Ding Yi @ Lisson Gallery, London - 'The Road to Heaven' Exhibition

Ding Yi: The Road to Heaven

Lisson Gallery, London

Through 22 November 2025

For his inaugural solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery and his first return to exhibit in London in over five years, renowned Chinese abstractionist Ding Yi presents a new body of work. This latest series is deeply informed by the history and cosmology of the Naxi people of Yunnan in southwestern China, offering a rich cultural and conceptual dimension to his distinctive visual language. In line with his larger corpus, the artist’s latest drawings and paintings employ a systematic iconography in the service of a layered, subjective response – a continuous act of translation rather than a fixed text.   

In 1988, while a student at Shanghai University, Ding Yi adopted the cross, either in the form of a ‘+’ or ‘x’ symbol, as a leitmotif. Initially arranging crosses in strict grids, he later developed complex geometric patterns in fluorescent colours, producing works that mirrored the architectural and economic explosion of Shanghai in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  Since 2011, Ding Yi has shifted toward a broader perspective, exploring themes of the cosmos, nature, and the universe, gradually moving beyond the strict rationality of his earlier work toward a more emotive and intuitive sensibility. Following his 2022 solo exhibition in Tibet, he began to engage more deeply with specific cultural and geographic contexts, with recent works reflecting a turn inward—toward spiritual reflection and contemplative states.

In 2024, following three research visits to Yunnan and in-depth conversations with scholars and Dongba priests, Ding Yi studied and internalised the texts and beliefs of the Dongba religion—an ancient tradition blending animism and Tibetan Buddhism. This belief system is preserved through sacred manuscripts composed in a unique pictographic script – the most significant and visually striking being The Road to Heaven. Used in funerary rituals, the long scroll depicts the soul’s symbolic passage from the earthly realm to the afterlife, and lends its title to this exhibition.

Drawing from the scroll’s visual and spiritual resonance, Ding Yi created a group of works executed on coarse-fibred Dongba paper using acrylic and water-soluble coloured pencil. These compositions reinterpret The Road to Heaven through his signature cross motif. The drawing transposes the Dongba writing system into a sequence of intricate schemes, each composed from a dense array of crosses. In this fusion of Dongba cosmology and his distinctive abstraction, Ding Yi invites viewers to perceive two worlds at once—entwined yet distinct in sensibility. Featured in the exhibition is The Road to Heaven 2024-B17, a four-panel work on Dongba paper. Each panel alludes to the transmigration of the soul through allegorical topographies: Nine Black Mountains, The Underworld, The Natural World, and Heaven.

The exhibition also features a suite of horizontal-format works on Dongba paper, continuing his iconic Appearance of Crosses series. For Ding Yi, works on paper hold a vital place in his practice, serving as both experimentation and refinement. In these, tiny crosses applied in various colours form mosaic-like compositions that oscillate between microcosmic and macrocosmic resonance. Blocks of dense black hatching – inset with constellatory motifs – echo the starry skies that have featured in Ding Yi’s works for two decades. Elsewhere, streaming blue diagonals conjure the two fundamental elements of life,  according to the Naxi – ‘Qi’ (energy) and water, linking to the ‘Twenty-eight mansions’ of Naxi astrology: the nightly resting places of the moon.

A group of larger relief paintings, rendered in chiselled basswood, features tiered zigzags that evoke the sacred Hengduan mountains of Yunnan in the guise of psychedelic abstraction. Coloured diagonals offset the faint underlying grid, while bold geometry, as often in Ding Yi’s art, compresses a sense of the minute, the handmade and the contingent, reflected in the tiny carved compartments that constitute each painting.

Ding Yi defined the first two stages of his career in terms of ‘steadying’ (the cultivation of a formal language) and ‘overlooking’ (the application of that language to the rapidly evolving world around him). The third, ongoing stage is that of ‘looking up’ – of widening his horizons, both spatial and temporal, to the cosmos and its ancient conceptualisations. The mathematical construction of his works belies a deep interest in the idiosyncratic and irrational dimensions of human thought and cultural tradition. The cross itself – at once Modernist and pre-modern, personal and functional – encapsulates the beguiling duality of his art. As curator Cui Cancan has observed, the “Winding Path” of Ding Yi’s practice “has no terminus – it sways fiercely between the poles of locality and globalisation.” The series of work featured in this exhibition is also on view at Ding Yi: The Winding Path at Contemporary Gallery Kunming and Anthropology Museum of Yunnan University, China, until 9 November 2025.

Artist Ding Yi

A leading figure in Chinese contemporary art, Ding Yi works across painting, sculpture, installation, and architecture. Since the late 1980s, his signature motif—the cross “+” and its variant “x”—has served as a symbol of structure, rationality, and a visual language exploring the essence of being. Trained in both art and design, Ding Yi began experimenting with abstraction in 1982. During his student years, he developed a strong conviction about how to paint and what kind of artist he would become. Rejecting the Expressionism and Surrealism then prevalent in China, he chose a rational path “free from ideology.” Profoundly influenced by Western artists such as Piet Mondrian and Frank Stella during the 1985 “New Wave” art movement, Ding Yi launched his iconic Appearance of Crosses series in 1988, aiming to create “an ultimate impression of abstraction”. At the time, he “designed” paintings resembling plans for fabrics or blankets, using rulers and tape to eliminate traces of hand gestures—rigorously precise compositions formed through the

repetition of the cross.

Ding Yi’s methodical structures are animated by vibrant, reflexively chosen colours, introducing an element of chance and tension into the work. Through colour and form, his paintings reflect on China’s rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, with visual motifs echoing QR codes and the sensory intensity of an information-driven society. Since 2010, Ding Yi has adopted a more expansive perspective in his examination of the world, integrating reflections on the broader human condition. His more recent works reveal greater luminosity and intensity, carrying a deeper emotional resonance.

Ding Yi was born in Shanghai in 1962, where he continues to live and work. He studied Design at the Shanghai Art & Design Academy (1980–1983), and later traditional Chinese painting at Shanghai University’s Fine Arts Department (1986–1990). His recent solo exhibitions include those at Contemporary Gallery Kunming and Anthropology Museum of Yunnan University (2025); Mostyn, Llandudno, Wales (2025); Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne (2024), Paris and St. Moritz (2025); Château La Coste, Provence (2024); Ningbo Museum of Art and Huamao Museum of Art Education (2023); MOCAUP, Shenzhen (2023); Mojie Art Museum, Taiyuan (2023); TAG Art Museum, Qingdao (2022); Jebumgang Art Center, Lhasa (2022); Galería RGR, Mexico City (2022); ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai (2018) and Singapore (2022); Timothy Taylor, New York (2021) and London (2019); Long Museum, Chongqing (2020) and West Bund, Shanghai (2015); Nova Contemporary, Bangkok (2020); Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (2019); Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (2018); Xi’an Art Museum (2017); and Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan (2016).

