November: Art exhibitions in Shanghai「Volume 1」
In early November, Shanghai seemed to be the center of art, filled with exhibitions and art fairs. Traditional and surrealist art forms interweave to create a strong and exciting artistic atmosphere throughout the city. Song Kun’s solo exhibition PURE LAND · TEARS OF SEA-MAID co-organized by Qiao Space and Perrotin; BANK’s Fly only when the shades of night gather by Yitian Sun; OTA FINE ARTS’s Strangers of the Metaverse; a joint exhibition presented by Longlati Foundation; “RADIANCE: The Basquiat Show” Jean Michel Basquiat’s masterpiece exhibition and selected items from the Hong Kong Autumn auction by Christie’s; West Bund Art Museum exhibited Chen Wei’s “Make Me Illusory” and so on. ArtGee will take you through the highlights of these diverse exhibitions.
- QIAO SPACE|SONG KUN — PURE LAND · TEARS OF SEA-MAID
Pure Land stems from the tradition of Animism; it also draws from the description of the pure land in Buddhism — — “the pure land world of self-luminescence that people can’t imagine”. What variations have this world become today? And how do the human spirit and body evolve in contemporary life, where traditions and nature, online media and information, industry and technology interweave with one another? I’m interested in the multi-layered experience of the human body, the organism and the robotic order. Using the ancient imagination of “Tears of Sea-maid”, I try to re-interpret this concept in the context of contemporary art, and invite musicians, dancers and models to collaborate on this exhibition. How can our perceptions, imaginations and emotions be truly and freely expressed? And how should the mixed identity break through narrow definitions when it comes to reality — Song Kun
“In Song’s work, “women” is not a social identity, but a continuously generated dimension beyond boundary, spanning from personal experiences to the grand narrative.”
Song Kun crosses different forms and media, combining art with sound, installation, video and so on, trying to create a new dimension. There, human bodies are no longer confined single symbols, they are perceptual beings, the ideal beauty created by artists.
2. BANK |YITIAN SUN— Fly only when the shades of night gather
“When philosophy paints grey pictures with grey paint, this form of life becomes old. Using gray to paint gray cannot make life pattern become young, but can only be regarded as the object of understanding. Minerva’s owl does not take off until dusk.” — Hegel
Sun Yitian takes Hegel’s beautiful metaphor of philosophy as inspiration for her much-anticipated second solo exhibition at BANK. The owl has always been a sagacious creature in Western mythology due to its close association with Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom.
Hegel claims that (the owl) wisdom takes wing with dusk, or that the meaning and purpose of an era can come only in hindsight, at the close of that epoch. Sun frames her exhibition with images of an owl on one side and a depiction of Minerva- not only the goddess of wisdom but of the arts, trade, and war — on the other.
3. OTA FINE ARTS — Strangers of the Metaverse
The title of the exhibition, “Strangers of the Metaverse”, is inspired by the classical science fiction novel Snow Crash by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. The novel constructs a new form of the internet in the future, an immense virtual world called “Metaverse”. Everyone living in this reality has a corresponding cyber identity, otherwise known as an “Avatar”. Based on a sequentially reversed time order of “Metaverse”, thirteen artists jointly present a cyber foreign land shaped by Martin Goya Business through a variety of non-traditional media including painting, image, installation, and animation.
Nearly 30 years after the birth of world wide web, the many technological predictions of the novel Snow Crash — virtual reality, digital currency and avatars, are now a reality. Its impact has been so broad that current science and technology have also adopted similar name concepts invented by the novel. In recent years, more and more contemporary artists have combined artistic creation with their foresight of network technology and an understanding of their own culture, to reshape and influence future technologies.
4. Longlati Foundation — Behind This Wall
The Longlati Foundation is delighted to launch Behind This Wall, a collection of artists including Derrick Adams (born Baltimore, Maryland, 1970), Amoako Boafo( born Akra Osu, Ghana, 1984) and Vaughn Spann (born Orlando, Florida, USA, 1992), who explore and redefine the concept of Blackness through portraiture. The group show will feature iconic works by the three artists as well as recent commissions by the Longlati Foundation to promote one of the key themes that has long influenced its collection and sponsorship programs — the promotion of minority and multiple minority cultures. At the same time, the group exhibition will show how the different carriers of identity are interconnected and intertwined to produce the body of the body that is inscribed for our time.
5. WEST BUND MUSUEM x CENTRE POMPIDOU |CHEN WEI— Make Me Illusory
Artist Chen Wei will present a series of new works specially created for Gallery0 of West Bund Museum Project. The exhibition invites visitors to enter the artist’s fictional immersive environment and, through images, multimedia installations and scenes, ponder and discuss the ways in which people communicate in contemporary cities.
In this exhibition, Chen Wei continues his previous observation of the city. He thinks about the change of life style from the perspective of an artist — when people are faced with the blocking of communication space, do individuals living behind screens still need to have intimate relationship and real interaction? What is the role of immediacy and zero distance, so admired in the digital age?
6. Christies|Jean-Michel— Basquiat: RADIANCE & Selected items from Hong Kong autumn auction
Christie’s is delighted to collaborate with HomeArt again this autumn, to present the groundbreaking exhibition Radiance: The Basquiat Show at The Peninsula Shanghai from 11–12 November, showcasing an exceptional, historical group of eleven masterpieces which cover the most important years of the artist’s career, from 1981 to 1986. The exhibition coincides with Shanghai Art Week in November — poised to be the talk of the town for art lovers, to build upon the exhibition’s success when it was first held in Hong Kong this May.
Following the acclaim received by the exhibition in Hong Kong this May, the Shanghai edition will showcase Basquiat’s artistic oeuvre through his eleven large-scale monumental pieces that span across the key stages of his artistic exploration, including several works produced in 1982, a watershed year that embodies a crescendo in his career.
