CAA China Art Annual Influence Top Artist of the Year Award was announced
2022 - 2023 CAA Chinese Art Annual Influence Awards Announces Winners| Agencies:
Artist of the Year: Dai Fan
Emerging Chinese Artist of the Year: Wang Struggling
Positive Change Award: Cai Guoqiang
Avant-garde Art Contribution Award: Sun Yuan + Peng Yu
Young Artist of the Year: Ge Yulu
Art Subversive Award: Hua Wei Hua
Curator of the Year Award: Hou Hanru
Best Critic of Contemporary Art of the Year: Zhu Qingsheng
Special Recognition Award: Kuri Ken-ting
Art Business Leader of the Year: Zeng Fanzhi
Best Exhibition of the Year : "Hello - Li Yongzheng Solo Exhibition" | Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art
Best Art Museum of the Year : Red Brick Museum
Gallery of the Year: Evergreen Gallery
2019 - 2020 CAA Chinese Art Annual Influence Awards Introduction:
What kind of era are we living in? A century of technology? An era of economy? A century of entertainment? An era of freedom? An era of joy? How Art Responds to This Era, the selection of the 2019-2020 CAA Chinese Art Annual Influence Awards on March 13 is quite meaningful. The number 13 is an auspicious and noble number in China: 13 in Buddhism is the Daji number, Buddhism introduced to China as thirteen sects, representing the perfection of merit, 13 is the number of emperors, is the emperor's exclusive, the emperor's belt of jade coins, thirteen, 13 is the Chinese number of emperors, symbolizing a right, an emperor's right. The Western taboo against 13 stems from two legends: the dramatic support point of The Last Supper is not the biblical eucharist ceremony, nor the identity of the traitor Judas, but the momentary commotion after the crowd hears Jesus say, "One of you has betrayed me"—the disciples show their sad, questioning, angry looks and gestures, and the picture is like a scene in the movie, and the forms of the twelve disciples are subdivided into four groups, forming a partial interspersed change, but unified whole. The inauspicious number 13 is also mentioned in the Bible, and judas, the apostate preacher of Jesus, was the 13th guest at the Last Supper. Meanwhile, in ancient Rome, legend has it that 12 groups of witches were gathered, and the 13th was thought to be demons. Therefore, "13" has become the most taboo number in Western culture. The Satanic number is 13. Legend has it that Jesus had dinner with his disciples before he was killed. The 13th person to attend the supper was Judas, a disciple of Jesus. It was this Judah who betrayed Jesus to the Jewish authorities for 30 silver dollars, causing Jesus to be tortured. The Last Supper was attended by 13 people, whose date coincided with the 13th, and "13" brought suffering and misfortune to Jesus. Since then, "13" has been considered a symbol of misfortune. "13" is synonymous with betrayal and betrayal. If the artist, the "spokesperson for betrayal and betrayal," is not the object of condemnation, the artist cannot know himself and love himself forever. The path that the artist takes, guided by an "unhealthy" curiosity, leads to our truth. This path is certainly the path of evil. This is not the evil of using the strong to bully the weak, but rather the evil that goes against one's own interests, the evil that the desire for freedom requires. Only seizing the moment is art. Art is free, unorganized, and "unable to undertake the task of establishing a collective order," it can only become a danger as if it were a violation of moral law. And the first requirement of aesthetics is freedom. The course of modern art, postmodern art to contemporary art is also the aesthetic process of evil, and since Romanticism, evil is an object that attracts people to render art with interest and gets the sympathy of countless people. In the works of Romanticism, there are demons and vampires, ghosts and born-agains, murderers and lunatics, cynics and satanic figures, possessed and demagogics. Crime, violence and blasphemy, breaking the rules, madness and black mass are all themes often used in Romanticism to contemporary art. Art and the artist itself are anachronistic, understanding what this age has the right to be proud of, namely its history and culture, as a kind of malpractices, incompetence and defects. Those who are truly contemporary, those who truly belong to the times, are those who neither meet nor adapt to the requirements of the times. The works and exhibitions of these 13 artists/institutions constitute the Last Supper of contemporary art, so, in this sense, they are inappropriate. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this rupture and the error of the times, they are able to perceive and understand their own times better than others. The contemporary must hold fast to his gaze on his own time. But what do people who look at the times see? The contemporary man is a man who insists on his gaze of his own time, and he insists on this gaze not to perceive the light of the times, but to perceive the darkness of the times.