Ding Yi has exhibited extensively in major international group exhibitions at institutions such as The British Museum, London; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Power Station of Art and MOCA Shanghai; SFMOMA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; Mercedes-Benz Contemporary, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; MAXXI, Rome; UCCA, Beijing; and touring exhibitions in Bern, Hamburg, and Barcelona. He has also shown in biennales and triennales including the Venice Biennale (1993), Asia-Pacific Triennial (1993), Biennale of Sydney (1998), Yokohama Triennale (2001), Shanghai Biennale (2006), Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2012), and Busan Biennale (2016). 

LISSON GALLERY

67 Lisson Street, London

www.lissongallery.com

Ding Yi: The Road to Heaven

Lisson Gallery, London, 27 September – 1 November 2025

Artist Xie Nanxing @ Capitain Petzel, Berlin - "f o r a d e c a s a" Exhibition

Xie Nanxing: f o r a d e c a s a

Capitain Petzel, Berlin

25 April - 1 June 2024

Capitain Petzel presents f o r a d e c a s a, a solo exhibition of paintings by Xie Nanxing (b. 1970, Chongqing, lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu).

f o r a d e c a s a is comprised of eight paintings which represent a complete body of work. The title, an abstraction of the Portuguese “fora de casa”, as in “jogo fora de casa” – the away game – reveals this series’ origins: while visiting Lisbon Xie Nanxing came across a notebook, the vibrant green pages of which were each marked with the lines of a football pitch. Perhaps a fun gift for the child whose bedroom walls are adorned with posters of footballers, or possibly a serious tool for the tactician for whom each match is an obsession. The markings of the football pitch – rendered most clearly against a comparable green background in f o r a d e c a s a # 1 – became the basis for this group of paintings, both as a loosely interpreted formal structure for each new work and as a catalyst for their content.

Football is a paradox. So trivial yet so serious. It is not a matter of life and death, the great Liverpool manager Bill Shankly reputedly said: it is much more important than that. Or perhaps it is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, said Gary Lineker, the Germans always win. Painting is also a paradox, at least for Xie Nanxing. It is not the truth, he has said, but neither is it just a game. It is “more like a game that is close to the truth, or rather a truth-mimicking game”. He has expressed a “mistrust” of painting, and yet he has spent the last three decades engaged in a deliberate and meticulous studio painting practice.

Nowhere is Xie Nanxing’s ambivalent, conflictual attitude towards painting more apparent than in the “canvas print” technique which he has often returned to over the last fifteen years and which he uses in several of these paintings. f o r a d e c a s a # 8, for example, is ostensibly the most abstract of the paintings in the exhibition – we see a central green circle, perhaps a centre circle, overlaid with faintly stippled polychromatic marks. As we continue to look, traces of figures begin to emerge to the left of the canvas, while to the right we see a harder-edged form and a rich patch of green reminiscent of the first painting in this series. These marks are in fact the literal traces of another painting which was made on an unstretched canvas that had been laid over the top of the surface we now see, such that some of the paint seeped through. That painting was then removed, never to be shown, and we are left with its “shadows” – evidence of painting having taken place.

And yet in this same series Xie Nanxing also embraces sheer painterly bravura, albeit interrupted by football scorecards, while in overtly citing Goya’s The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters (and not for the first time) Xie embraces his work’s place in a longer tradition of painting. Some paintings suggest abstraction, but others are uncharacteristically direct in their figuration. A football match can be tense and tactical, but it can also be an explosion of excitement. Catenaccio or heavy metal football. “Xie Nanxing’s paintings cannot be cast in the camps of either aestheticized objecthood or conceptual dematerialization”, the curator and art historian Ruth Noack has acutely observed, “they hover firmly in between”. 

CAPITAIN PETZEL

Karl Marx Alle 45 - 10178 Berlin

www.capitainpetzel.de

Liu Xiaodong @ Faurschou Foundation Copenhagen

Liu Xiaodong: Painting As Shooting
Curated by Jérôme Sans
Faurschou Foundation Copenhagen
Through December 16,  2016

Photo of artwork ‘Xuzi at Home’.

© Xiaodong Studio

Liu Xiaodong

2010

Oil on canvas, 140 x 150 cm.

Collection of the artist

Photo of artwork ‘The Nude Black Maya’.

© Xiaodong Studio

Liu Xiaodong

The Nude Black Maya, 2009,

Oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm.

Private Collection

Faurschou Foundation presents the third and final Liu Xiaodong exhibition in its Copenhagen space.

Painting as Shooting is conceived as an exhibition in three chapters, curated by Jérôme Sans and produced by Faurschou Foundation, in Venice, Beijing and Copenhagen. The first step, which took place at the Cini Foundation for the 56th Venice Biennale, was the first major European institutional exhibition to fully explore Liu Xiaodong’s unique practice, as one of China’s most influential painters of the last two decades. The second, presented by Faurschou Foundation in its Beijing space, presented the most recent series of works created by the artist during his stay in Ordos in Inner Mongolia. The last chapter, mixing the first two shows, represents the most updated survey on Liu Xiaodong’s work.

The exhibition, Painting as Shooting, focuses on a unique selection of some of the artist’s most important projects from the last decade. They deal with major global, sociological, cultural, economic, ecological and environmental issues from the past ten years. It is not meant as a retrospective exhibition, but rather as a journey through images of the various worlds and situations he has witnessed all over the world, in locations such as China, Asia, Cuba, Europe, Israel, etc.

Photo of artwork ‘Jincheng Airport’.

© Xiaodong Studio

Liu Xiaodong

Jincheng Airport, 2010,

Oil on canvas,

300 x 400 cm.

Collection of the artist

Most recently Liu Xiaodong reactivated the issue on human migration, which appeared in his earlier "Hot Bed" series. Previously he portrayed migrants within Asia, both in his homeland China and in Thailand. Today Liu focuses on the largest migration and humanitarian problem since World War II: communities taking the most dangerous trip across the Mediterranean Sea and the most hazardous routes into Europe to escape the wars in the Middle East and Africa, hoping to find a better future in Europe. This issue will not only impact Europe, but the rest of the world.

Liu Xiaodong's projects will also be presented in an extended book, containing large graphical illustrations, sketches, diary notes and texts by Jérôme Sans. In addition to the exhibition there will be shown ten documentaries each following the different projects.

Painting as shooting

Liu Xiaodong is a painter of everyday life. His images are of family and friends set against modest scenery capturing ordinary moments, such as eating, laughing or playing games. However, in-depth exploration of what is hidden behind the small stories that populate the surface of his work reveals a much bigger picture. Xiaodong’s paintings are pointing with simple gestures to the reality of the periphery, the margins and the paradoxes of our contemporary society. It is the reality that no one dares to speak about; the tough reality of daily existence that reaches out to us from displaced communities—from migrant workers, victims of ecological and natural disasters and sex workers to the new homeless—all sharing the dream of a better life.

