This exhibition will put on display a variety of Woodman’s mixed media works from the past decade, including sculptures, triptych vases, large installations and canvas pieces in addition to some of her earlier works. Clay is a traditional artistic medium that occupies an important position in art histories around the world, and the material serves as a key element in Woodman’s works. This exhibition is intended to decompose the development of the artist’s creations and display her clay-focused experimentations in contemporary art.
The title of this exhibition derives from a chapter entitled “House and Universe” in the work The Poetics of Space by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. This piece of literature quotes the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke and others to describe the dialectical relationship between the “house” and its surrounding environment as well as human consciousness and the physical body. In philosophical thinking, the idea of enclosement that the house represents serves as a metaphor for the workings of the universe. The reason that the exhibition’s Chinese title translates to 宇宙 (Pinyin:yuzhou, or “universe”) is because we can find similar thought patterns within Chinese culture, such as how Huai Nan Tzu of the Western Han Dynasty expounded, “The period from furthest antiquity to present day is called yu [or ‘extension-in-time’]; the four compass directions along with up and down are called zhou [or ‘extension-in-space’].” Eastern Han scholar Gao You once commented that yu refers to the eave and zhou refers to the beam, so yuzhou in and of itself suggests the meaning of “house”. The practice of making pottery approaches clay as a hollow enclosement that creates containment and purpose (from which the definition of pottery derives), and this concept has interlinking characteristics with architecture and the universe. In the context of Betty Woodman, modern pottery is not only as apparatus to be used in the home, but it further creates a link between the arts and cultural history. Woodman’s works leverage the spirit of the regional cultures of multiple historical eras through the use of various media. They embody the traditions of ancient Crete, Egypt, Greece, and Etruria as well as the styles of Baroque architecture and artist Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. They demonstrate inspiration drawn from Chinese Tang tri-colour glazed ceramics and kimonos of Japan, and they fuse the planarity of the second dimension with the tangibility of the third to create skillful and technical clay art that has become its own unique, contemporary art language.
As a female artist born in the 1930’s, Betty Woodman’s artistic earthenware creations are a vast departure from the daily functionality typically associated with pottery. She managed to break away from the inevitable connection between household containers and domestic life, in turn redefining people’s impressions of women and their traditional roles within the home. Ceramics is one of the earliest means of artistic expression, and it has become a pioneering material when put into the hands of artists, leading to the conception of all sorts of new and creative possibilities for painting and sculpting alike. Glazed earthenware and two/three-dimensional structures can also be found extending out from the wall or resting upon vibrantly patterned canvas carpets, and Woodman’s art not only serves as a sensual feast for home décor, but also a deeper exploration of space and objects.
The exhibition is curated with the assistance of Jeannie Huang and Sun Qian.
related files:
exhibition brochure
CUI JIE AND LEE KIT: THE ENORMOUS SPACE
2018 January 20 - April 8
OCAT Shenzhen, Shenzhen
Enormous Space: Double Solo Exhibition of Lee Kit and Cui Jie shows brand new works by the two artists.
"The Enormous Space" is a short story by J.G. Ballard, the famed British writer born in Shanghai’s former concessions, that maps how space is produced in art, uniting the inner imaginary world and external reality. Weary and fearful of suburban life, the protagonist of the story decides to never set foot outdoors again, using the gate of his house as a weapon against the outside world. Ultimately, his almost primitive lifestyle reveals how the physical space outside compressed life itself, and paradoxically expanded his inner world.
Cui Jie references architect Le Corbusier’s unrealized design Maison Feuter (1950). All of Cui Jie’s drawings, sketches, and sculptures in this show come out of her research into Chinese architecture and public sculpture. Her paintings reflect the modes of expression mediated by urbanization and personal aesthetics for the past 30 years or the transitional period from planned economy to market economy. Using cumulative techniques, the paintings build up architectural details, breaking away from the linear logic of perspectival space. Modeled on Le Corbusier’s furniture, new works connect the body and urban space. This work references one of the architect’s unrealized domestic buildings intended to fulfill the basic human living requirement—intended as a way to liberate humankind, it also suffocated the progress and development of social aesthetics.
