The 5th Beijing Gallery Week officially opened on April 27, 2021. This year's Gallery Week in Beijing brings together a total of 37 galleries, non-profit institutions, and independent art institutions. In addition to the exhibitions in the major units, Gallery Week Beijing also extends the exhibition project to the digital field. This year's single reading and going to see the exhibition again! Today, I would like to share with you a few interesting works, hoping that in the post-epidemic era when life is gradually returning to normal, we can re-experience the feeling of entering the art scene.
The Great Wave and the Aftersound – Postmodernism and the Global 80s
Beijing Middle Art Museum
As its title suggests, it's a huge, ambitious exhibition. The exhibition presents the experimental work of artists from China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Russia, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Chile and other countries in the 1980s. It's as if you're looking around the world from the perspective of a "tourist," looking for the energies of the 1980s scattered around the world and smoothly and subtly incorporating them into the global discourse of postmodernism. Since the beginning of the 1980s, with the intensification of the global expansion and penetration of capital, the cultural logic and ideological style of postmodernism have accelerated in all corners of the world. It not only provides an ideological framework for reflecting on the single logic of modernization, but also dissolves the boundaries between different forms of artistic practice, and artists boldly use "collage" and "appropriation" techniques to mock the seriousness of art itself.
In the exhibition, we can see the photographs left by The Japanese photographer Keizo Kitajima who studied under Moriyama Avenue when he went deep into the countries of Eastern Europe before and after the upheavals of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; the "Apartment Art Group" that was forced by the current situation in the former Soviet Union to use apartments as a creative and exhibition space; and the portrait of widows created by C.A.D.A(Art Action Group) who raided and occupied newspapers and magazines. — She lost her husband in a march against Pinochet's military dictatorship... Here, everything can become a kind of artistic practice and medium, and the whole exhibition is mixed with installation, performance, video, body art and other forms.
The global presentation of exhibits requires, on the one hand, to actively intervene and try to understand each specific political and cultural context, and at the same time to hint at the possibility of re-integrating it as a whole. These experimental creations break through the authoritarian system of art history interpretation, seemingly lacking a holistic purpose, but when they converge in the same exhibition space, the chemical reactions they produce are staggeringly enormous. The exhibition space is filled with overlapping sound effects, dark images from the 1980s constantly stimulating the eyes, and in the face of real physical sensations, the language of explaining the theory of esoteric art seems particularly pale and powerless – because the whole exhibition is a 1980s era slice and condensed capsule.
Guo Hongwei: Lively
Magic Stone Space
Entering the magic stone space, "lively" becomes a very cute pun. On the one hand, it is the name of a water pavilion in the west of suzhou lingering garden, and on the other hand, it is used as an adverb, which coincides with the overall style and spiritual temperament of the exhibition. "Lively" exhibits Guo Hongwei's paintings in recent years. In terms of creative content, he focuses on the untimely and differentiated situations, and the overall style is based on bright tones and free lines, and achieves accurate deduction in connotation and emotion.
Almost all of the paintings on display are impressive, and the free-growing curve is a common element of each work. The largest work in the exhibition hall, Dance No. 1 (2021), is derived from a scene in the film Sister Joanna (1961) in which a group of nuns in white robes happily rotate and jump. In the painting, the nuns' expressions are erased and their postures are shown in fluttering sleeves. However, through the magical combination of curves, abstract sleeves, faces and body lines reveal an incomparably exuberant rhythm and intoxicating pleasure. The religious laws of asceticism are dissolved and shattered with the incomparably gentleness of the seductive pink blocks and the flexible curves of the ice cream. At the same time, thanks to the huge scale of the work, it can fill all your visual senses in the most primitive and effective way, so that everyone who sees it can regain the long-lost, innocent amazement. - This painting is so beautiful!