Liu Xiaodong approaches his work with the eyes and the storyboard practice of a filmmaker. Each of the artist’s major works begins with a simple idea from one of his daily diary entries, describing the events he has witnessed, photos he has taken or people he has met, and then transforms them into live characters on his canvas. In a way the artist’s paintings resemble a production set where he acts as a director who collaborates with actors to play, record or recreate a situation, various impressions or the effects thereof. It is hereby that Liu Xioadong embodies the concept of "painting as shooting."

Biographies

Photo of the artist Liu Xioadong

Photo by © Jiang Jia

Liu Xiaodong (1963) lives and works in Beijing. He holds a BFA and an MFA in painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (1988–95). The artist gained recognition in the 1990s and represents the Chinese Neo-Realism style. His solo exhibitions include Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2012) and Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2010), while his work was also shown in various group exhibitions such as the Shanghai Biennale (2000, 2010), the 15th Biennale of Sydney (2006) and the 47th Venice Biennale (1997).

The artist Liu Xiaodong with the curator Jèrôme Sans, Venice, 2015.

Photo by Yu Hong, © Faurschou Foundation & Liu Xiaodong Studio

Jérôme Sans is an internationally renowned curator, art critic, artistic director who has curated numerous major exhibitions around the world. He was the former director of the ground-breaking Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing and co-founder of the acclaimed Palais de Tokyo in Paris. He is currently artistic director of one of the most important urban development projects in Europe, the Lyon Rives de Saône-River Movie, and co-founder of Perfect Crossovers ltd, a Beijing based cultural consultancy group.

FAURSCHOU FOUNDATION
www.faurschou.com

Tales of Our Time @ Guggenheim Museum, NYC

Tales of Our Time
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
November 4, 2016 – March 10, 2017

Chia-En Jao (b. 1976, Taichung, Taiwan)

Taxi, 2016

Color UHD video, with sound

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Acquisition in process

© Chia-En Jao

Sun Xun (b. 1980, Fuxin, Liaoning Province)

Mythological Time, 2016 (details)

Two-channel color HD animated video, with sound, and ink, graphite and acrylic on mulberry bark paper

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Acquisition in process

© Sun Xun

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Tales of Our Time, an exhibition featuring eight newly commissioned, large-scale works by artists born in mainland China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. This is the second exhibition of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative, a long-term research, curatorial, and collections-building program at the Guggenheim Museum.

Though diverse in subjects and strategies, the works are united by the artists’ use of storytelling to propose alternative ways of looking at place. Working in drawing, animation, video, photography, sculpture, installation, and participatory intervention, the artists in the exhibition address the concept of geography and territory in ways as specific as where they are based or as big as China itself, which they see as a concept constantly being questioned and reinvented. These artists freely cross divides to examine the tensions between past and present, myth and fact, reality and dreams, rationality and absurdity, and individuality and collectivity.

The artists represented in Tales of Our Time are Chia-En Jao, Kan Xuan, Sun Xun, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Tsang Kin-Wah, Yangjiang Group, Zhou Tao.

Tales of Our Time is organized by Xiaoyu Weng, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art, and Hou Hanru, Consulting Curator, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative. The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative is part of the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative, directed by Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art and Senior Advisor, Global Arts. Kyung An, Assistant Curator, Asian Art, provides curatorial support. All commissioned works will enter the Guggenheim’s collection.

“Curators Xiaoyu Weng and Hou Hanru have taken a dynamic and collaborative approach, as they worked closely with the commissioned artists to explore the questions and insights that drive these art practices. We hope that these works will inform new understanding of global contemporary art through the lens of Chinese culture today,” stated Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. “The Guggenheim is grateful to The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation for its sustained commitment to this effort.”

“The artists represented in Tales of Our Time vary greatly in their practices and viewpoints,” says Xiaoyu Weng. “But they share a broad perspective, one that places China’s culture, history, and social reality in the context of the wider world. And like so many artists today, they register acute discomfort with the tension between the personal experiences of regular people and the dominant narratives and conventions of power.”

The exhibition’s title refers to the 1936 book Gushi xin bian (Old Tales Retold) by the influential Chinese modernist, social activist, and literary giant Lu Xun. In the book, Lu reinvents Chinese legends, as he considers these tales to be not only a literary genre, but also a strategy for critiquing social conditions and reconstructing history through storytelling.

Tales of Our Time is installed on two Tower Levels of the museum. Visitors may enter Tower Level 4 through a passageway lined with fantastic visions inspired by the natural world, drawn in the classical Chinese style on traditional bark paper by Sun Xun (b. 1980). Sun’s installation Mythological Time (2016) centers on his hometown of Fuxin in northeastern China, a coal-mining town that was once the pride of modern-era Chinese industrialization, but which the artist portrays as merely a fleeting scene over many millennia. A second monumental wall-size painting by Sun Xun depicting a surreal prehistoric landscape is also on view. Two video streams are projected onto its surface, sending animated creatures cavorting next to those drawn on paper with ink and acrylics.

Taxi (2016), a video installation, presents conversations conducted by the artist Chia-En Jao (b. 1976) with taxi drivers in Taipei. The artist asked drivers to take him to historically contested destinations in the city, such as a branch of Chang Hwa Bank where a mass protest was suppressed by Chiang Kai-shek’s military regime in 1947, the Presidential Office Building, the Grand Hotel, or the National Taiwan Museum. Recorded documentary style, the conversations meander through difficult memories of the Japanese occupation and martial law to present-day concerns. The artist has also created a flag for the installation, a traditional coat of arms representing many aspects of Taiwanese society, including its aboriginal communities. Through this investigation into the powerful connection between history and storytelling, Jao creates a mental map of Taipei that honors individual memory and experience.

Zhou Tao (b. 1976, Changsha, Hunan Province)

Land of the Throat, 2016

Installation with two-channel color HD video, with sound

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Acquisition in process

© Zhou Tao

Nearby Taxi on Tower Level 4 is a futuristic, pod-like video installation by Zhou Tao (b. 1976).  Land of the Throat (2016) evokes a phenomenon characteristic of China’s urbanization today: the construction of the new and the consequential transformation of the land. Two synchronized videos composed of footage recorded in Guangdong, China and Arizona are projected onto opposite sides of an enclosed structure in the gallery space.  A cow chained to an abandoned industrial washing machine moos in an otherwise silent, desolate landscape; workers pour out of construction sites; children play aimlessly; dogs and rats roam near fishing holes; and rescue workers in Shenzhen care for survivors injured in the city’s 2015 landslide.