Art is not an awareness of the self, much less an experience of some distant possibility (for something that did not exist before), but merely a call through expression to possibilities that cannot be attained. Perhaps, only extremes can give people the truth. Evil in its sharp form is the expression of art; evil has the highest value. But this concept does not negate ethics, it requires "superb morality". Obviously, the so-called "evil" of art is different from the evil in the moral sense. Since taboos are elusive, temporary violations are more liberal. The actions of art belong to the category of supra-morality, not to the realm of morality. Artists should stand in the perspective of transcending the current moral norms, examine and challenge the prescriptiveness of good and evil that do not meet the requirements of human nature, and break the deformed moral concepts that exist for power. For those who experience contemporaneity, all times are obscure. Darkness expresses an activity or a unique ability. In our case, this ability is tantamount to neutralizing the light of the age; neutralization is to discover the obscurity of the age, its peculiar darkness, which can be separated from the light. Strict morality comes from the knowledge of evil, which lays the foundation for close communication. Before there was a moral code, that kind of chaos and depravity could be regarded as evil. Without a "knowledge of evil," there is no impulse to establish moral norms. In this sense, the so-called "evil" arises from a kind of rebellion, that is, the rebellion of evil against the good. He believes that the principles of the real world are not true reason, but a combination of reason and arbitrariness. That is to say, the relationship between evil and good is absolute in the face of order and norms, and relative in the face of life and humanity. And man is bound to oppose himself. Why should we be aware of the obscurity of the times with great interest? Isn't darkness something nameless experience that is fundamentally incomprehensible, something that never points to us, never pays attention to us? On the contrary, contemporary people regard the darkness of the times as something that focuses on him, as something that never stops attracting him. Darkness is something that turns to him more directly and exclusively than light. Contemporary people are those whose eyes are struck by the dark light waves of their own time. The work reveals a secret of immoral art in which the aesthetics of evil emerge on the other side of its value. In this way, another history of beauty is told from the dark side of human culture, modernism.
As a point of interest for the international art world, the "2019-2020 CAA China Art Annual Influence Awards" serves as a platform to showcase China's top artists around the world, including the annual award selection, as well as ongoing research and education programs, dedicated to promoting artistic practice and critical thinking, and nearly discovering the outstanding Chinese artists emerging around the world, committed to exploring and presenting the many challenges facing contemporary art, thus activating more topics and contexts. Artists of the 2019-2020 CAA China Art Annual Influence Awards, whose ideas are like the shock waves of a great earthquake, overturning all established concepts, and defending the dignity of freedom – seriousness, loudness, resistance and originality – with their firm artistic stance. Reality is absurd, but the spirit needs to remain sober. Artistic thinking is the questioning of appearances, the search for the nature, organizational structure, ultimate purpose and meaning of appearances. The purest thing precipitated by avant-garde art comes from the mother's desire for liberation, which gives people the opportunity and the means to live authentically, the courage to spit on everything dirty in this world, to subvert all the traps that prevent human beings from gaining freedom, including traditions, rules, habits, disciplines and all other things that imprison people. The "self" is the only supreme reality, the core and master of all things, the self creates everything, and outside the self, everything does not exist, so I can only care about myself, and people are egoists. The whole history of mankind is the history of man's struggle to affirm himself as the "only self."
Art's torture and reshaping of the world is the creation of a new world, that is, the assumption of the sequence of sensible objects as symbols pointing to the essence of intelligence. Within the world of meaning that knowledge has, the world is knowable; but the world can be interpreted in other ways, and behind it is not meaning, but innumerable meanings—avant-garde art offers different perspectives and methods of seeing and perceiving. The artist's methodological language and ideas, the power to produce art, are not created in the way of the Creator's creation, nor are they forcibly endowed with form to others by force, but by imagination—the power to make the invisible visible, the power to make the void radiate light, and the avant-garde artist means "the one who emits light", "the god of light". In the contemporary context, the function of culture is increasingly pale, it is hoodwinked, concealed, destroyed, exploited, avant-garde art is a tool of combat, it is not for you to play, it makes you fight. The artist has only one way out and must allow himself to take risks. The artist aspires to be a saint, a rebel, a mystic. Occupy the place of God and thus attain the highest prestige. The bottom line of art is by no means personality, conscience and morality, the bottom line of art is not even aesthetics, the bottom line of art is creation, it is more accurate to say that the bottom line of art is the defense and attack of freedom and power. We look at art, what do we do art for? It is to turn disappointment into new hope, not despair; to transform decadence into anger rather than self-abandonment; to transform imprisonment into creation, not imprisonment. Let anger be a stimulant for the soul to rise. Avant-garde art must be uncompromising.
