During the 59th Venice Biennale, African-American artist Simone Leigh won the Golden Lion Award for Best International Exhibitor at the Venice Biennale Theme Exhibition, and she has always regarded black women as the target audience for her work; artist Chen Shiying launched the art exhibition "TOTEM" (TOTEM) in Venice, presenting her titanium sculptures in the form of large-scale site-specific installations. In China, the documentary "People Dealing with the Silk Road" premiered, presenting the archaeological story of the Silk Road strung together by yidilis, Guo Wu, Han Jianhua, Hu Xingjun, Yu Tengfei, Ma Qiang and other front-line archaeologists.
The Paper, Art Review, "Art Figures of the Week", reports on and analyzes the art topic figures and hot events at home and abroad in the past week.
Venetian | artist Simone Leigh
Winner of the Golden Lion Award for Best International Exhibitor at the Venice Biennale, he has always focused on black women
Recently, the 59th Venice Biennale held an award ceremony in which African-American artist Simone Leigh won the Golden Lion Award for Best International Exhibitor in the Theme Exhibition.
Simone Leigh
Born in Chicago in 1967, Simone Lee graduated from Earlham College in Indiana in 1990 with a degree in art and a second degree in philosophy, and now lives and works in New York. She is one of the artists currently attracting much attention in the market: a small bust sells for $400,000, and a large work sells for about $750,000. Simone Leigh's work often explores social issues such as history, race, and gender. She analyzes the construction of black female subjects in many ways through sculpture, video and performance, and presents them with traditional African materials and artistic craftsmanship, redefining the concepts of space, time and existence.
Large bronze bust of a black woman in brick house (2019)
At the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, Simone Leigh brings works with a strong African character in an exhibition called "Sovereignty" – a bronze sculpture in the front yard and five halls inside display ceramics, bronze and figurative works made of lafite. The artist brought the two cultures together in the hope that in this way the cultural missing in the historical record would be filled. In the Venice Biennale-themed exhibition "Milk of Dreams," Simone Leigh also presented a large bronze bust of a black woman, Brick House (2019). The piece was unveiled in New York's High Line Park in 2019. She has always seen black women as the target audience for her work. "Their traditions are excluded from archives or history," Simone Leigh said in an interview with The New York Times as she sought to explore the tools of survival for these women. In fact, whether it is large-scale sculptures, performances, videos, or works with radical colors, black women are always the protagonists of their creations. (Text/Qian Xue'er)
Venetian | artist Chen Shiying
Titanium sculptures are unveiled in Venice
Recently, Chinese artist Chen Shiying launched the art exhibition "TOTEM" in Venice, presenting his titanium sculptures in the form of large-scale field-specific installations.
Artist Chen Shiying
"TOTEM" refers to a long-standing vehicle of primitive age gods. The title connects the different dimensions of Chen Shiying's Buddhist philosophy, including reverence for the natural world and the excavation of the inner spirituality of sculpture. The exhibition features a large-scale installation consisting of parts from Chen Shiying's 10-meter titanium sculpture Titanium XIV, A Dialogue between Matter and Time, scattered across a specific spatial field in Fondaco Marcello.
The sense of power of Chen Shiying's large-scale installation does not come from a single image, but is generated by the combined relationship between multiple parts. Once dismantled, the sculpture's integrity as a unified image ceases to exist, suggesting the fragility and impending collapse of the past order. The work is a metaphor for the disintegration and imbalance experienced by today's society under global issues such as polarization and climate change. "The concept of the exhibition stems from my personal contemplation and curiosity about the mysteries of life, nature and the universe. I focus on exploring the mysteries of matter and form, as well as understanding the difference between imaginary space and real physical matter. Chen Shiying said.
Chen Shiying's art installation
Ungrouped iron beams and intricately carved titanium heads are scattered across the ground space, and the viewer is invited to get up close and personal with the elements in the sculpture from different angles.
Known for his jewelry creations, Chen Shiying's large-scale sculptural art exhibition "Titanium: Dialogue between Matter and Time" kicked off in Fondaco Marcello in Venice, Italy, in 2021 and was exhibited at the Canary Wharf Public Art Project in London in early 2022. (Finishing/Qian Xueer)
Beijing | artist Ma Shuqing
The solo exhibition "3+1" opened, and the painting focused on the three major elements of time, space and color
On April 23, Ma Shuqing's exhibition "3+1" in Beijing opened, the name of the exhibition points to the configuration of three complete spaces and one channel of the exhibition venue, and the omission of the "formula" ('=' part) in the rigorous mathematical formula of "3+1" also indicates Ma Shuqing's creative method of embracing an open ending with formal material integration.