Kan Xuan (b. 1972, Xuancheng, Anhui Province)

Ku Lüè Er, 2016 (details)

13-channel color video installation, with sound, and sandstone and marble

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Acquisition in process

© Kan Xuan

Kan Xuan (b. 1972) is an artist who splits her time between Beijing and Amsterdam. She traveled for more than five months to far-flung parts of China to photograph and research the remains of 110 ancient cities to create the multi-media installation Ku Lüè Er (2016), on view on Tower Level 4. On one gallery wall, eleven flat-screen monitors rhythmically loop videos of various lengths, each featuring hundreds of the thousands of mobile-phone images Kan took while traveling. The artist manipulated the color of the images and edited them in a stop-motion style. A lone video monitor is stationed on the floor, leaning over a floor projection of simple, notational maps created by the artist from her memories of site locations. The floor monitor sends out smacking, splashing sounds from balls of clay being thrown in a children’s game. A few stone sculptures hang nearby, their knotted forms echoing the fences that guarded these lost cities. Instead of providing historical knowledge or factual statistics, Kan Xuan engages China’s vast history of dynasties and evolution of territories through her intimate personal emotions and experience as a reminder of our collective memory and oblivion.

Yangjiang Group (est. 2002, Yangjiang, Guangdong Province)

After Dinner Shufa: Tales of Our Time, 2015

Photograph, 150 x 300 cm

Courtesy the artists

© Yangjiang Group

Yangjiang Group, whose founding artists are Zheng Guogu (b. 1970), Chen Zaiyan (b. 1971), and Sun Qinglin (b. 1974), conjure a small utopia in Tales of Our Time. Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken (2016) is installed along a Frank Lloyd Wright–designed circular area overlooking Central Park. Here Chinese tea is to be shared on simple plywood furniture set amid calligraphic works and a temporary Chinese garden, which is visible on the outside balcony and contains bamboo, shrubs, a miniature bridge, and a pond. As part of the participatory installation, visitors are encouraged to measure their blood pressure and heart rate before and after they enter this area—a humorous means designed to calculate the purported relaxing effects of a tea gathering in an art exhibition. A green and white calligraphic mural is suspended several stories from the ceiling to the ground floor of the museum’s Thannhauser Gallery. Since 2002 this art collaborative has been inviting neighbors in Yangjiang, its small hometown on the southern coast, to drink tea, play soccer, practice calligraphy, and enjoy communal dinners. In symbolically transporting their small plot of land to New York, the Yangijiang Group has neither left behind its humor nor its desire to create a borderless, anarchist zone of citizenship and belonging.

The Tower Level 5 gallery houses Can’t Help Myself (2016), a massive robot with a mechanical arm created by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu (b. 1972 and 1974), two longtime collaborators based in Beijing. Placed behind clear acrylic walls, the machine is programmed to perform one very specific action: with its modified front arm, it guards a puddle of dark red viscous liquid. As the red substance slowly spreads on the ground, the robot frenetically shovels it back into place, leaving smudges reminiscent of contemporary surveillance warfare. Sun and Peng, who are known for using bold humor with undertones of violence to address provocative topics, neither pose nor answer the question of whether the repetitious dance of the robot in Can’t Help Myself is absurd, authoritarian, or both.

Sun Yuan (b. 1972, Beijing) & Peng Yu (b. 1974, Jiamusi, Heilongjiang Province)

Can’t Help Myself, 2016

Industrial robot, steel, rubber, visual-recognition sensors, acrylic wall with aluminum frame, and food-grade fiber with water

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Acquisition in process

© Sun Yuan & Pen Yu

Photo: Courtesy the artists

In a darkened gallery, also on Tower Level 5, an immersive projection sends images of rocks, ships, oceans, and waves washing over the viewer. Entitled In The End Is The Word (2016), this six-channel video installation by Hong Kong–based artist Tsang Kin-Wah (b. 1976) interweaves found footage, sound, and light. The work begins with a rush of seemingly banal shots of a tsunami at sea near the site of an ongoing territorial dispute between China and Japan, the Diaoyu Islands (known as Senkaku Islands in Japanese). These images then begin to morph into abstractions. Synchronized videos projected onto the walls and floor of the dimly lit room create the illusion that animated, coiling strips of words and phrases are pouring out of the video images and into the gallery. Finally, rather than simply disappear, these images accumulate into a crescendo of blindingly bright light, a state the artist likens to sa?sara, a Sanskrit word meaning “perpetual wandering” in the sea of life’s suffering.

Tsang Kin-Wah (b. 1976, Shantou, Guangdong Province)

In The End Is The Word, 2016 (detail)

Six-channel video installation, with sound

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Acquisition in process

© Tsang Kin-Wah

In addition to In The End Is The Word, Tsang created No(thing/Fact) Outside (2016), a vinyl text installation that extends beyond the Tower galleries–climbing walls and snaking along floors in less prominent areas in the museum, such as elevators and stairwells. Reflecting Tsang’s ruminations on the exhibition, the work spatially and conceptually links the stories told by the artists in Tales of Our Time.

About the Exhibition Catalogue

A conceptual extension of the exhibition, the catalogue edited by Xiaoyu Weng and Hou Hanru blends a traditional museum publication with a fiction anthology. Featuring scholarly essays and artwork descriptions, it unconventionally examines the exhibition artists, who all challenge current views about art from China. Interwoven with these essays are seven commissioned short stories by the Chinese and American fiction writers Han Song, Hon Lai-chu, Li Juan, Ken Liu, Lo Yi-chin, Wang Bang, and Brian Kuan Wood. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue offer a heterogeneous view of contemporary art and culture from China, highlighting tensions between individual narratives and mainstream history as well as showing how the gaps between the two can be transcended.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
www.guggenheim.org

Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours @ Ullens Center for Contemporary Art - UCCA, Beijing

Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art - UCCA, Beijing
Through 19 November 2016

Through 19 November 2016, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) presents Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours, the artist's largest and most comprehensive exhibition anywhere to date and his first institutional solo show in Beijing. Including nearly sixty works borrowed from collections around thé world, it covers nearly thirty years of Zeng's creative output, winding through his extensive stylistic and thematic evolutions on canvas and in sculptural form. The main body of the exhibition in UCCA's Great Hall features key works from each major series in Zeng's career, presenting a complete picture of his creative exploration and artistic contribution, and referring to art-historical precedents from Hellenistic sculpture to Lucian Freud. It culminates in a room dedicated to a recent series of works on paper—never before exhibited in China—which mark a new engagement with the aesthetics of Chinese painting, and in the Nave, where a special space has been constructed to show two of his most substantial landscapes.