Rebellion and subversion are the identifiers of avant-garde art, on the basis of which avant-garde art derives the destruction and denial of all established things (even themselves), and this seemingly extreme, distorted thinking has actually appeared in human history in various or hidden, ignored, misunderstood, or diluted cultural forms. The spiritual world of the ordinary man consists of beliefs that he accepted without doubt and firmly believed in. He was instinctively hostile to anything that would disrupt the established order of this familiar world. A new idea that is incompatible with some of the beliefs he holds means that his mind needs to be readjusted; and one of the processes is laborious, mentally draining, and troublesome. The psychological motivation to develop a conservative spirit hostile to new ideas is reinforced by the strong opposition of certain vested interests in society, such as a class, a hierarchy, or a commercial group, whose interests are combined with the maintenance of the established order and the ideas on which the established order is based.
Avant-garde art awakens you, and you even begin to imagine that you can do anything instead of living your life in obscurity in a factory. Avant-garde art seeks out and attracts fellow practitioners with whom they can communicate ideas without dying, and the liberation it brings is in full swing in every corner of the world where young people living with a desire for human freedom are born. Viewers may still not be sure if their work is art. Noble life is not dominant, oppressive, ambitious, like a tyrant, and the power of noble life should not be conflated with social, political, or military power, for none of these powers belong to life itself, but to the role of an individual in an institutional apparatus. However, the noble nature of the great artist is different from it, in the ineffable distance between the great man and the mortal level, not in what effect it can achieve— even if the great man can make the world tremble. Therefore, whether a person is noble or not is not determined by how much power he can control others, organizations, or even history through institutional structures, but whether he has the power to shape a type of person, whether he has the power to his own dignity, and his uniqueness, his difference, that is, whether he has the power to make his life outstanding. Absolutely self-possessed, he is his own legislator, he is self-sufficient, he is super-moral, he creates a new way of coping with everything, and with this power he steps into every field, as if everything is unexpected, full of promises, dreams and surprises. After all, there are still many novel ideals that can exist, eternity is not extended, not to tolerate a moment of stagnation that has neither a past nor a future, not an endless linear stretch; eternity is the infinity of the present moment, which is related to density - deep, deep eternity. Each artist's proposal is unique, showing how fresh, practical and important their contribution to the thriving Chinese and world contemporary art is, through each artist's representative works, the audience can discover the potential and new trends in the development of contemporary art marked by the artists, and comprehensively meet the unforeseen forms, experiences and meanings.
13 winners of the 2019-2020 CAA Chinese Art Annual Impact Awards 2019-2020 | institution:
1. Emerging Chinese Artist of the Year: Wang Struggling
Wang Struggled: "Pink means feminine, girly, homosexual, pleasurable, hedonistic, erotic, stinging, glare, disharmonious, neurotic, left-leaning," the "State" introduction says. So in addition to the aesthetic tendencies dominated by pink tones, its more important trait is to highlight the sensitive nerves represented by the word "Pink". "As long as he is a sensitive and romantic artist, he will definitely create more or less emotional, feminine works... ”
The artist Wang Yi established a pink cult of the "Pink Republic" and served as the "king" himself. She hopes to eventually find a "homeland" to build a utopia full of Pinky artwork. The PinkEr Republic is an idealized organization that Brings together a group of "Pink admirers," an art group that pursues the grotesque and an experimental art project. But Wang is not satisfied with letting it exist only in the mind or cyberspace, she hopes to cross the virtual boundaries and try the chemical effects of spilling the hot pink liquid into the cold gray reality. The "Pink Republic" is a "pink utopia" that currently holds fewer than 100 "national citizens." The nearly 60-page "National Manual" details comprehensive "national information" from "origin of the republic", "country code", to "military defense". Although some contradictions can be found in the various visible sources, this utopian "state" is not a purely fragmented fantasy product, and the founder Wang Yuanzheng plans to be on the earth (?). Find a real pink "homeland" for it.
2. Artist of the Year : Dai Fan
Dai Fan: "My work is to illuminate as much as possible the humble things, the socially excluded things, the silent things, the dirty things, the anonymous things—"Nothing", the notorious things and the ruined places, I defend their right to speak, and I encourage us to stand on the side of those very small, even nameless or indescribable events and people, and readjust the way we perceive these events, these characters." ”
Dai Fan's work allows the audience to feel the air on another planet.
Dai Fan regards the inevitable events in the distant future as the things of the present, and uses this attitude to look forward to its coming. Dai Fan does not think of his practice as a "work", but as a voyage, a construction site, and he believes that nature and society must experience the magic of art—to open and generate concepts and define new problematic patterns. Every creation of Dai Fan is shocking. In 2017, Dai Fan created in Europe to create the "Sharks with Ultrasound" incident: disaster, fear, technology riots, shamans. The sharks on the surface of the sea are like the declaration of the end of the world and the picture of hell, disturbing the viewer's thinking, not discussing in the established field of art, using the ocean, sharks, refugee ships, and ultrasonic devices to create a non-institutionalized drama archetype, the stability of art is disintegrated, morality is ridiculed, and the trajectory of man and the trajectory of sharks constitute a nest of nomadic response to the environment, and the creativity and imagination of art will suspend, mutate, and burst events with new thinking and new actions in the face of daily and moral norms.
