Evolving from the imaginative sensibilities of the artists to offer a contemporary reading of various conditions and dynamics within fiction and fact, the exhibition reconsiders the notion and inspiration of what locality implies and means today.
In a global era characterized by a constant stream of frequent flyers, mobility and migration, our understanding of what or how a location is made distinctive for each of us has significantly shifted and transformed. This set in motion the exhibiting artists to further question the value of the social and cultural displacements that are becoming common in a streamlined mapping of new experiences, expectations and representations.
Are we all in need of a new frontier? All signs point to yes. By the use of real or fictional narratives, imagined sites and geographical contexts, the exhibition probes the physical and mental experiences of artists pushing forward the frontiers of their worlds to deconstruct stereotypes and subvert the notion of belonging to a specific locality/community/culture. These artists will unpack what we take for granted and tackle the issue of location at large as well as the concept of otherness (me, you, us and them).
Fostering and keeping in mind the artistic plurality of the complexity in question, rather than applying a comprehensive, and thus limiting, theme upon the artists, we choose to unravel the dialogical attempts along the lines of the perceived collective, which actively operates under interdisciplinary associations. An exhibition on locality as speculative imagination, what has been created is not thematic, but to put it boldly a poly-thematic exhibition arranged around the artworks; it examines the artistic attitudes and strategies when dialogues are formed, which are then expanded to operate within the entirety of the gallery.
Here and under the night breeze, images are not simply to be seen but to be experimented within an environment of drifting, inspiration or suspicion. To create a never-ending voyage dedicated to the ramification of visual resonances.
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Courtesy of Tang Contemporary Art, Photo: www.artspy.cn
About the Artists
Chen Wenbo
Born in Chongqing, China in 1969, Chen Wenbo graduated from the Department of Art Education, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1990 and currently works and lives in Beijing, China. In the new epoch, the old are replaced by the new. To radically abandon the old is to rush to an unprecedented new world. A sense of urgency ticks as the steps of history die away and people begin to pose differently to change, forget, march forward, waggle and decorate themselves with trendy and superficial elegance. Chen loves to paint the material portrait of the age or rather the portrait of world materialization. A coat over coat, he is creating a world even more bizarre than the reality. Meanwhile, everything is simplified according to his standards until we can feel nothing behind this novel coat.
Lin Yilin
Born in Guangzhou, China in 1964, Lin Yilin graduated from the Department of Sculpture, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1987. Currently he lives and works in New York, Guangzhou and Beijing. In 1990, Lin belonged to one of the art collectives, the “Big Tail Elephant Group”, responding to and addressing the phenomena of urbanization ever since Guangzhou’s reform and opening up in early 1990s. Lin Yilin’s works repeatedly use materials such as “brick”, and every time he makes bricks mixed with other materials such as money, water, TV, cycling in order to create what he calls “social construction”.
Liu Chuang
1978 Born in Hubei, China, 2001. Graduated from Hubei Institute of Fine Arts and currently lives and works in Beijing.
Sun Yuan & Peng Yu
Sun Yuan was born in Beijing, China in 1972 and graduated from the Fourth Studio, Department of Oil Painting at Central Academy of Fine Arts. Peng Yu was born in Heilongjiang Province, China in 1974 and graduated from the Third Studio, Department of Oil Painting at Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1998. Currently they both work and live in Beijing, China. Sun Yuan & Peng Yu belongs to one of the most important artists group born after the 1970s. It’s difficult for us to find a word or sentence that can sum up their work from the appearance of characters. This is not to say that Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s work has no features or is difficult to understand, but because Sun Yun and Peng Yu’s works are constantly challenging our conventional visual experience in terms of material selection or creative ideas.
Although Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in the trial of their art, the material is always changing in various forms, however, the subject of their work is the eternal. They have been working as pioneers in expressing breakthrough over outmoded artistic contexts to emphasize the impact of real artistic experiments on social aesthetic inertia and thinking.
Yan Lei
Born in Langfang, Hebei Province in 1965.Yan Lei graduated from China Academy of Art, Hangzhou in 1991 and was awarded the Most Outstanding Artist Award of Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) in 2002. He presently lives and works in Beijing. Yan Lei art-making stretches across various media including behavior, photography, painting, sculpture and installation and his works maintain his consistent sharp ridicule and questioning towards the artists in the contemporary art world, their creations and power relations. Yan Lei invented a technique of monochrome painting: he outlined a number of areas from the pictures that he collected according to different brilliance, followed by marking out the different numbers and then cultivated in different gray scale colors. Thus a certain number of colors will be painted in a certain number in a work area and an artwork can be completed.
Yang Jiechang
Born in Foshan, Guangzhou in China in 1956, Yang Jiechang graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1982 and has taught there. Since 1989, he has settled abroad, working in Paris and Heidelberg, Germany. He learned calligraphy art. He has taken part in many international exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennial and Venice Biennial and his works are collected by renowned art galleries at home and abroad. Attending to the details of life has been his constant style. He was engaged in contemporary ink-wash experimentation and production in his early years, while in the 1990s he went to study in Europe. He has brought the traditional painting skills of Chinese ink-wash, calligraphy and fine brushwork with iconography into a brand-new artistic approach.
Zheng Guogu
Born in Yangjiang, Guangdong Province, China in 1970, Zheng Guogu graduated from the Department of Printmaking, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1992. Currently living in his hometown Yangjiang City. Nearly all of his works are being described as stories that occurred in Yangjiang, or maybe this is the drama in life. He puts countless life situations onto his photo works, and performances, the fantasy and brutality of reality. Behind the manipulative techniques of the photographic paper, it’s Zheng Guogu’s serious opinion about contemporary life. Their works, usually staying away from grand narratives and sharp critical stance, tends to seek a theme out of grassroots and marginal civil society landscapes. He has been invited to Documenta Kassel, Venice Biennale, Gwangju Biennial, Lyon Biennale and exhibitions held in many international art galleries.
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Rirkrit Tiravanija is a contemporary artist residing in New York, Berlin and Chiang mai, Thailand. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961.His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music. Architecture or structures for living and socializing are core elements in his work. Tiravanijas installations of the early-1990s involved cooking meals for gallery-goers. Tiravanijas work has been presented widely at museums and galleries throughout the world including solo exhibitions at Musee dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris(2005),Serpentine Gallery, London(2005), Secession, Vienna(2002), and The Museum of Modern Art, New York(1997).He has participated in such notable group exhibitions as the Sharjah Biennial 8,United Arab Emirates(2007), 27th Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil(2006),Whitney Biennial 2006, Day for Night, New York(2005), and the 50th Venice Biennale(2003).
Sakarin Krue-on
An artist does not merely focus on the process of feeling and creating experimental art, but meanwhile his works raise questions on the environment they are in. As an instructor and department head of the Department of Art in Thailand, Silpakorn University, Krueon tried to pass on some information from "Erotic Purity" in early stages to latter exhibitions, so as to influence the discussion on how to ensure continuous development of traditional forms in a contemporary context of words and aesthetics. This was never seen before in history. After accomplishing his next idea, this was only the outset of the artist's dry humor and ironic style. His subsequent works tend to reflect the ever-increasing greediness, consumerism and opportunism in society.
About the Exhibition
Opening: 2012-5-19 16:00:00
Duration: 2012-05-19 - 2012-06-30
Venue: Tang Contemporary Art