Its title inspired by that of an early painting he completed in 1990, "Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours" offers to bring the viewer along on the artist's creative journey. A key figure in the generation of artists who emerged, along with the very notion of "Contemporary Chinese Art," onto the world stage of the early 1990s, Zeng Fanzhi has consistently used his works to reflect on the social and cultural climate of his country through a highly personal visual language. His early paintings, completed during the late 1980s while he was a student at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, combine the pedagogical apparatus of socialist realism with a romantic interest in Western classicism and modernism to depict new realities of Reform-era Chinese society. Following his arrival on the Beijing scene in the early-1990s, Zeng Fanzhi quickly gained recognition for his "Masks" series, which gives symbolic form to the dichotomies and affectations of that era through figures in varying states of alienation. After this, Zeng Fanzhi continued his research info painting itself, producing the strikingly colored, tensely vibrating, monumentally scaled canvases of the "Abstract Landscapes" series. In recent years, he has combined the free-range brushstrokes of these landscapes with homages to works by masters including Leonardo DaVinci and Albrecht Durer, in a series of seven four-by-four-meter paintings that have been extensively exhibited abroad. The newest works in this exhibition consist of a grouping of paintings in ink on paper which signal an introspective shift in his practice. Today Zeng fulfills a role inhabited by artists throughout Chinese history: an aesthete among the worldly, offering uplift and solace through refinement.

Its design carefully authored by the artist's longtime collaborators Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, "Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours" rhythmically divides the expanse of UCCA's Great Hall into an immersive survey of his career. Six freestanding walls, each punctuated by a 2.4-meter square window, thoughtfully connect major shifts in the artist's practice. They are enclosed by a series of darker walls that run around the space's perimeter, chronologically presenting portraits from ail phases of Zeng's career. Having sought to avoid enclosed spaces, Tadao Ando has likened this layout to sections of an MRI scan that allow viewers to walk through layers of the artist's mind.

UCCA Director and exhibition curator Philip Tinari states, "UCCA is hugely excited to be presenting Zeng Fanzhi's most comprehensive exhibition to date anywhere in the world. His singular painterly vision connects his personal experience of living in contemporary China to centuries of artistic creation across many cultures, as art becomes a vehicle for exploring history and articulating taste. This exhibition offers not only an overview of his considerable talent, but a meditation on the importance of aesthetic cultivation in a messy world."

Regarding his survey, Zeng Fanzhi states, "Fortunately, I encountered painting in my youth and chose to embark on this creative path that now stretches for nearly thirty years. Along the way, I have discovered a place I call my own, where art serves as a guide through the long corridor of history, allowing one to traipse freely through time and space. My heart is filled with gratitude for the wonderment of this experience, and I hope by presenting this exhibition, which incorporates canvases from ail the major shifts in my practice, to share a fantastic visual journey with a global audience."

UCCA
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
www.ucca.org.cn

Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

Through April 6, 2014 

Zhang Huan, Chinese, born 1965

张洹家谱

Family Tree, 2001

Nine chromogenic prints

Sheet (each): 21 × 16 1/2 in. (53.3 × 41.9 cm)

Lent by The Walther Collection

Photo © Yale University Art Gallery

A major loan exhibition of contemporary Chinese art presenting works by 35 artists born in China is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Featuring 70 works in various media—paintings, calligraphy, photographs, woodblock prints, video, and sculpture—that were created during the past three decades, Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China demonstrates how China’s ancient pattern of seeking cultural renewal through the reinterpretation of past models remains a viable creative path. Although all of the artists have transformed their sources through new modes of expression, visitors can recognize thematic, aesthetic, or technical attributes in their creations that have meaningful links to China’s artistic past. The exhibition is organized thematically into four parts and includes such highlights as Xu Bing’s dramatic Book from the Sky (ca. 1988), an installation that fill an entire gallery; Family Tree (2000), a set of vivid photographs documenting a performance by Zhang Huan in which his facial features—and his identity—are obscured gradually by physiognomic texts that are inscribed directly onto his face; and Map of China (2006) by Ai Weiwei, which is constructed entirely of wood salvaged from demolished Qing dynasty temples.  

Maxwell K. Hearn, Douglas Dillon Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Asian Art, stated: “A unique feature of this landmark exhibition is the way in which it positions contemporary art from a non-Western culture within an encyclopedic art museum. Instead of being presented by the Metropolitan’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, Ink Art is curated by members of the Department of Asian Art and displayed in the Museum’s permanent galleries for Chinese painting and calligraphy, featuring artworks that may best be understood as part of the continuum of China’s traditional culture. While these works may also be appreciated from the perspective of global art, the curatorial argument is that, by examining them through the lens of Chinese historical artistic paradigms, layers of meaning and cultural significance that might otherwise go unnoticed are revealed. Ultimately, both points of view contribute to a more enriched understanding of these creations.” 

Liu Wei, Chinese, born 1965

刘炜花儿 (detail)

Untitled No. 6 "Flower", 2003

Accordion album of twenty-four leaves with silk brocade cover; pencil, acrylic, ink, and watercolor on paper

Image (each leaf): 9 5/8 × 6 1/2 in. (24.5 × 16.5 cm)

Lent by a private collection, New York

Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Section 1: The Written Word

Writing is China’s highest form of artistic expression as well as its most fundamental means of communication. Valued for both its semantic content and aesthetic significance, the written word conveys personal as well as public meaning. Given the inherent power of this universal medium, the written word—particularly brush-written calligraphy—has been a rich terrain for artistic exploration in China. The exhibition features key early works by Xu Bing (b. 1955), Gu Wenda (b. 1955), Qiu Zhijie (b. 1969), and Zhang Huan (b. 1965)—all of whom have found ways to subvert the semantic and aesthetic functions of language.

Section 2: New Landscapes

For more than one thousand years, landscape imagery has been used to convey values and moral standards, both of individuals and of society as a whole. Today, as China is being transformed by modernization, artists continue to mine the symbolic potential of landscape imagery to comment on the changing face of China and to explore the “mind landscape” of the individual. A rich selection of paintings, photographs, videos, and films in this section highlighted the diverse ways in which contemporary artists have drawn inspiration from earlier compositions and themes. On view are works by Ren Jian (b. 1955), Liu Dan (b. 1953), and Yang Yongliang (b. 1980), all of whom have revived and transformed the monumental handscroll format with powerful new imagery. This section also displays works by Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), Shi Guorui (b. 1964), and Xing Danwen (b. 1967) that offer stark commentaries on the impersonal nature of China’s expanding urban landscapes; and works by Fang Lijun (b. 1963), Yang Fudong (b. 1971), and Qiu Anxiong (b. 1972), who use woodblock printing, film, or video to explore man’s increasing disconnection from the natural environment. 

Yang Fudong, Chinese, born 1971

杨福东 留兰

Still from Liu Lan, 2003

Single-channel video, 35mm black-and-white film transferred to DVD, with sound; 14 min.