Dai Fan's "100 million robots" burst, have courage, aesthetics, and the strange sense of science and technology is full of strangeness, like a flood beast, which makes people feel surprised and frightened, and has a strong lethality... It makes you feel that you have changed by watching his work, and it is he who has changed your perception of the world. His best-known identity is the "Cosmic Manifesto", a leader and pioneer of the art of "robotics" in a series of new artistic genres that encompass hyper-futurism to explore artificial intelligence, genomics, human technology, space technology, neurotechnology, cosmic space, bio-nanotechnology, robotics and biotechnology. Dai Fan's creative breakthrough introduces the concept of a terrifying universe and the concept of artificial intelligence robots into the structure of contemporary art. He points out that we can no longer understand existence and understand light with the feeling of extreme fragmentation and individualization that postmodernism did, but instead, in the vast dome, we need to dabble in some light that has never been touched before with a capacity beyond our feelings. Dai Fan's work involves a non-human cosmology, a world completely devoid of us, an inhuman outside without light, without hope, or even faith. The most important thing about that supernatural mystery is that the intelligence that emerges in the future will continue to represent human civilization — human-machine civilization. In other words, the computers of the future are human beings—even if they are non-biological. "Who is the successor of mankind?" The answer is: we are creating our own successor, and machines have or will have life. At some point in the future, the relationship between humans and machines will be similar to the relationship between animals and humans today.
3. Positive Change Award: Cai Guoqiang
Cai Guoqiang: There is a grassroots force in my art, which is my personal curiosity, childlike heart, and attitude towards expressive art, which have become resonant with ordinary people. In a world of different cultures, in Doha, in Ukraine, in Brazil, in the United States, in Europe, it's easy to have conversations and think about my work anyway. ”
On the occasion of the centenary of the October Revolution in 1917, Cai Guoqiang: October opened on September 13, 2017 at the Pushkin National Museum of Art, where Cai Guoqiang's unparalleled blasting plan and gunpowder paintings, full of living energy, became a unique and eye-catching symbol, transforming the museum into a huge installation. Cai Guoqiang is good at thinking about life, human relations and society, and the responsibility of artists in society. At a complicated historical moment, he tried to help the victims of the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, and also made kites with the children of the Egyptian slums... This exhibition is a reflection on the fate of ordinary people in times of large-scale historical turmoil. It does not merely review historical events, but tells the story of those who survived historical disasters; This exhibition is about our dreams and hopes. We conceive of the exhibition as a dialogue between contemporary art and classical architecture in academic museums, between works and the history of their creation, and between historical events and today's hopes.
4. Avant-garde Art Contribution Award: Sun Yuan + Peng Yu
Sun Yuan + Peng Yu: "It is actually because our group of people have done such works that art has what it is today, rather than us anticipating new artistic trends ahead of time."
Sun Yuan and Peng Yu did not follow the mainstream of art at that time but were maverick, repeatedly challenging mainstream art with different media and expression methods. Their work is like a sharp sword, poking open a bloody wound, reaching the viewer's heart, and the work is also mixed with the impulse of desire, and the expression subverts tradition. They challenge the moral standards of the art world with their controversial extremes. Their works often embody contradictory reflections on life and death, and on the state of human existence. It continues to reveal their sensitivity to the material of their works and their reflections on the linguistic forms of new art, which is also the commonality of the excellent contemporary art works we see today.