Artist Ma Shuqing
In 1976, Ma Shuqing graduated from Tianjin Arts and Crafts School, stayed in the art creation group to engage in painting creation, and participated in many national art exhibitions with solid realistic painting skills, and also won the honor at the first national oil painting exhibition. However, the stylized main theme creation could not meet Ma Shuqing's instinctive pursuit of free creation, and in 1989, Ma Shuqing went to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, and began to study abstract painting. The feeling that was abstracted from him at that time was freedom.
In 2002, Ma Shuqing returned from school, which coincided with the prevalence of political pop in the Chinese contemporary art world, while Ma Shuqing spent a beautiful period of precipitation in his studio, and found creative methods that could be used as references in other art forms such as music and film, which also re-stimulated his visual accumulation during his studies in Germany. Gradually, Ma Shuqing began to focus her understanding and cognition of painting on the three constituent elements of time, space and color.
Untitled 2020
Ma Shuqing is very good at extracting abstract concepts that are closest to essence in concrete things. Over the years, the artist has explored layer by layer through the integration of formal materials, revealing another way of viewing flat painting, and the specific field installation related to sound is also the artist's first attempt, following the work, the sense of hearing and vision will gradually unfold here. In this exhibition, epoxy resins, acrylic pigments, and scraps cut by the paper media that once carried the content have become the media experiments in Ma Shuqing's latest creation. For Ma Shuqing, materiality is very important, it is not only a carrier for visualizing the abstract concepts of time and space, but also expands the possibility of viewing due to their special physical properties. (Finishing /Rhinoceros)
Hunan | front-line archaeologists Yi Dilis, Guo Wu, Han Jianhua and so on
"The Man Who Dealt with the Silk Road" premiered, documenting the story of the struggle of the archaeologists of the Silk Road
Guided by the Information Office of the Hunan Provincial People's Government, Mango TV's self-produced documentary documentary about Silk Road culture and archaeology-related cultural workers, "People Dealing with the Silk Road", premiered last week with a total of 10 episodes. The first episode of "Field Archaeologists" (part 1 and part 2) mainly tells the deeds of Idilis, Guo Wu, Han Jianhua, Hu Xingjun, Yu Tengfei, Ma Qiang and others who quietly worked hard for China's archaeological cause and stuck to their posts.
Idilisi, honorary director of the Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology
Idilis is the honorary director of the Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and also the leader and key figure of the excavation of the "Xiaohe Cemetery". In the nearly 50 years since he engaged in the work of cultural relics and archaeology in Xinjiang, Idilis has been sticking to the desert with difficult conditions, not willing to investigate, take pictures and draw pictures day and night, and accumulate certain work and life experience. Affectionately known as the "Old Fox of the Desert" in the struggle against extremely cold weather.
Guo Wu
Guo Wu is a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. During his studies at peking university's School of Archaeology, Guo Wu was attracted by the archaeology course in the Western Regions and fell in love with Xinjiang, the hub of the Silk Road. After graduation, he came to the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, took the initiative to apply to the leader to join the Xinjiang team, and since then plunged headlong into the vast sea of Silk Road history and archaeology. Since 2018, Guo Wu has been responsible for the archaeological excavation of the beiting ancient city site in Jimsar County, Xinjiang, leading the team to excavate an area of more than 7,000 square meters.
Han Jianhua
Han Jianhua is an associate researcher at the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and in 2018, the "hot water tomb group" in Dulan, Qinghai, was stolen, and the public security organs cracked the case and recovered 646 cultural relics, causing a great social shock. Subsequently, Han Jianhua served as the leader of the "2018 Blood Wei No. 1 Tomb" project to carry out rescue excavations of the tomb, which was later selected as one of the "Top Ten New Archaeological Discoveries in China in 2020".
The Tao is the same, why be afraid of the mountains and the sea? Like Idilis, Guo Wu, Han Jianhua, Hu Xingjun, Yu Tengfei, Ma Qiang and others, there are many people who stick to their posts and silently dedicate themselves to The cause of Archaeological Excavation and Cultural Relics Protection in China, and groups of young archaeologists like them have successively entered the archaeological field to find their different lives. (Finishing /Rhinoceros)