Lent by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Photo courtesy the artist

Section 3: Abstraction

Abstraction is at the heart of Chinese painting and calligraphy. Because the brush mark has always been recognized as a record of the artist’s hand, in addition to performing a descriptive or semantic role, both painting and calligraphy have been valued for their abstract expressive potential. Benefitting from such a rich tradition of exploiting the abstract and symbolic qualities of painting and writing, contemporary Chinese artists have been able selectively to adopt Western notions of nonfigurative art to augment and expand their expressive goals. The work by classically trained calligrapher Wang Dongling (b. 1945) included in this section exemplify those artists who have used their command of traditional techniques to create large-scale abstractions emphasizing the dynamic gestural qualities of calligraphy while divorcing the work from any suggestion of semantic signification. Two examples on view from the Divine Light series by Zhang Yu (b. 1959) feature circular or rectilinear forms that evoke cosmic events—an exploding star or a planet coalescing from a sphere of gaseous elements—that are at once beautiful and terrifying. 

Wang Dongling, Chinese, born 1945

王冬龄 守白

Being Open and Empty, 2005

Hanging scroll; ink on paper

Image: 87 1/4 × 57 in. (221.6 × 144.8 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the artist, 2013

Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Section 4: Beyond the Brush

A final component of the exhibition introduces works that neither fit into the above three thematic categories nor derive their primary identity from traditional forms of ink art; yet they exhibit an ink art aesthetic through their rich associations with Chinese literati pastimes or patronage. Highlights in this section are two performance-related pieces: an album by Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957) that envisions his plan for Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10, presented together with a three-channel video of the actual event; and Huang Yongping’s (b. 1954) 43-foot-long handscroll documenting his installation pieces from 1985 to 2001. Other works on view includes scholars’ rocks made from silicone or stainless steel by Zhang Jianjun (b. 1955) and Zhan Wang (b. 1962) and a dragon robe made of polyvinyl chloride by Wang Jin (b. 1962). 

Ai Weiwei, Chinese, born 1957

艾未未浪

The Wave, 2005

Glazed ceramic

H. 6 1/8 (15.7 cm); W. 16 7/8 in. (42.9 cm); D. 14 3/4 in. (37.6 cm)

Lent by a private collection, New York

Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Zhan Wang, Chinese, born 1962

展望假山石

Artificial Rock #10, August 8, 2001

Stainless steel; wood stand

H. 29 1/2 in. (75 cm); W. 17 11/16 in. (45 cm); D. 7 1/2 in. (19 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Friends of Asian Art Gifts, 2006

Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum will present a full-day public symposium with talks by leading scholars of Chinese contemporary art on February 21 and a Sunday at the Met program on February 23, as well as gallery talks, a studio workshop, an artist demonstration of calligraphy techniques, and a teen program called Ink Experiments.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.  

Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China is curated by Maxwell K. Hearn. 

The exhibition is featured on the Museum’s website: www.metmuseum.org

Artist Yu Fan, Amy Li Gallery, Beijing

Yu Fan: Floating Wall, Moving Sound 
Amy Li Gallery, Beijing
Curator: Liu Libin
Through September 3, 2013

Amy Li Gallery, Beijing, presents YU FAN Floating Wall, Moving Sound. As Yu Fan's first solo exhibition in Amy Li Gallery, it showcases five sculpture works including two very recent works Black Cats and Sitting Girls, which represent Yu Fan's new exploration of sculpture language. The exhibition is curated by Liu Libin - PHD of China Central Academy of Fine Art, well known art critic. 

The main difference of “Sculpture” as an art form from other artistic expressions is that: the sculptor reflects and creates on the basis of “physical form”, and the public sees it and perceives it on that same basis. The reality and fiction are two extremities of the “physical form”, and behind that lies the fascination of Yu Fan for extremities. If we consider “volume” as a straight line, reality and void are each at one end of that line. Take one point on that line, apply a rotation, and the two extremities are bound in a circle. Several “straight lines” then make a round surface, and that is three dimensional Yu Fan. These many lines could be internal questions about the art of sculpture, They could also be clues to Yu Fan's life, like career, ideals, etc. Each of these lines has two ends, the combination of which forms the borderline of the round surface. Yu Fan has a special predilection for this, and he touches it lightly, carefully. This “light and careful touch” is related to the atmosphere of vigor or pounding, sensitivity or morbidity that transcends his works.

Relief sculptures represent a large proportion of Yu Fan's works, and in this exhibition four works have been selected: Arthur in uniform, Leifeng Pagoda and Lily, Black Cats and Sitting girls. One can say that the first two still exudes the familiar characteristic of Yu Fan – namely freshness and purity, Black Cats and Sitting girls materialize Yu Fan's perspective, Black Cats shows a cat on a pedestal, and fixes seven positions of the cat falling to the ground. Chinese people believe that black cats can chase away evil spirits and sent them down South, making generations safe. But the fall of Yu Fan's black cat, its fear of falling, makes it seem closer to the Western interpretation. Sitting girls is composed by 16 girls’ relief sculptures. These girls are fashionably dressed, and are all in a reserved but desiring position, seemingly eager for something, to a certain extent, however keeping it in unspoken modesty. This again reminds me of Yu Fan “light and careful touch” towards the circumference. There are another two sculptures in this exhibition: Crane No.1 and Crane No.2. One is looking down, the other up, which corresponds precisely to what I was mentioning above, the reality and the void.

Place Yu Fan's works in an exhibition hall, and not only the relief sculptures will float, so will the walls; not only will you hear the sounds of nature, very clearly, these sounds will begin to move.

YU FAN is one of the most important artists leading the trend of chinese sulpture art. He was born in 1966 in Qingdao (Shandong province of China)，graduated from the Sculpture Department of CAFA, currently works and lives in Beijing as vice director and professor of CAFA's Sculpture Department. His works have participated in numerous important exhibitions and art fairs in China and other countries, many of them have been collected by important art institutions.

AMY LI GALLERY - 摘自
54 Caochangdi (old airport road, Caochangdi Art District), Chaoyang District
BEIJING 100015, CHINA
Gallery's website: www.amyligallery.com

Liu Wei at Lehmann Maupin, New York

Liu Wei
Lehmann Maupin, New York
February 28 – March 23, 2013

Liu Wei

Merely a Mistake, II, 2009-2011

doorframes, wooden beams, acrylic board, and stainless steel, dimensions variable.

Installation image from the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

Lehmann Maupin presents the first solo exhibition of Chinese artist Liu Wei’s work in the United States, on view at 540 West 26th Street from 28 February through 23 March 2013. The exhibition will feature an amalgamation of multi-media works created over the past year in the artist’s studio in Beijing. Three large-scale assemblages constructed from salvaged demolition debris, a continuation of the artist's Merely a Mistake series begun in 2009, will be the centerpieces of the installation in the main gallery space.

Liu Wei will be present for an opening reception on Thursday, 28 February from 6 to 8 PM.