5 . Young Artist of the Year: Ge Yulu
Ge Yulu: "The idea of Ge Yulu naming roads first originated from a short art history course. "I started thinking about the relationship between the name and myself, and the certain playfulness of private symbols appearing in public. People usually choose to hide their names, but I decided to do the opposite. ”
Ge Yulu "named" an "nameless road" near the Apple Community in Shuangjing Street, Chaoyang District, with his own name, and hung his own "Ge Yu Road" street signs at the west and east entrances of the road. This sign has been used for 4 years, and nearby residents have accepted the name of "GeYu Road" and even entered it into navigation software. After he disclosed it, the incident triggered a heated discussion in the society. Ge Yulu became popular overnight, but the end of this interesting story is not "perfect". On July 13, the urban management department removed the "Ge Yu Road" road sign, and ten days later, on July 23, the "Baiziwan South 1st Road" road sign was hung in place. There is no "Ge Yu Road" in Beijing, which makes countless netizens sigh. What caused netizens to be curious and regretful was not only Ge Yulu's brain hole, but perhaps more of a tacit understanding of this somewhat persistent, cute and even "secondary two" behavior. In the mediocre and dull life, Ge Yulu is like a sudden burst of Mars, igniting the excitement of many people. Ge Yulu originally wanted to explore the possibilities of an urban space. This is not the first time he has faced controversy. Ge Yulu is "an experimental art, a manifestation of art's re-intervention in life"; while studying at Hubei Academy, he had a whim and scribbled his name on school walls, toilets, blackboards and poster columns. The first attempt to explore the relationship between personal symbols and public space sparked great controversy. Ge Yulu was certainly responsible, at least violating a series of regulations on place names. In a word, no unit or individual may do the naming of geographical names without authorization. Regarding the matter of naming the road, he said this: In fact, it is very simple, the following method: 1. You have to find a road that does not currently have a name 2. Make a road sign and paste it on the relevant location of the road section. 3. Sit and wait for the network map to be included. 4. Join the "Civil Affairs Zoning Geographical Names Public Service System" to officially regularize. He then follows the steps in turn. So, in 2013, in a blank section of the map, Ge Yulu posted a road sign made of his own name. One thing that can be clearly said in the Hundred Crosses has caused widespread controversy in the past month. Interestingly, this matter is basically a whole body groove point, Ge Yulu himself, the traffic management department, the civil affairs department, the network map, the Central American school, almost every element involved, have been scolded. However, returning to the origin of Ge Yulu's artistic students, as well as the artistic attributes of this work itself, it has to be said that this may be the best performance art work ever produced in China.
6. Curator of the Year Award: Hou Hanru
Hou Hanru: "I think today's Chinese contemporary art is too instrumentalized, too mediated, and there is no very personal and free fundamental evaluation of the problem, which is extremely lacking."
Hou Hanru is widely regarded as one of the important figures who introduced Chinese contemporary art to the Western world. As a Chinese working in Western countries, Hou Hanru pays attention to the collision and integration of cultures, as well as the vitality and problems brought about by globalization and urbanization in the Asia-Pacific region. His numerous curatorial projects in the field of Chinese and international art have promoted the development of contemporary art throughout the Asia-Pacific region, and at the same time, he has made himself one of the most active curators in the international art world.
7. Best Critic of Contemporary Art of the Year: Zhu Qingsheng
Zhu Qingsheng: "If China does not regard the spirit of contemporary art as the common sense of civic aesthetic education, and if in the world cultural competition, because of a momentary frustration, loss, and temporary failure, it retracts to conform to the old ways, resists modernization, and denigrates the precious achievements of reform and opening up, how can Chinese art have originality?"
Zhu Qingsheng is committed to promoting the development of modern art, and has made theoretical interpretations, exhibitions, activities planning and promotion, research on art history and experimentation in art creation, and insisted on placing academic research, organizational activities and practical creation in the forefront of world art. And to push the study of Chinese contemporary art to the position of competing with the study of Western contemporary art, he made academic interpretation and critical preparations.
8. Special Recognition Award: Kuri Ken-ting
Li Xianting: "What matters is not art. From the perspective of Western art history, contemporary art is a new round of redefinition of the concept of art, for us, it is not a kind of art, not a concept that can be equally ranked with Chinese ink painting, oil painting, printmaking and the like, it is a position, a cultural attitude, a gesture that includes the reconstruction of the value system. That is, no matter what kind of artistic creation you are engaged in, as an artist, you must pay attention to the hearts and psychological states of contemporary people, and pay attention to art as the most basic sense of survival of people. ”
In the more than 30 years since the end of the 1970s, Li Xianting has grasped the new changes in Chinese contemporary art from the perspective of cultural strategy, and pioneered the curation of many heavyweight exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art representing important artistic trends and trends, which have had a huge and far-reaching impact on the emergence and development of China's modern art movement. In the eyes of the international art world, today's Lao Li is more like a cultural symbol of China's current situation, and more represents the unremitting pursuit of artistic freedom and the cultural attitude of not easily compromising. It is precisely because of the iron backbone of Li Xianting that Chinese contemporary art has moved from the fringes to the mainstream, from being excluded to entering the room, and has been respected by the international art world as never before.