Lee Kit’s I didn’t know that I was dead is composed of ambiguous poetic texts, dislocated walls, and diluted and overlaid colors, assembling and blending mundane fragments. Using space as a canvas, the work combines projection and sound to juxtapose multiple highly personal narratives. Through psychological transference, it constructs a new depth-of-field inside the exhibition, molding the inner space of the work inner space. This irregular space creates a familiar environment through obstruction and perspectival juxtaposition, responding to the object under the framework of the modern city while attempting to awaken the obscure consciousness of the audience.
SIMON DENNY: REAL MASS ENTREPRENEURSHIP
2017 March 18 - June 15
OCAT Shenzhen, Shenzhen
Based on the artist’s research trips to the Window of the World and Huaqiangbei electronic market during his stay in Shenzhen, Simon Denny: Real Mass Entrepreneurship is a timely response to the call for “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” in contemporary China. From spectacular sculptures rented from theme park workshops, display counters selling electronic hardware and advanced tech products, to simulated Huaqiangbei viewing docks, these objects, like monuments, stand for the constant self-adjustments and continually evolving network of the economic special zone in the age of globalization, reflecting the structuralizing and regenerative effects of tech culture on the urban landscape.
Video edit produced in collaboration with Mario Pfeifer.
Real Mass Entrepreneurship trailer
OCAT PERFORMS: LI RAN/ TAO HUI
2016 December 3 - 23
OCAT Shenzhen, Shenzhen
First initiated in 2008 by OCAT Shenzhen, OCAT Performs is a project held annually in the winter. The theme this year is Act, with the artists Li Ran and Tao Hui invited to take part. With “sound” and “language” serving as forms of performance, and with roles given out and the on-site space molded, the works enable audience interaction and offer up reflections on the concepts of “live presence” (xianchang) and “performance” (biaoyan).
Li Ran’s video installation The Extras (2016) sets its “stage” in a huge limestone cave called Shihuadong (“Stone Flower Cave”), located in the Fangshan area to the south of Beijing. This has been the backdrop used for the past dozen years or so on Beijing Television’s (BTV) weather forecast. The varying geological folds and the variegated colors artificially projected thereon, along with the post-production sound effects from popular television as well as texts with emotional prompts—all these are brought to the foreground of the stage, and situated in a pre-set, temporary site in waiting. The microphone hanging straight down from the ceiling parallels the stalactite naturally formed from erosion in the caves; in the exhibition space, this is where the sound enters, awaiting the “actors” to add in description (in words) in order to complete the performance. Tao Hui’s Emotional Cough (2016) is based on the routine characterizations of television dramas and literary works, predetermining different degrees of “coughing” for the actors. Tao portrays the roles through the three different kinds of sounds: the drumming of musical performances, the sounds of coughing, and the discourse in scholarly discussions, dividing the space into three equal and connected parts.
The theme of the performances, Act, points to both the form of performances as well as the expression of the identities of the “actors.” Looking back on the fictional identities fashioned in Li Ran’s previous works—from the ex-Soviet soldier in the video work From Truck Driver to Political Commissar (2012), to the blurred imagery of youth and the middle-aged in the performance work Mont Sainte-Victoire (2012), and to the host of a popular social and natural science program in the video work Beyond Geography (2012)—one sees how Li Ran has always been the enactor of roles. In a new installation that the artist created for OCAT Performs, The Extras, Li Ran switches the role of the “actor” and places that on the audience. Guided by the prompts in the text, the audience speak and play the role of “extras” in the work, discerning the fictional and the real in the “performance," as well as that fine line between the roles of the actor/spectator.
Tao Hui’s artistic practice has always revolved around the methodologies of “human” culture and social identities. His early video work Miss Green, Remember to Forget (2008) sets into everyday life the folk legendary characters, “Miss Green” (Xiao Qing) and “Madame White Snake” (Bai Suzhen), from the TV series The New Legend of the White Snake, turning that encounter of reality and fiction into a site where identities collide. In Acting Tutorial (2014), a recent video installation work, Tao imagines and concocts identities for actors. This work records how several actors came together in a fabricated site of a performance school, where the actors imagined and expressed various extreme emotional states. Here, the reality of the bodily movements and of the emotions in all their televisual theatricality are hard to tell apart.
For OCAT Performs, Tao Hui has created Emotional Cough (2016), which extends his dialectical discussion of the inside/outside of the body and of emotions. The multitude of identities (drummer, cougher, researcher) in the actors are intermeshed; under the conditions of coughing, whether these be pathologically derived or emotionally contrived, the work explores the linkages between the human body and the most emotional of instances, rethinking one’s invention and understanding of self-identity in social situations.