Considered to be one of the most progressive and original Chinese artists to have emerged on the international art scene, Liu’s work has evolved over the past 15 years into a layered conceptual approach that transcends medium and material. Working across painting, sculpture, photography, installation and video, Liu is relentless in his pursuit of truth and engagement with reality. His exploration of urban life stems from the accelerated urbanization afflicting his immediate cityscapes and the instability of a rapidly changing society. Of the times, Liu has said, “We grew up when things were constantly changing and nothing seemed stabile. There was a turnaround in values every couple of years…. Today you’d believe in one thing and tomorrow you’d believe in something completely different.”

Critical of the systems on which contemporary society is structured, Liu employs whatever medium or technique is best suitable to call into question the fixed notion that there is one way to understand the world and one way to act. In his catalogue essay for Liu Wei: Trilogy presented in 2011 by Shanghai’s Minsheng Art Museum, Gunnar B. Kvaran writes:

Acutely aware of his place in history, but also concerned with breaking tradition, Liu intermingles artistic inventiveness and an engagement with serious social and political questions, inviting the public to take part in intersubjective relationships. He does so through a symbolic constellation of objects, created out of unexpected materials and placed in surprising configurations, that deal with universal topics such as power and politics, society and identity, history and memory, art and philosophy, or with more abstract notions like time, unpredictability, change and illusion.

Kvaran goes on to say that “each of his works is like a vessel loaded with intelligent and meaningful reflections on the human condition, and the power of his art lies in the originality of the forms, objects, materials, and narrative structures that he brings together.”

Lehmann Maupin’s exhibition highlights new work from the various series for which Liu has gained notoriety, including Exotic Lands, Jungle, China, Merely a Mistake, Beyond the Sky Limits, Truth Dimension, and Colors. The abstract imagery of his Truth Dimension and Colors paintings recall the vast skylines of the world’s metropolises, their vertical urban sprawl unfolding frenetically across horizontal panoramas; in sharp contrast, the muted bands of color in Beyond the Sky Limits appear as quiet ruminations on the natural landscape. For Liu, an engagement with architecture is a reoccurring thread, and the reclaimed doorframes, wooden beams and metal bolts that constitute Merely a Mistake take the form of pointed arches and flying buttresses, reminiscent of Baroque and Gothic architecture. Installed side-by-side, as opposed to grouped by series, the nearly two-dozen works on view form a collective reading of a profoundly complex artistic practice.

LIU WEIL (b. 1972, Beijing, China) graduated from the China Academy of Art in 1996, and came of age with the younger generation of Chinese artists showcased in the ground-breaking 1999 “Post-Sense Sensibility” exhibition in Shaoyaoju, Beijing. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world, most recently in a solo exhibition at the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2011), as well as at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010), National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2010), Saatchi Gallery, London (2008), Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2008), and Mudam Luxembourg, Luxembourg (2008), among others. He has participated in numerous international biennials, including the Shanghai Biennial (2010), the 6th Busan Biennial (2008), the Guangzhou Triennial, (2008), and the 51st Venice Biennial (2005). He received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for Best Artist in 2008, and was nominated for the Credit Suisse Today Art Award in 2011. The artist currently lives and works in Beijing.

LEHMANN MAUPIN
www.lehmannmaupin.com

Liu Wei & Ai Weiwei at Faurschou Foundation, Beijing

Liu Wei & Ai Weiwei: Works from the Collection
Faurschou Foundation, Beijing
13 October 2011 - 26 February 2012

The current show at Faurschou Foundation is the first show of works from the Faurschou Foundation collection, and thus marks the transition from commercial gallery to art foundation that Faurschou has now undergone. With the establishment of Faurschou Foundation, Luise and Jens Faurschou are realizing a long-held dream of devoting all their time, skills and networks to expanding and developing their collection of contemporary art, and creating exhibitions of a high international standard, both at the existing premises here in Beijing, and at the new exhibition space in Copenhagen which will open next year in September with a solo show by Cai Guo-Qiang.

In the future the exhibitions at Faurschou Foundation in Beijing and in Copenhagen will take their point of departure in the collection, and Luise and Jens Faurschou will be creating new exhibitions in collaboration with some of the best contemporary artists, curators, museums and galleries all over the world. For many years it has been the dream of Luise and Jens Faurschou to focus on the collection and its development, and the possibility of showing it. On the basis of the results and the collection created over the years, it has now become possible to realize this dream.

Faurschou Foundation currently presents works from the collection by Ai Weiwei and Liu Wei.

Entering the gallery the viewer is almost walking into Map of China, a large sculpture made out of Iron wood (Tieli wood) that Ai Weiwei has collected from dismantled temples of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

Many of Ai Weiwei's works from the past decade are made of local materials and of antique Chinese objects, Neolithic pottery, tables and chairs from the Ming and Qing Dynasties, wood, doors and windows from demolished temples and traditional houses, freshwater pearls, tea, marble, stone, bamboo etc. - 'ready-mades' trans¬lated into a conceptual, post-minimalist idiom.

Ai Weiwei points to the loss of culture by transforming the historical objects into something new - into moving and highly sensual contemporary artworks which thanks to their aesthetic beauty recirculate the meaning and history of these valuable cultural artifacts in the context of contemporary China.

From his recent grand-scale installation at TATE Modern in London earlier this year a field of porcelain handmade Sunflower Seeds covers the floor.

At TATE Modern Ai Weiwei installed a 100-ton thick layer of sun¬flower seeds on the floor - 100 million seeds - all made of porcelain produced and painted by hand in Jingdezhen.

The number of seeds is overwhelming, and yet 100 million is not even that many in the Chinese context. It is precisely in China that it is possible to produce such a labour-intensive work - and the work is very much about the relationship between the mass and the individual, and about China's increasing dominance in the world economy.

Sunflower Seeds is an incredibly beautiful, poetic work, simple, and with many layers of meaning connected to Chinese history.

Ai Weiwei has in the past years been engaged in the loss of lives after the Sichuan Earthquake. Namelist of student earthquake victims found by the citizen investigation, 2008 - is the names of students who died in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. The list has been collected by the citizen investigation volunteers. The date for the work is open ended as not all the identities of the students have been found out. Some names are not able to be found as entire families have disappeared after the earthquake. The government has never revealed the full list of victims of the earthquake, but only a number. The citizen investigation volunteer's aim is to give each number a name.

In the second part of the exhibition space - Don't Touch by Liu Wei hangs suspended from the ceiling.

Composed of sewn together ox-hides, Liu Wei's rendering of the Potala Palace in Tibet, Don't Touch, is the largest work to date from the artist's series of sculpted dog chews representing a disarray of global headquarters. The mock-ups demonstrate Liu Wei's early interest in questions of power, the relationship between landscape and architecture and the material condition of the visual.