9. Art Business Leader of the Year : Zeng Fanzhi
Zeng Fanzhi: "It is true that all artists want their works to be immortal and eternal, and I hope that after their deaths, their works will still be appreciated by people." I want people to find something new when they look at my work, something they want to see in the painting, something they're looking for. However, when it comes to the word "heritage", I would like to say that it is more important to leave a spiritual legacy to the world than a material legacy. ”
Zeng Fanzhi is considered to be one of the more representative and internationally influential artists in contemporary China. Since the 1990s, his creations have received continuous attention from the art critics and society for their unique linguistic style and keen social criticism. From his early "Union Hospital" series to the "Mask" series, he used expressionist techniques to depict the mental state of people at the moment, which, despite its cartoonish color and teasing taste, still gave people a sense of heaviness and depression. The Last Supper, a late work in the "Mask" series, sold for HK$160 million at Sotheby's Night Auction on October 5, 2013, making it the highest price in Chinese contemporary art. Let the artist become the focus of public opinion. In the early works of "Union Hospital" and "Meat" series, it can be seen that Zeng Fanzhi at that time had a direct social criticism, and he almost faced the cruelty of life. Zeng Fanzhi also borrowed the illustrative characteristics of the early Renaissance Christian triptych paintings, giving this group of works a sense of fatalism outside of human nature. Although Zeng Fanzhi's mask series is his most recognizable work, this series does not represent the most essential feature of Zeng Fanzhi's art, and the mask series is still a product of the times in the 1990s.
10. Best Exhibition of the Year: "Hello - Li Yongzheng Solo Exhibition" | Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art
Although many times Li Yongzheng's works are directly associated with various social events, I still like to call him a conceptual artist, but he involves social events in his material. His work encompasses discussions that go far beyond ideology, with different artists accustomed to using different materials while also expressing different perspectives, especially in the context of diverse art history.
——Lan Qingwei (Director of Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art)
At 15:30 on February 25, 2017, "Hello - Li Yongzheng Solo Exhibition" opened at Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art. Hosted by Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Lan Qingwei, Executive Director of Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art, the exhibition presents the recent installation artworks created by artist Li Yongzheng from February 25 to March 19, 2017. The exhibition is the artist Li Yongzheng's first solo exhibition in Chengdu, featuring six installations, namely "To You" (2013), "Secret Exchange" (2014), "Death My Dream for Many Years" (2015), "Defending the Motherland" (2015), "Hi" (2015-2017) and "Gift" (2017), covering the main faces of the artist's creation in the past two years. At the exhibition site, the audience can see "To You", "Hi" and "Gift" as interactive installations, there are many audiences queuing up to experience, in addition to the work "To You", the audience can take away the newspaper that has been placed and printed; interested enthusiasts can even write their secrets in "Secret Exchange"; it is particularly worth mentioning that in the "Gift" work, the artist tries to use the latest VR technology to the work, the audience can wear VR glasses on the spot to experience the work and the concepts of time and space, history and other concepts emphasized by the artist. All the works in this exhibition have a characteristic: the works are dealing with people, emphasizing the relationship with other people, and also summarizing Li Yongzheng's creative approach. He hoped to get a response from the visitors and complete an exchange. "How to define what is happening" is the starting point of Li Yongzheng's creative thinking, and he explores the method of response in his own way, and the essence of the response is the world.
The interesting thing about Li Yongzheng's work lies precisely in the unspeakable parts of the established structure and terminology, such as our subtle feelings when we face the salt mountains in the narrow corridors of his creations, we can understand the artist's way of entering, read his way of working, but still be shocked by his works and ready-made objects. The exhibition showcases six installations by Lee Yong-jeong, namely "To You" (2013), "Secret Exchange" (2014), "Death, My Dream for Many Years" (2015), "Defending the Motherland" (2015), "Hi" (2015-2017), "Gift" (2017), of which "Hi" and "Gift" are presented to the audience for the first time, and these works can be presented as different dimensions of a person's life.
Li Yongzheng's works have no fixed form and emphasize the participation of the audience. At the same time, it uses the Internet, media and new technologies to create, emphasizing the thinking of participants. Li Yongzheng's artworks often make people directly associate with various social events, but we still like to call him a conceptual artist, but he involves social events in his material. His work encompasses discussions that go far beyond ideology, with different artists accustomed to using different materials while also expressing different perspectives, especially in the context of diverse art history. Whether we take what is happening in society as the main body, or use them as a means of artistic creation, is the basis for distinguishing the value of Li Yongzheng's artistic creation. "How do you define what's going on?" This is the question that Li Yongzheng asked about his own creation, and in answering this question, Li Yongzheng used a kind of "developing vision" - this is not like the artist's view of himself, but more like a viewer's perspective, which is also the method that Li Yongzheng often uses in his creation: a work will not have only one final product, and the work that has been realized is likely to be nothing more than a factor of the new work. In his creation, Li Yongzheng transforms all the artworks that have happened to him into new materials, and he is not afraid to use the same materials, such as water and salt, to create different works. If You classify Li Yongzheng's works, there are some macro words involved: the response to life, the temperature of history, social intervention in society, the Internet and "games". However, the composition of the work is relatively specific, and the materials involved can be simply enumerated: water, salt, metal, old paintings, networks, and the techniques involved are not profound: substitution, transformation, exchange. "The work is only a specimen of reality" - this is Li Yongzheng's definition of the work.