JIANG ZHI: ALL
2016 November 19 - March 26 2017
OCAT Shenzhen, Shenzhen
Light is the cornerstone that upholds the fundamental structure of a holistic, visible world.
“Light”, together with the concept of “visibility”, runs through Jiang Zhi’s practice. On one hand, he often skillfully employs photography and video, mediums that are often called “light writing” in his work; on the other hand, he frequently appropriates the expressions of “light” to elucidate invisible matters such as time, violence, and affects in a realistic manner.
Encompassing works from different stages of the artist’s career—created in the diverse forms of painting, photography, video, sculpture, and installation—this exhibition probes the multifaceted significations of light to display, veil, desacralize, and sanctify. Through the discussion on how “totality” is constructed, the exhibition further sheds light on what “all” that means.
SUMMER TRIANGLE: JON RAFMAN, LANTIAN XIE, ADRIAN WONG
2016 July 31 - October 23
OCAT Shenzhen, Shenzhen
Shaped by historical and cultural contexts, the image of a city constantly changes through the reflections by the prism of mass media. Summer Triangle presents the artistic practice of Jon Rafman, Adrian Wong and Lantian Xie, takes constellations as a metaphor - with Hong Kong as a case study - exploring how popular media construct the image of a city.
Demarcated by humans’ consciousness and optical parallax, constellations from relationships in non-linear space and time, composing multitudes of Benjamin-ish “dialectical image”. Like star patterns, the image and identity of a city are at once the intermixture of history, politics, languages, and the crystallised essence of a mass culture. With the artworks of the three artists, the exhibition attempts to trace the facets of the image of a city in the era of information implosion.
DIGGING A HOLE IN CHINA
2016 March 20 - June 26
OCAT Shenzhen, Shenzhen
Digging a Hole in China is featuring a range of works produced in contemporary China that bear a connection to land; the exhibition attempts to expose and analyze the discrepancies between this genre of work and “conventional” land art understood in the Western-centric art historical context, thereby probing the potential of “land” - as a cultural and political concept - in artistic practice. In China, the concept of Land Art was imported from the West in the mid-1980s. While most of these works did not necessarily related to their Western counterparts, and there were vast differences between the two contexts, their concurrence nevertheless reveals intriguing correlations. Produced at different points in time from 1994 onward, the works in Digging a Hole in China delineate the hidden trajectory of land’s conceptual evolution. This strand of art does not attack established systems in a belligerent and explicit manner, but instead subtly exposes the epistemological framework of land in order to open up new sites beyond it.
“Land” in the Western context was once a nowhere that defied established systems. In the present age, when Google Earth can teleport us anywhere with a single click, geographical distance seems to no longer offer new sites for criticism. Land and capital becomes devotedly attached to consumer behavior; the sense of distance that “land” once possessed has slowly vanished, albeit with our further physical estrangement from the material, to a point at which there is nowhere to stand. In a post-manifesto era far away from the birth of Land Art, the exhibited works engage a material plane that people share, generating fissures that can release yet unknown properties of the land. Venturing into the obscure qualities of the land while bundled up with them; this is perhaps the so-called post human condition of our lived present.
related files:
exhibition brochure
HAEGUE YANG: COME SHOWER OR SHINE, IT IS EQUALLY BLISSFUL
2015 October 30 - 2016 January 3
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
"I saw a strange optimism and generosity in the title, an encouragement to overcome a seeming lack of commonality and to embrace growing diversity in our time and place." —Haegue Yang
From 30 October 2015 to 3 January 2016, UCCA is pleased to host the first solo exhibition in China of Haegue Yang. Haegue Yang: Come Shower or Shine, It Is Equally Blissful includes the artist's major works from 1994 to the present with newly commissioned sculptural installations. Through the Lobby, Nave, and Central Gallery, viewers navigate the plurality of Yang's unique visual language, a landscape of material hybridity—spices, Venetian blinds, clothing racks, synthetic straw, Choco Pies, bells, graph paper—torn, lacquered, woven, lit, and hung. Here, Yang attempts to stage diverse narratives of nameless subjectivities in a syncretic mode of abstraction and figuration that does not seek a balance between the two.
