Chen Yujun – The Empty Room – Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing

Chen Yujun, The Empty Room
Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing 
Through 5 December 2010

On view in Beijing, at Boers-Li Gallery, a solo exhibition of recent work by the artist Chen Yujun produced since 2008 in a project entitled The Empty Room.

CHEN YUJUN was born in Putian of Fujian province in 1976, and the most basic motivation of his work comes from the culture of the Central Min diaspora. Because a branch of his family emigrated to Southeast Asia in 1900, many of his works are concerned with this lineage and the living environments of that alien territory. As young critic Lu Mingjun has summarized, this form of mental memory and life experience creates in his artistic practice a distinct anthropological aesthetic: for Chen Yujun, the foreign land of the South China Sea represents a space of possibility or experience of the unknown, and the communication of this experience becomes the original intention of his work. His mode of painting is simple and unadorned, consisting of hybrid visions of architecture and scene, a sensation of bland vicissitude and solitude that emerges through plants, decorations, and furnishings. Such images originate in the experiential world of the artist, but exceed this experience through a unique form of communication in painting. They consistently challenge the observational logic of the viewer, calling for explorations into the unknown.

Asian Geography is a new series initiated by the artist in 2009. For some time, the notion of Asia has been advanced as a community primarily through the cultural oppression of Eurocentric ideology, such that the cultural concept of Asia actually convinces us to ignore cultural differences within the continent. In Asian Geography, Chen Yujun attempts to produce an alien space of the other, a space of Asia at once both strange and familiar. In these works, apart from the appearance of bizarre furnishings, we find that readymade objects and space constructed through the extension of all manner of lines form a unique depth within a set of two-dimensional relationships. Observing such works, the disorder, vacuity, and fragmentation of space interfere with an understanding of our own identity and existence.

Asian Geography surpasses Chen Yujun's early imagination of Southeast Asia, placing the focus of this concept within an identification of history and identity. Within this series, the artist extends his domestic space such that it becomes the geographic space of Asia. As he says:

“The entire course of my practice unfolds through the history of migration of my family, appropriating this outward trajectory primarily in order to present my own secret experiences and imaginations. Through this specific spatial situation, I attempt to depict a singular domestic space and the alienated identity of its resident.”

BOERS-LI GALLERY - BEIJING - CHINA

11 November 2010 - 5 December 2010

www.boersligallery.com

Qiu Anxiong – Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing

Zoo - Qiu Anxiong’s solo exhibition
Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing
22 October - 21 November 2010

The exhibition includes QIU ANXIONG's new work in oil painting, sculpture, and video installation.

The exhibition as a whole revolves around the decaying scenes of the zoological garden. Animals once free to gallop and soar are here confined to a purportedly humane synthetic nature, held captive in the limited degree of freedom endemic to the zoo and certainly experiencing some degree of boredom. Such paintings exist here as a background to the exhibition, allowing the figure of the zoo to come to stand in for captivity itself within this new series. Alongside this conceptual development, Qiu Anxiong attempts to survey the broader meaning of captivity within more expansive spheres of culture, educational systems, and lifestyles, a discussion that originates with the phenomenon by which external control imperceptibly becomes habitual self-control, mirroring another process by which the object of control shifts from the animal to the human.

As a portion of this continuing exploration of culture and control, this exhibition employs models of the zoo and civilization to manifest mistaken understandings of history. Animals are here taken as gods, as in Heresy turned into food products, as in Revolution or observed as pets, as in Enlightenment. The artist here uses a method of Borgesian personification to reveal how, throughout the history of civilization, the various manifestations of collectivism have imprisoned and even extinguished the individual. Through the reverse of such personification, the artist concludes the exhibition by animalizing a domestic scene depicting consumer society, thus expressing the captivity of material consumption outside the spiritual realm.

Beginning with his widely known work New Classic of the Mountains and Seas I, Qiu Anxiong has drawn on a method in which mythical and existing animals are metaphorically drawn into reality in order to develop his analysis and critique of contemporary society. At the same time, the narratives and symbols present in his work continuously construct new forms of visual narrative in a relatively restricted system. The attraction of this work lies in its eccentric and abnormal quixotic pursuit, particularly in the artificial encyclopedic knowledge it spawns. This  unique narrative mode could be linked to those of Borges, but its spiritual quality is actually much closer to the critique of reality manifested in Orwell's Animal Farm.

QIU ANXIONG  was born in Chengdu in 1972. He has exhibited in the Shanghai Biennale in 2006, China Power Station Part 1 in 2007, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2009, and most recently the São Paulo Biennial in 2010. He also held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 2007. His video work “New Classic of the Mountains and Seas II” and related print works have recently been acquired by the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

BOERS-LI GALLERY - BEIJING - CHINA

www.boersligallery.com

Zhang Huan: Hope Tunnel at UCCA Beijing

Zhang Huan: Hope Tunnel
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art - UCCA, Beijing
Through October 24, 2010

Zhang Huan’s Hope Tunnel is a curated social project related to the 2008 earthquake in Wenchuan, Sichuan Province.