Katashi Mountain House - Exhibition of Shen Qin Chen Qi's works
Asian Arts Center
"Piece stone mountain house - Shen Qin • Chen Qi works exhibition" is the third double solo exhibition held by the two painters. The exhibition began when two artists traveled to Yangzhou's garden "Piece Stone Mountain House" in May 2020, a classical garden building originally built in the Ming Dynasty. The stacked stones in the garden are said to have come from the hands of Shi Tao, a great painter of the Qing Dynasty. Feeling the towering green peaks of the single peak and the beautiful reflection of the clear pond, the two artists immediately met to create under the theme of "Piece Stone Mountain House", and held an exhibition to pay tribute to Shi Tao.
The exhibition space was transformed by Korean architect Jeong Dong-hyun based on the existing structure of the exhibition hall, and the black-based space may initially make people want to retreat, but as soon as you enter it, you can quickly appreciate the mystery. The zigzag and extended spatial structure, combined with the staggered lighting arrangement of light and shade, makes every painting appear full of surprises. In the exhibition space, "the beginning is extremely narrow, only to understand people", but as long as you patiently "repeat dozens of steps" can be "suddenly enlightened". The huge work "Stone Mountain House", which suddenly appears in front of the eyes after passing through a narrow corridor, makes people feel as if they have traveled to an open new world in a trance. This masterpiece placed on the curved exhibition wall adopts the method of watermark woodcut, and when the delicate shadows and subtle brushstrokes work together to complete the magic of time and space transformation, the exhibition space becomes a sparkling ink garden world. The ingenious space design not only makes the "dialogue" and "integration" between the two artists with different styles visible, but also creates an immersive viewing experience, so that the works have obtained richer expression.
Not sure about the imperfect fragments of the whole
Raphael Domenek – Hul Space
Huer Space brings artist Raphael Domenek's first Solo Exhibition in China, "Imperfect Fragments of an Uncertain Whole." From the moment you enter the exhibition space, you can immediately experience the sense of surprise that breaks through the convention. The artist transforms building materials and life scenes into experimental publications, including handmade art books placed on the showcases of the middle exhibition space, light installations hidden in the lower exhibition space, and ceilings with poems engraved over the heads of the audience.
Each visitor is immersed in a huge installation in the exhibition hall and immediately becomes part of the "uncertain whole". The artist invites the audience to intervene in the exhibition, which is not only reflected in the ingenious space design, but also in the process of interacting with the exhibits by each audience. To see the full contents of the exhibition, you may meet other people in the winding exhibition area, you may need to move the art book inlaid with stones and tear apart the pages that are deliberately glued. In order to see the lighting installations and the poetry on the ceiling, you may be tempted to bend down and crouch on the ground to find out, or keep looking up at the stars. Through the interaction between the space, the exhibits and the viewer, the artist transforms the visitor's constantly wandering body within the space into part of the exhibition, while also breaking the inherent hierarchy between the artwork and the audience, providing a more equal and dynamic communication platform.
"Bubble is bubble is bubble is bubble"
Aspartame – The Hive Center for Contemporary Art
The Hive Center for Contemporary Art brings art group Aspartame's "Bubbles are Bubbles Are Bubbles", an exhibition that includes a series of sculptures using foam as a material in the artist's latest art project. The sculptures, born of white plastic foam, are delicately arranged to create a natural and human scene that is full of reverie: they can be sand dunes, rocks or the waves of the sea in the middle of the sea; they can be the ruins of the old city, the dilapidated Roman columns, or even the childlike building blocks. Artists generously made public the method of creating sculpture, carving industrial foam from curved electric heating wire and spraying it with real lacquer to color it.
And this way of creating simplicity still makes the foam sculpture show a strong tension. It begins by challenging the seriousness of sculpture as an artistic medium with a deep history—the scarcity of sculpture that should have existed for a long time is made of a universal industrial bubble that is immediately produced and discarded. But perhaps it was the simplicity and convenience that bubbles were everywhere that attracted artists. As curator Yu Fei put it, "If the mold used by plastic foam is lost, the materials that are more valued, have greater quality and higher value will not be able to be endowed." "Bubbles become the true form of life in a philosophical sense. Exquisite sculptures and precious furniture made of foam molds, although they will last longer than foam, they are only the shadow of foam after all. The bubble sculpture, like the dunes, rocks and waves it represents, becomes a direct eternal existence.