In reference to an idiom found in the poem Drinking on the Lake when it Shines after the Rains by the Northern Song dynasty scholar Su Shi, the exhibition's title suggests high spirits in spite of dramatic shifts in the environment, the embrace of diversity in our world. It also alludes to the artist's preoccupation with sensorial experience, which triggers associative sentiments beyond the verbal and conceptual. Lacquer Paintings such as Rainy Dirty (2012) or Rainy Chili (2011) display impressions of seasonal and environmental conditions acquired in the production process: lacquer is poured onto wooden panels in multiple layers then set against the elements outdoors. Exposed to rain, wind, and other disturbances, their surfaces become dotted and dusty, recording the specific season and place of their creation. Similarly, Spice Moons (2013), eight framed panels of spice prints, line the opposite wall of the Nave, carrying the scent of Singapore's diversity and colonial history into the exhibition space. Through visual and titular references, the two series suggest a connection between celestial bodies, the moon and stars, and human perception.
Hanging from the rafters of the Nave, Sol LeWitt Upside Down – K123456, Expanded 1078 Times, Doubled and Mirrored (2015) consists of twin volumetric shapes, tropes of LeWitt's K123456 (1997) expanded and mirrored with Venetian blinds. Becoming opaque or transparent according to the natural light of the space or standpoint of the viewer, the piece approaches the original not as parody but as a compositionally liberated expression of respect. Totem Robots (2010), a sculptural installation in three parts titled Sidewise, Askew, and Forward, also share the Nave, their ‘arms’ and ‘heads’ draped with electric cables, light bulbs, and other ephemera emptied of function.
These accumulated anthropomorphic features can also be found in the new sculptural group The Intermediates (2015) and the wallpaper series Eclectic Totemic (2013)—completed with London-based designer duo OK-RM (Oliver Knight and Rory McGrath)—situated in the Central Gallery. Titled The Sun and the Moon: The Golden Crow and the Jade Hare, the floor is drawn according to a spiral pattern found in Oskar Schlemmer's Triadisches Ballett (1922), the straw figures of The Intermediates, adorned with a Korean bridal headpiece, vintage Indian cowbells, and artificial succulent plants among other things, ‘dance’ in a whimsical ritual allowing an experiential shift in their assumed objectivity.
The Central Gallery is entirely wrapped and rendered by wall décor with the paper collage series Trustworthies (2010-) on vinyl arrangements. Video Trilogy (Unfolding Places, Restrained Courage, and Squandering Negative Spaces, 2004-2006) is embedded within the Trustworthies, featuring an intimate voice-over monologue unfolding episodes of observations on homelessness and displacement collected during lonesome journeys. The narrator's voice flows over sequences of urban scenery interrupted by occasions of origami, masked figures, or paper windmills.
In the Lobby, viewers are welcomed by Virtuous Edibles – Affection and Benevolence (2015), two towers—each weighing approximately 500 kg, altogether a ton—constructed from Choco Pie packages with the characters of 情 [affection] and 仁 [benevolence] delineating the product markets of Korea and China, respectively. Monumental in scale, the work posits a contrast between the intimate, familiar taste of the snack with its ever-changing commercial image, while highlighting the notion of virtue attained through the application of an otherwise trivial commodity.
An extensive exhibition catalogue, Haegue Yang: Come Shower or Shine, It Is Equally Blissful explores the affective power of industrial materials, revealing a spiritual threshold in the ordinary.
Within the internalized movements of Yang's diverse practice, several iterations of alternative temporality are attempted: the appropriation of Sol Lewitt's progression in geometric shapes (Sol LeWitt Upside Down – K123456, Expanded 1078 Times, Doubled and Mirrored), astronomical phenomenon reflected in shifts of human perception (Lacquer Paintings, Spice Moons), and the syncretism of tradition with the economic undercurrents of sweetness in a popular Korean snack (Virtuous Edibles – Affection and Benevolence). Each signifies movement in spite of static form, citing instances outside the insomnia of their inscribed utilitarian time.