11. Art Subversive Award: Hua Wei Hua
Hua Weihua: "My usual workflow and procedure take four hours to calculate the lottery. Spend four hours counting lottery tickets on Tuesday, Thursday, sunday afternoon, and buy lottery tickets by eight o'clock. I'm counting on a computer, and my computer has a screen recorder. In the exhibition of the art museum, it is possible to spend two hundred yuan to buy a hundred lottery tickets, and it is possible to spend two thousand yuan to buy a thousand lottery tickets. Just that night, including specific data. It is possible to show the process in the form of projections and ultimately present the results of my lottery tickets. Because this thing is not a work, like a life of mine. But it's still a life with ideals. ”
Hua Weihua's work "Myth": Hua Weihua spent three years to buy lottery tickets in December 2017 and won 5 million, using a real face to confirm the authenticity of this lottery, because from the beginning of the lottery to today's jackpot, no one dared to show his face.
Introduction to the creative process of Hua Weihua's "myth": A few years ago, Hua Weihua found that there was a group of people in China doing one thing together, and how large was the number of this group? There are 461 million lottery players who buy lottery tickets. Of these, 217 million are regular bettors, which are almost a must-buy every day. There are also 7 million online gamblers. The consumption power of online lottery players is very huge, and these 7 million online lottery players are very skilled in the use of technology network technology, Hua Weihua carefully studied China's lottery and found that the largest lottery sold in China is the welfare lottery. China has dozens of online lottery portals, and China's largest circulation newspaper is China Lottery Newspaper, which publishes more than the People's Daily in a single issue. The key is that it has a fixed number of people there, 461 million, fixed physical store bettors, ah, this does not count the 7 million online bettors. Later, when I studied further, I found a question: How many welfare lottery tickets were issued in China from 1987 to 2014? A total of 1170.1 billion yuan was sold (from network data), and the first prize of the two-color ball was about 950 million. This bonus went down, and as a result, no one publicly appeared on stage to receive the prize. The China Welfare Lottery, for this reason, is very loud among all the low-level people in China. I think so, because the China Welfare Lottery desperately needs a person to show his face in public to confirm that this thing is true. Use a real person's face to confirm the authenticity of this lottery. Hua Wei Hua through a variety of other methods to win this lottery, Hua Wei Hua in the word, Hua Wei Hua does not need advertising fees, Hua Wei Hua does not wear a mask to receive the prize, will be on the front page headlines of major portals, it is very likely to be on CCTV. This matter hua wei hua is to first verify its feasibility. Hua Wei Hua found nine large lottery portals on the Internet, and each of its lottery channels has a corresponding ten experts, and one number recommendation is made every day. Any expert, as long as its portal exists it must have an audience. There must be an audience that believes in him, and there must be an audience who buys it according to his number. Hua Wei Hua counted the so-called expert recommendation numbers on the nine portals, counted it, and then they recommended me and I did not buy it. Because from the beginning of the lottery to today's people who won the jackpot, no one dared to show his face, Hua Weihua won the first prize, Hua Weihua did the first person to eat crabs to show his face, Hua Weihua did this thing to want to make Hua Weihua's reputation, in China, through the most grassroots people to expand Hua Weihua's reputation to at least 3-500 million. The traditional Chinese concept is that wealth is not exposed. The second is that you are instantly rich, you are suddenly rich, Chinese despise upstarts but want to become upstarts. Five million people who buy lottery tickets at the bottom think that this is big money, and with this money it is likely to change the short-term quality of life of the entire family. Maybe China's so-called welfare lottery is simply a false, the concept of the Chinese welfare lottery two-color ball is three three plus sixteen, and if these numbers and all the numbers are bought, it is 17.72 million and 188 bets, which is equivalent to saying that it is a little more than 35 million. After buying all these numbers, you can win a prize of five million, then win 15 second prizes and 162 third prizes. That's how it was pushed down. Then this concept, as long as this number is sold out, it will definitely exist. Moreover, the sales of each issue of the China Welfare Lottery are now about 350 million, which is equivalent to selling all the numbers ten times. Theoretically, it should produce about ten first prizes per issue. But in fact it is far below that number. After so many years of statistics, an average of four or five, that is to say, it is still possible.
