On the afternoon of February 26th, the solo exhibition of the works of three artists, PennEn of China, Park Kyung-geun of South Korea and Larick of Austria, was held at the shanghai pavilion of OCAT (Oct Center for Contemporary Art) in the Suhewan area, and the exhibition attracted many Chinese and foreign audiences to come and observe. The exhibition ends on May 8.
Park Kyung-geun: "When the Tiger Is Still Smoking"
The exhibition "When the Tiger Is Still Smoking" features several important video and installation works by Korean artist Park Kyung-geun. These works revolve around the shaping of the self, leading the audience to explore the intertwined relationship between "self" and "other" in the process of continuous reflection, overthrow and reconstruction, and also launch a multi-angle discussion of modern people's self-cognitive anxiety and identity issues.
The first thing you will see when you enter the exhibition hall is Park Kyung-geun's new creation of the "Moving Things" series (2021), which attempts to disassemble the shaping process of self-knowledge through the observation and imagination of animals, as well as re-examine the positioning of human beings in the natural world. The Ladder of Heaven (2016) returns to the context of human society, exploring from a more personal perspective how the relationship between the individual and others and the collective is influenced by social systems, traditions, popular culture, etc., as well as the internalization of this influence and the loss of the self. The important works of the early years, "The Murmur of Cheonggyecheon" (2010) and "1.6 Seconds" (2016), imagine the relationship between man and industrial production from different angles, of which the former euphemistically dissects the development of Modern Andern industry in South Korea by showing the daily life of the korean industrial and commercial agglomeration, that is, the Cheonggyecheon area of Seoul, and re-examines the worship of the collective grand cause represented by industry in the process of modernization; the latter is dominated by the assembly line of highly mechanized factories. Imagine the mutual viewing between man and machine and the self-positioning of man in a modern production and living environment.
TLarrick: "Exoskeleton"
Exoskeleton is the first solo exhibition by Austrian artist Oliver Larijk at a Chinese art institution and the first presentation of a trilogy of animated images created by Larejk between 2014 and 2021. The gradual process of these three video films can also be understood as the decline of animation culture and its technical means in a more macroscopic framework. Accompanying the film are five sculptures created by Larick for 3D scanning and photogrammetry of sculptures in the museum's collection.
The five sculptural works presented in lareque's exhibition, using sculptural prototypes that have long been considered open and editable source materials, linking European naturalist sculpture to ancient Egyptian, Greek or Roman paradigms. By emphasizing the temporary state of each sculpture, Larick also incorporates his interest in various ideologies and social systems. Together, these sculptural forms construct a vocabulary that allows the artist to question not only the concept of sculpture as a solid thing, but also how change and fluidity, as eternal drivers of the operation of global cross-cultural practices, flow against the boundaries between nature and culture.
T Payne: "Matching Pool"
"Matching Pool" is the name of the solo exhibition by Chinese artist Payne, which combs through three groups of works to sort out and reinterpret the concept of "matching" through the two figurative creative situations of "arena" and "dance hall".
The exhibition "Matching Pool" divides the entire space into three interconnected "sub-pools", which retroactively show the form, rules and causes of this driving force. In The Reich dressing room, African-American bodybuilders display their toned bodies in enclosed transparent spaces, with swollen muscle groups and soaked sweat depicting the "body" as an iconographic vessel—containing muscle-enhancing tonics and the drive attached to the "libidinal ecology," such as the shaping of the perfect body, the competition for professional competitions, and the need for support for the economic system. Continuing to enter the enclosed black box space, the new work "Matching Pool" intends to restore the dark and indistinguishable dance hall scene in reality, which not only maintains a unique environment of "yes and no, not and no", but can also be regarded as the realistic matrix of the paid matching platform. The walls around the matching pool shimmer with gray-white fluid-like figures, presenting a blurry state of "then and then"—both close to an unexpected number generation and resembling a well-defined mixed dance hall entity. The exhibition leaves questions here: is there a clear boundary outline (rules) in the matching pool, and why and how are the pulling forces that cause imbalances in seemingly reciprocal paid matches aggregated and distributed?