Haegue Yang: Come Shower or Shine, It Is Equally Blissful is the final installment of UCCA's Secret Timezones Trilogy, a suite of consecutive solo exhibitions by contemporary Asian artists whose works reveal dislocated temporalities lying dormant behind mundane objects. The trilogy is curated by UCCA consulting curator Venus Lau, this exhibition with assistant curator Felicia Chen, and sponsored by SEDANT·ZIQUE.
related files:
press release
KORAKRIT ARUNANONDCHAI: 2558
2015 21 August - 19 October
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
2558 amasses a gesamtkunstwerk of Korakrit Arunanondchai's body paintings and a video-installation chronicling his Beuys-like mythology, opening with performances by Arunanondchai and collaborators boychild, Aj Gvojic, Harry Bornstein and Arunondchai's twin brother, Korapat.
From August 21 to October 19, UCCA continues an investigation into alternative temporalities with the second installment of the Secret Timezones Trilogy, Korakrit Arunanondchai: 2558. The young artist's third institutional solo show and his first in Asia, 2558 amasses a gasmtkunstwerk of body paintings on acid wash denim and a video-installation chronicling his Beuys-like mythology snaking through the Nave and Central Gallery. For the opening ceremony, the artist boychild, who appears frequently in Arunanondchai's works, performs along with Arunanonchai's twin brother Korapat and several volunteers. The stage and lighting is designed by Aj Gvojic with sound production by Harry Bornstein.
Projected in succession onto the walls of the Central Gallery is a cycle of four films that form the core of 2558. Beginning with 2012-2555, named after corresponding Buddhist and Gregorian calendar years, each independently structured episode sees Arunanondchai, the Thai "denim painter," progress towards self-actualization in an arch of death, purgatory in 2556, and spiritual rebirth in 2557 (Painting with history in a room filled with men with funny names 2). Here, the artist's narrative playfully deconstructs art world binaries—high/low, West/East—in a parody incorporating Duangjai Jansaonoi's controversial "body painting" performance on Thailand's Got Talent. This incident and famed Thai architect Chalermchai Kositpipat's televised response are thoroughly recapped in 2556 and directly inform Arunanondchai's execution of paintings in the Nave.
The fourth film, Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3, further situates the artist's work within a unique cosmology, indoctrinating viewers with his rap star vernacular of philosophical musings on enlightenment. Heaven and Hell become diametrically opposed interpretations of a world created from the feedback loop of experience and synchronous digital documentation. A motif repeated throughout the film and carried over into the works of the Nave, the "search for Naga" is not simply a reference to an exotic symbol but an allusion to the pan-cultural Ouroboros, an eternally returning cycle representing his practice.
Together, the Nave and Central Gallery constitute the "body of work," a notion further underlined by the human outline created from the layout of materials within the exhibition. While intended to be experienced as a whole, the two halves engage different discourses of representation, his films owing as much to the recorded anthropemetries of Yves Klein as they do the modern music video. His paintings, emancipated from the walls of the Nave, result from a set of propositions interrogating memory and the objecthood of art. Arunanondchai often describes his canvases with the analogy "Ctrl z," the "undo" feature of most software. Burned then re-stitched with photographic documents of the burning, these canvases compress time into one layer, paradoxically revealing the process of creation at the cost of concealing its effect. Appearing several times on-screen, the canvases are artefacts of his filmed performances—as are the clothes dressing the mannequins that people the exhibition space—which, in turn, are ritual re-enactments of a previously aired talent show. These repeated elements, which jump between the virtual and the real, form the basis of a collective memory extending into physical space, imploring the viewer through a gestalt effect to perceive his total work.
With the promise of infinite variation, execution, and revision, the shift towards digital modalities compounded with globalization implies a dual flattening in our perceptions of time and geography. In the first installment of the Secret Timezones Trilogy, the works of Ming Wong complied with an unfixed, heterotopian temporalilty, creating a space floating between past, present, and future satirically overlaid with a linear logic. 2558 offers another interpretation, opening an affective space in the museum where time melts away.
Korakrit Arunanondchai: 2558 is the second installment of UCCA's Secret Timezones Trilogy, a suite of consecutive solo exhibitions by contemporary Asian artists whose works reveal dislocated temporalities lying dormant behind mundane objects. The trilogy is curated by UCCA consulting curator Venus Lau, this exhibition with assistant curator Guo Xi. The final installment features work from Haegue Yang (30 October to 3 January).
related files:
press release
MING WONG: NEXT YEAR
2015 11 June - 9 August
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
Through works combining his ongoing research into the modernization of Cantonese opera, the archeology of science fiction movies, and the New Wave classic Last Year at Marienbad, Singaporean artist Ming Wong explores nonlinear, heterotopian notions of temporality.