Standing higher than any other palace in the world at over 3,700 meters above sea level, the Potala Palace is a conspicuous but almost passé religious, political, and cultural symbol, presented to the world with pride and yet a stain on the reputation of many. Perhaps dispelling politicization, perhaps creating a fantastical pseudo-religious object, perhaps pointing to a dystopian mutation stemming from a larger social lack of spiritual direction, we can't be sure. But Liu Wei "lets it hang", and advises, irony intended, "Don't touch".

FAURSCHOU FOUNDATION

www.faurschou.com

Chen Jiagang: Abandoned Fable. A retrospective exhibition at Han Art Gallery, Montreal, Québec

Chen Jiagang Retrospective: Abandoned Fable, Han Art Gallery, Montreal (Westmount), Québec, November 4 - December 3, 2011
 

CHEN JIAGANG was born in 1962 in Chongqing, Sichuan, China. The artist lives and works in Beijing. Han Art Gallery in Westmount (Québec) presents a retrospective exhibition featuring fifteen photographic works by Chen Jiagang. As one of today’s most renowned Chinese contemporary artists, Chen Jiagang is featured at the 12th Annual Toronto International Art Fair (TIAF 2011) through October 31, 2011 before his debut at Han Art Gallery.  Abandoned Fable opens on November 4th and concludes on December 3rd, 2011 

CHEN JIAGANG, Bridges, 2008. Photograph from The Great Third Front series. Courtesy and ©2008 Chen Jiagang. Courtesy  Han Art Gallery, Montreal

Chen Jiagang is a distinctive contemporary artist who consistently weaves a phenomenal historical analogue into his imagery.  In allowing time itself to disappear from space, Chen Jiagang composes a visual language full of complexity and contradiction that adds to this historical contemporary fable - a spatial narratology and an art form that relies on the cultural inheritance. His works narrate the impact of power and politics on environment, human inhabitation, gender balance and family development - all social perspectives that are systematically disseminated into the peoples’ spiritual realm of senses.  The artist utilizes language between certainty and uncertainty to rebel against dogmatic mainstream perspectives in a society where images are becoming increasingly standardized, to discard with the trend of commercialization in art, and to obtain independence with direction.   

In the past few years, the artist made many trips to the factories, mines and small villages in the mountains and in the valleys of Yuanan, Guizhou and Sichuan.  These provinces in particular, which once served as a strategic epicenter of industry in the 1960s determined by Chinese national politics, now find themselves in a vastly different circumstance. 

Trained as an architectural designer, Chen Jiagang regards memories as the most authentic source in human life and believes that images act to preserve these memories.  Aside from bringing to attention intensely social and political issues, his works explore these issues from various perspectives, taking a distanced standpoint to explain history, enabling him to express his aesthetic need on the basis of an intensely personal experience.     

In regards to technique, Chen Jiagang often chooses to capture his images when the sun has just set, immediately after the clouds have emitted the last rays of light and warmth over the deserted and abandoned space.  It is common for him to portray a powerful contrast between subject and space, as demonstrated in his depiction of young women dwarfed by industrial ruins from the past. For example, in one of his works, a woman is portrayed pacing back and forth, seeming reluctant to leave the place she finds herself. Sinking into the darkness and disappearing into her surroundings, the woman is a subtle sign and yet a vibrant creature who breathes life into the remaining walls and majestic ruins filled with traces of the past. The corner store is now deserted, and the path leading towards the space serves only as a football field. These oft-frequented places of the past now remain abandoned and forlorn. Chen Jiagang uses this imagery to compose the bitter sound of a mournful elegy without emitting a single sound. A period which would otherwise be forgotten as history is captured in a moment where people and space observe one another silently with indignation. 

In a country that is presently experiencing one of the highest rates of development in the world, it is not surprising that the works of Chen Jiagang prompts the viewer to question the usefulness and absurdity of this mad race towards development that humanity has been pursuing for decades. His works are deeply entrenched in the new preoccupation of Contemporary Chinese artists, preoccupations that are social, political, and environmental.  As a successful architect and contemporary art collector from the start, Chen Jiagang now exhibits his most recent accomplishments - a monumental photographic product that is entrenched in a powerful aesthetic and conceptually loaded with meaning and inquiry. 

The works of Chen Jiagang have been exhibited in renowned museums and galleries across the globe—including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, and the Art Gallery of Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing.  His works have been consistently purchased by private collectors throughout his career.  Most recently, Chen Jiagang’s works were featured in the Red Flag exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal. A landmark exhibition, Red Flag served as the first show to bring Contemporary Chinese Art and Quebecois aesthetic together under one roof.  During this exhibition, Chen Jiagang’s works were featured alongside some of the most well-known Contemporary Chinese artists, including Gu Wenda, Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan, Xu Bing, Wang Tiande and the Gao brothers.  

In this retrospective solo exhibition at the Han Art Gallery in Québec, fifteen major works have been selected to showcase the essential and integral value of Chen Jiagang’s creativity in the first several chapters of his career. 

HAN ART GALLERY
Westmount, Québec, Canada  H3Z 1P6www.hanartgallery.com

Feng Mengbo, Long March: Restart large-scale video game installation at MoMA PS1

Feng Mengbo , Long March: Restart MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY 
December 12, 2010 -  April 4, 2011

MoMA PS1 presents the New York debut of Feng Mengbo’s installation Long March: Restart (2008), a large-scale, interactive video game installation. Recently acquired by MoMA and presented for the first time since entering the Museum’s collection, Long March is a fully functioning video game created by the Beijing-based artist who is known for his long-time engagement with digital technology. Feng Mengbo is on view in the first floor Painting Gallery beginning December 12, 2010.

LONG MARCH borrows imagery from arcade favorites like Street Fighter II and Super Mario Bros., along with propaganda motifs of Communist China. Feng invites visitors to direct the hero of the game—a Red Army soldier—via a wireless controller and combat the myriad enemies in his digital path. Comprising eight large-scale projections, the work creates an immersive environment in which visitors are dwarfed by the video game graphics. Like many popular games, Long March is a “horizontal scroller,” in which the hero moves from one side of the screen to the other. This movement is made physical through the scale of the installation. As the player directs the Red Army soldier across the game’s landscape, the player is forced to walk along with the character in order to keep the soldier in clear view and literally keep pace with the action.

FENG MENGBO (Chinese, b. 1966) lives and works in Beijing. He has been exhibiting his art for nearly two decades. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at such institutions as the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; and the Dia Center for the Arts, New York. He has also participated in the 45th Venice Biennale; the 1st and 3rd Guangzhou Triennials; Documenta X and Documenta 11; Ars Electronica 2004; Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection that debuted at Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; and Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China at the International Center for Photography, NY; among other exhibitions. 

Feng Mengbo is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art. 

Opening Day Celebration: Sunday, December 12 from 12 pm to 6 pm

Major support for the exhibition is provided by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art. 

MoMA PS1 Long Island City
New York 11101
www.ps1.org

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