Hua Weihua: "I have a problem with the methodology of buying lottery tickets. Many people are experts recommended numbers, he buys this number, and I buy the number that experts think to kill. I count which numbers are killed the most, count them, and then count them on the computer. In this case, it is possible to approach the big data of the China Lottery Center. This data it may be 1 square meter of area, but I may calculate it will be 0.1 square centimeters, it will be very close to it. But there is still a chance. And ordinary Chinese lottery players have a misunderstanding about the lottery, where is the misunderstanding, it thinks that you are fake. If the sales data of each period of the Chinese lottery can be analyzed, what is the average prize of 35 million lottery tickets? Ten million is near, that is to say, there are still twenty-five million for operating expenses and funds withdrawn by the state, and only ten million is for winning the lottery. This award is very strict and clear. It's just that ordinary people don't know, think that this lottery ticket didn't win, it's fake, it's not. China Welfare Lottery eight o'clock shutdown nine thirty draw, this one and a half hours, the National Lottery Data Center said that it is in the data statistics, ordinary lottery players think it is a ghost. But this does not affect the authenticity of the lottery, but the expectations of ordinary people are too high. ”
12. Museum of the Year : Red Brick Museum
Located in the International Art District, No. 1, northeast of Chaoyang District, Beijing, the Red Brick Art Museum covers an area of about 20,000 square meters and an exhibition area of nearly 10,000 square meters, founded by collectors Yan Shijie and Cao Mei, and officially opened on May 23, 2014. The goal of the Red Brick Art Museum is to let avant-garde art lead the development of the museum, creating a garden-style art museum equipped with a contemporary landscape garden, where the audience can not only watch the indoor works on display, but also swim in the outdoor landscape. This private art museum built of red bricks in a new Chinese garden does not have an inaccessible high cold in the public mind, but has more reasons to approach. From the opening exhibition "Taiping Guangji" in May 2014, to the 2015 "Snake Cane II - Huang Yongli International Touring Exhibition", "Li Wei Solo Exhibition - Nobody Cares", "Yan Lei Li Wuli", until the just-opened "Turner Prize" and "Duchamp Prize" winner solo exhibitions, the artists on the exhibition list of the Red Brick Art Museum are very avant-garde conceptual artists at home and abroad. Avant-garde is the positioning of red brick "art museums", positioned in avant-garde art, in order to have advanced leadership, will promote the entire Chinese cultural system, or establish an education system of contemporary art, the art museum is meaningful. Yan Shijie, Director of the Red Brick Art Museum: "It is the best way for the public to unconsciously accept contemporary art." The positioning of the Red Brick Art Museum is an international platform, how can we be equal when we talk to the West? The Red Brick Art Museum uses the garden culture that represents the essence of oriental culture to create a modern garden, Western artists will also have things to read, "red brick" can break through the white box of the traditional art museum, let the art spread in the garden space, so that the public in the garden play process, you can be close to the dialogue with contemporary art, and gradually improve their understanding of art.
13. Gallery of the Year: Evergreen Gallery
Evergreen Gallery is a foreign gallery, but what it does is very similar to China's "Foolish Gong Moving Mountains" - it looks silly, but when it persists, it will give people a spiritual strength, like the process of accumulating faith. Evergreen Gallery was founded in 1990 by Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi and Maurizio Rigillo. As the gallery's name suggests, the founders wanted to promote the development of contemporary art in Italy, where ancient art is steeped. Evergreen Gallery strives to be a bridge between the past and the present, and explores the current artistic research in Italy and the international cultural context by introducing international artists to Italy, as well as helping and promoting young Italian artists abroad. Covering an area of 1,100 square meters in Italy, evergreen gallery provides a space for artistic exchanges and dialogues between the public and artists. In order to meet the growing needs of the gallery and meet the aspirations of the wider public, in 2004 Evergreen Gallery opened a new exhibition space in Beijing, China, with the aim of promoting international contemporary art in a country where there is little appreciation for contemporary art, and to advocate new forms of cultural exchange. Beijing Evergreen Gallery acts as a particularly important cultural bridge, providing Chinese art lovers with the opportunity to see the works of international masters of art, created exclusively by artists for the gallery and projecting their artistic experiences. This is a double challenge: on the one hand, foreign artists have to display their work in such a special place as China; on the other hand, visitors have to venture into a very different cultural territory. The gallery's interest in China stemmed primarily from its very sincere friendships with Chen Zhen and Xu Min, which were subsequently deepened by its subsequent engagement with other artists and led to further discussions and contacts.
Evergreen Gallery has become an exciting venue for artists from all over the world, and this precious artistic adventure of Western galleries is of extraordinary significance. Like the San Gimignano Evergreen Gallery, the underlying goal of the Evergreen Gallery in Beijing is to discover new artists and provide them with space to display, thus allowing different creative fields and diverse cultures to blend with each other.