Exhibition view of “Paraventi: Folding Screens from the 17th to 21st Centuries” Fondazione Prada, Milan Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Alessandro Saletta – DSL Studio Courtesy: Fondazione Prada
An exhibition that brings together a variety of screens from the 17th to the 21st century, documenting and presenting the many changes that have taken place around them from the imperial period to the digital age.
Do you have screens in your home? Do they be unfolded and used every day, or are they folded up and leaning against a corner all year round? What are those screens made of? What do they look like?
A recent exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan called "Paraventi: Folding Screens from the 17th to 21st Centuries" featured 70 screens spanning 400 years from around the world. Curated by Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, the project also presents two "mini-editions" at Prada Sakataku in Shanghai and Prada Aoyama in Tokyo.
More than 10 years ago, Cullinan met Miuccia Prada, the director of Prada, while studying for a PhD in Italian post-war art studies at the Courtauld College of Art in London. When the Fondazione Prada opened in Venice in 2011, he was invited by Miuccia Prada and the critic and curator Germano Celant (1940–2020) to help curate the opening exhibition. When the foundation opened in Milan in 2015, Cullinan curated In Part, an exhibition that explores the incomplete, fragmented body in painting, sculpture and photography. As a member of the Foundation's advisory board, even after becoming the director of the Portrait Gallery, he still has a close relationship with the Foundation and continues to explore exhibition opportunities with the Foundation. One day the Foundation gave him a study on folding screens and asked him if he would be interested in curating the project. Cullinan found that he had learned from his research about screens he had never seen before, and his interest in the proposal grew, and the exhibition on screens was born.
Since Cullinan is an advisor to the foundation, he is familiar with the architecture and exhibition halls in Milan, and knows how the exhibition halls and exhibition lines should be carried out. The Foundation's meeting place in Milan is an old 1910s industrial complex in the southeast of Milan, which used to be the distillery and office of a spirits company. The Pritztec Prize-winning Dutch architect Koolhaas restored several of the old industrial buildings and added three new buildings, known as the Podium, the Cinema and the Torre, in which the screen exhibition was held.
Cullinan believes that the exhibitions on the first and second floors must have completely different effects, and there must be a variety of display methods, otherwise the viewer will be easily bored. "The Foundation and I decided from the very beginning that we wanted to find a good architect to set up the exhibition. WE ALL ADMIRE SAANA'S STYLE WORK. They've worked with Prada before, and I appreciate their design for the new Louvre in Lens. From the very beginning, Cullinan explained, he felt that the downstairs should be circular, with multiple lines, a bit like a "panorama", or even a bit like a "peep show" kind of structure. SAANA has designed transparent plexiglass that curves like bubbles, allowing the audience to see the hazy privacy from the outside, or to walk into the labyrinth-like "bubbles" and face to face with the screen.
On the second floor of the gallery, Cullinan wanted it to be an open space based on the age of the work, "because I don't think there is a need to raise the debates and discussions that the curator wants to raise at this moment." Cullinan admired the iconic way in which the Brazilian-based Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914 – 1992) displayed each painting hanging from the ceiling at the Museum of Modern Art (MASP) in São Paulo, "where each artwork seemed to occupy its own exhibition space, and I wanted the screens to have a similar effect." ”
Obviously, screens are a very broad topic. The title of the exhibition hall alone is full of learning. Cullinan points out that in Japanese, the folding screen means "to block the wind", in Latin countries, "para" means "to prevent", and the French "vent", Italian "vento" or Spanish "viento" are all "wind", so they are also used to shield from the wind, but also to separate rooms or create a more intimate atmosphere. The English colloquial name is "screen", but it is also known as "Coromandel" because the screen was imported to Europe from the Coromandel coast of India in the early 17th century.
In the foreground: Six scenes from the story of Prince Genji (Genji monogatari) Giappone, inizio del XVII secolo / Japan, early 17th century Viktor and Marianne Langen Collection, Neuss, Germania / Germany
One of the most special parts of this exhibition is that the screens have never been discussed or exhibited in such a wide range of topics. Although there have been many exhibitions on screens before, such as ancient screens in China and Japan, or screens that focus only on the 20th and 21st centuries in the West, this is the first time that they have been put together, no matter what culture or period they come from.