From June 11 to August 9, UCCA presents the solo exhibition Ming Wong: Next Year, comprised of two new works from the Singaporean artist. In Scenography for a Chinese Science Fiction Opera, Wong turns the Nave into a stage, fusing the aesthetics of the spaceship referenced in Chinese and American cinematic history with traditional cloud patterns based on Chinese cosmology of immateriality. Continuing the futurist theme, Wong has re-staged the French New Wave classic Last Year at Marienbad with his film 明年 | Next Year | L'Année Prochaine. The two pieces continue with thematic threads evident in the artist's previous works, continuing his exploration of temporality.
For the installation Scenography for a Chinese Science Fiction Opera, Ming Wong closes off the Nave, mimicking the three-dimensional set design of traditional stage theater with more than ten wooden backdrops. Painted to resemble the interior of a spaceship and swirls of clouds, the backdrops are bifurcated down the middle allowing visitors to walk the length of the hall, through this man-made scene, to its conclusion-a kaleidoscopic, disorienting wheel of color. Ming Wong's installation appears to follow a narrative: visitors emerge from the spaceship, thereby entering the space of the open sky. But in actuality, this piece contains two mismatched parts: the sky is painted after the universe found in traditional Chinese opera and ancient religious murals, abstract and bright, contrasting sharply with the dark, naturalistic spaceship. The two sets of iconography represent a multifaceted cultural landscape and a nonlinear time frame derived from Wong's investigations of the modernization of Cantonese opera, ancient Chinese wall painting, and science-fiction films from China and abroad. Visitors are enveloped within a futuristic science-fiction movie set then given over to a mural painting of the sky, seemingly walking towards the future yet facing the past. The installation calls into question the linear, continuous, and quantitative aspects of time.
In 明年 | Next Year | L'Année Prochaine, Ming Wong performs the male and female roles in fragments taken from Last Year at Marienbad (1961), written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and directed by Alain Resnais. The narrative follows a woman living in a lavish hotel, who meets a man by chance. The man claims that they met the year before in Marienbad, had fallen in love, and agreed to meet at the hotel to elope. His brazen attitude and proposition make the woman laugh, and at first she denies everything. In the end, she finally concedes and runs off with the man. The film is celebrated for its innovative cinematic language-the camera reflecting the pace of the mind through repetition, reversal, freeze frame, and white out-capturing reality, memory, and illusion while inventing a sequential order different even from the internal logic of the montage. In the original film, the memory loss of the main character inhibits her thought process and time-"next year" compressed into now-loses all meaning. Ming Wong prefers the highly dramatic portions of films, acting as multiple characters within the story and attempting to embody their emotions. Last Year at Marienbad subverts the objective role of the camera, using it to portray a highly subjective world. This enables Ming Wong to more easily bring emotions to the surface, and also presents viewers with a subjective world in which they are faced with their own understanding of time.
Ming Wong's video works are generally based on excerpts of art films. From beginning to end, Last Year at Marienbad never makes reference to a specific location, and Ming Wong takes advantage of this fact to re-stage the work at Marienbad Café and Fuxing Park, both in Shanghai. Taking place in a café named after a French art film and a park combining French and Chinese gardening styles, neighborhoods and apartments that reference Chinese and Western architecture, the film hints at the notion that cultural perceptions of time remain unfixed. As a Singaporean artist based in Berlin, the artist's cultural identity has often been used in interpretation of his work. However, cinema is inherently “transnational” and is used by the artist to reveal the synthesis of cultures. In 明年| Next Year | L'Année Prochaine, this is most clearly viewed in post-colonial Shanghai's "Western-style" Marienbad Café, where Wong's cinematic language and conscious structuring of the film are emphasized.
Ming Wong: Next Year is the first installment of UCCA's Secret Timezones Trilogy, a suite of consecutive solo exhibitions by contemporary Asian artists whose works reveal dislocated temporalities lying dormant behind mundane objects. The trilogy is curated by UCCA consulting curator Venus Lau, this exhibition with assistant curator Zoe Diao. Further exhibitions include Korakrit Arunanondchai and Haegue Yang.