“Hope Tunnel is conceptual art on a grand scale, a monument to hope, a space in which art becomes a vehicle for awareness, philanthropy and the public good. A towering display of destructive power frozen in time, it allows us to reflect on the scale of recent earthquake disasters, commemorate the victims and contemplate the possibility of reconstruction and the challenges that lie ahead.”

UCCA Director Jérôme Sans describes Hope Tunnel as being “conceived by an artist who believes that art has the power not just to move us emotionally, but to galvanize us into positive action. We may be dwarfed by the wreckage of freight train no. 21043 and humbled by the destruction wrought by nature, but as the title reminds us, we still have the power to help—and to hope.”

Artist Zhang Huan calls his train “a witness to history” that should be preserved. “At a time when the whole world is looking toward the future, preserving the past seems more important than ever. Reflecting on the disaster, investigating the causes, mitigating future dangers and finding ways to live in harmony with our environment rather than trying to conquer it—that’s where the real future is, the tunnel of hope that leads us to tomorrow."

Moving beyond “art for the sake of art”

Hope Tunnel is more than just a train, an installation piece or a Memento mori that recalls our own mortality. It is a multi-faceted philanthropic project and an experiment in using art to serve the public good.

“As a non-profit public arts center, UCCA is in a unique position to carry out curated social projects such as Hope Tunnel. Free of the artistic constraints and profit motives that restrict many traditional museums and galleries, UCCA possesses the resources, vision and innovation needed to harness the social and philanthropic power of art.”

“At UCCA, we are committed to engaging not just with the “art world” but with society in general and the world at large. Through exhibitions, films and educational events that reflect what is happening in Beijing, in China and around the globe, we seek to create a forum for dialogue and a place for developing innovative solutions. “

“Art should be about more than just making pretty things and putting on spectacles,” says UCCA Director Jérôme Sans. “It means caring about the world around you and giving something back to society.”

The long journey of freight train no. 21043

When the Sichuan earthquake struck on May 12, 2008, freight train no. 21043 was passing through a tunnel in the border region between Gansu, Sichuan and Shaanxi Provinces. Loaded down with grain and aviation fuel, the train collided with a boulder, caught fire and became trapped in the tunnel's inferno. It took workers six months to dig out the wreckage, clear the tunnel and reopen the railway line to earthquake-damaged areas of Sichuan.

When he heard the news reports and saw the photos of the Sichuan earthquake and the train disaster, Zhang Huan was badly shaken. Realizing that the train had both historical value and emotional resonance, he decided to try to preserve it for posterity. After a long and complicated process, the artist managed to obtain the wreckage and transport it to his studio in Shanghai for selective renovation.

When two large carriages of the train are installed in UCCA's largest exhibition hall amidst railway tracks and quake debris, visitors are able to examine the wreckage and watch a documentary that follows every step of the train’s journey from a salvage company in Xi’an to Zhang Huan’s workshop in Shanghai to UCCA in Beijing. A percentage of ticket sales will go to the Red Cross Society of China Jet Li One Foundation Project to fund disaster relief and reconstruction projects in Yushu, Qinghai Province.

In conjunction with Hope Tunnel, two of Zhang Huan’s large incense-ash sculptures are on display in the UCCA lobby: Military Officer and Cultural Officer.

BIOGRAPHY: ZHANG HUANG

Internationally acclaimed artist Zhang Huan was born in 1965 in Anyang, Henan. He currently lives and works in Shanghai. As an active member of the Beijing art scene in the 1990's, he was involved mainly in performance art and was considered one of the foremost avant-garde artists in China. After relocating to New York in 1998, he became a full-time artist working in a variety of different mediums and giving artistic performances in major cities worldwide.

In 2005, he returned to Shanghai and established the Zhang Huan Studio, where he continues his artistic work, expanding into new realms and developing new forms. The ash-painting technique he created has added another method of painting to the art history books. Zhang Huan has also pioneered a variety of other techniques, such as sculpting in ox-hide, wooden door carvings, and woodcuts with feather additions, to name just a few.

In 2009, Zhang Huan directed and stage-managed the lyric opera Semele, performed at the La Monnaie Royal Theatre in Belgium. He is the first Chinese modern artist to direct a lyric opera. In 2005, Zhang Huan and his wife founded the Gao An Foundation, which establishes "hope elementary schools" in impoverished areas of western China. They have also provided scholarships and study grants to ten major universities in China.

Curators: Jérôme Sans, UCCA Director
Project Coordinators：Paula Tsai, Joy Bloser

UCCA - ULLENS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART - BEIJING - PR CHINA

www.ucca.org.cn