Cullinan wonders what are the deeper themes that bring all these screens together, how to explore their cultural and artistic roles, how to read them, whether they are from an Eastern or Western perspective, how to make the narrative unfold sequentially in space and time, whether the screen provides privacy, and at the same time hides shame, is it a utilitarian furniture or a work of art? is it a painting or sculpture? represent elegance or vulgarity? how were screens used to flaunt wealth and power in colonial times? It has evolved from concrete furniture to ubiquitous computer and mobile phone screens, and how can these screens allow reality and fiction to coexist?
"Paravento di Coromandel"China, late 17th centuryMuseo Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon / Lisbon
Presented as a promotional poster for the exhibition in Shanghai, and also on display in Milan is a 12-screen ebony screen from the collection of the Museo Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon from the Kangxi period. Although many screens were exported from China to Europe at the time, according to records, this one was not an export item, but a special birthday gift, and the composition of the screen was complex, interlaced and multi-layered, depicting both stories and legends, as well as auspicious flowers and trees, and even the birthday ceremony was depicted to the lower half of the screen. Cullinan is very grateful for the opportunity to borrow this work, "Because the history, name and appearance of the Coromandel screen are very special, we try to find the best and most suitable examples in the exhibition, and this work is a good proof of this." ”
The depth and breadth of the exhibition is impressive, and one of the rather surprising screens is a screen by Francis Bacon (1909–1992) in 1929. I took pictures of the screen at the exhibition site and sent them to some friends who study the history of 20th century art, asking them to guess which artist it came from, but none of them guessed correctly. This is because its style is very different from the paintings of the artist Bacon.
"Bacon began his career in the 20s of the 20th century, when he started out as a decorator, and even printed business cards that read: Francis Bacon, Decorator. He has a very successful career and has clients in London, Paris and Berlin. At the time, he was also heavily influenced by the Irish architect Eileen Gray. But as he became a painter and began to gain popularity, he may have felt that this was a demeaning of his work, and in order to be taken seriously as an artist, Bacon felt the need to suppress this chapter", Cullinan argues, and to some extent the work questions the general view of the identity of decorative or functional works, the attitude towards the noble or the vulgar.
From left to right: William N. Copley Konku 1982 Collezione privata, Colonia /Cologne, Private collection;Elmgreen & Dragset Paravent, 2008 Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne / Centre de création industrielle, Parigi / Paris
Cullinan also points out that the folding screen underwent a major transformation in the late 19th century, when for some reason many artists in Paris or France at the time, from Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) to James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), began to make folding screens. That's a big shift. This transformation continued into the 20th century, when many great artists, architects, and designers began to make screens. In the exhibition, the names of Eileen Gray, Picasso, Le Corbusier (1887 - 1965) can be seen, and it was one of the major shifts of the 19th and 20th centuries, when suddenly the screen began to leap across the globe and its identity changed dramatically, no longer just a piece of furniture separating the interior space.
In addition to the screens by artists, designers, architects and others, the Foundation has invited 17 artists to create new works especially for the exhibition. It includes several Chinese artists such as Cao Fei, Li Shuang, Zeng Wu, and Tiffany Sia. Cao Fei's Autobiography on Screen was exhibited in Shanghai and Milan, in Shanghai as a large-scale immersive installation, the last work in the exhibition, and in Milan as the first work in the entrance, presented as a sculptural installation.
Cullinan explains why this work is placed at the entrance to the Milan exhibition, so that the first thing people see when they walk into the exhibition is about the current screen culture and how our lives are dominated by screens. "Cao Fei has done a great job of bringing technology directly into her work, updating the screen language. She starts by examining the communication of the media and explores how they can change our real lives"
According to Cao Fei, a set of mobile wallpapers played on different electronic devices in the Shanghai exhibition: "In the past, traditional screens were used to separate the actual space, while the mobile wallpaper was a barrier to distinguish the inside and outside of the mobile phone, as well as a microscopic 'landscape' to distinguish the real world from the digital network. Social media 'windows' exist on the screen. In other words, screen-in-screen is building our contemporary digital life. Electronics are an extension of humanity. On the one hand, it provides digital access to humanity, and on the other hand, it plunges us into a state of oblivion, and the multiplicity of time and space."
Wu Tsang，Rebellious Bird，2023，Courtesy dell’artista e / of the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlino
This exhibition offers an insight into the wonderful world of screens: from China to the world, from traditional furniture to the canvases that became artists, to dematerialized digital screens. I believe that in the future, whenever and wherever I see a screen, it will make me think about the background and meaning it may contain in addition to the function of separating the space. It also helps people to re-evaluate the boundaries between art and craft, and to distinguish between the noble and the vulgar. Most importantly, it makes people think, and isn't thinking the ultimate goal of the exhibition?