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As one of the earliest art museums to get involved in new media art in the mainland, in 2024, HOW Art Museum will launch the "HOW Image Season", with the theme of "Echo", inviting five artists who have made great achievements in the field of contemporary video art to hold four exhibitions and five solo exhibitions, including many new works. As a medium with a history of nearly 200 years, video continues to expand the boundaries of creation with the invention of new technologies. In order to satisfy the desire to capture reality, human beings have expanded the scope of media from painting to photography, video, and even AI.
From March 31st to August 11th, HOW Art Museum presents "2024 HOW Image Season – Echoes", inviting five artists in the field of Chinese contemporary video art – Ma Liang, Li Xiaoliang, Yang Yongliang, Li Hanwei and Xu Jinjin – to present four exhibitions in the exhibition space on the third floor of HOW Art Museum (Shanghai). Spanning the 70s to 90s of the 20th century, the five artists use photography, video and installation as media to symbolize the three forces of the Chinese contemporary art scene.
HOW Art Museum hopes to create a miniature Chinese contemporary video art landscape through exhibitions from a Chinese perspective, and to build an international exchange and display platform to jointly explore the transformation and development of video art as a diverse art form in today's developed technology and rich media.
The 2024 HAO VIDEO Season is divided into two opening phases, the first of which will open on March 31 with the exhibition of Li Hanwei and Xu Jinjin, and the solo exhibition of Yang Yongliang on April 12, and the collaborative exhibition "The Twilight of the Ritual" between Ma Liang and Li Xiaoliang. The latter will present two separate solo exhibitions, "Ma Liang: Love in the Wind and Dust" and "Li Xiaoliang: The Light of the Safari", curated by Lu Mingjun.
Ma Liang: Love in the dust
"Ma Liang: Love in the Dust" presents the artist's creations in four series over the past ten years, including "Mobile Photo Studio", "Childhood Sweetheart Photo Studio" and "Will the World Be Okay". Influenced by his dramatist parents since childhood, Maleonn conveys his thoughts on time and life through the deliberately created sense of drama and conflict in his works. It is in response to the lyrics "When the years and beauty have become a sigh in the dust, there are old teardrops in your sentimental eyes".
Maleonn's "Mobile Photo Studio" series
In 2012, Maleonn launched the public art project Mobile Photo Studio, which would later become his signature work. He assembled a team and loaded his studio into two trucks and spent 10 months traveling through 35 cities across the country, taking "studio photos" for 1,600 strangers for free in the form of a makeshift photo studio. Once the work was published, it caused a sensation across the country, with more than 20,000 online applicants.
Detail of Ma Liang's "Childhood Sweetheart Photo Studio".
"Childhood Sweetheart Photo Studio" is a public art project made by Ma Liang on the Weibo platform in 2018, using photoshop to synthesize old photos, and a total of more than 120 couples or couples have completed childhood photos out of nothing. Each set of entries includes two original old photos submitted by the participants, a composite photo and an animated GIF.
Maleonn's "Will This World Be Okay" series
Photo taken by SIGMA fpL camera
The title of "Will the World Be Okay" comes from an interview with the famous scholar Liang Shuming.
Li Xiaoliang: The light of the safari
"Li Xiaoliang: The Light of the Safari" presents more than 70 works by the artist in two series, including video, installation and photography in the past two years. Over the past decade or so, Li Xiaoliang has focused on the on-screen image of ongoing issues. In the past two years, he has explored the other side of a variety of themes, expressing more individual narratives in the "safari" in different countries and natural environments. The "Melting Wax" series of works exhibited this time uses pure artistic conception to interpret the inner thoughts in the contrast of black, white and red.
Li Xiaoliang "Melting Wax" series 2021-2024
Melting Wax is a series of photographic and video installations created by Li Xiaoliang from 2021 to 2024. During this period, he visited Iceland, the Netherlands, Italy, Indonesia and other places, documenting the natural temperature of different places in the form of images, embedding these temperature images into their corresponding scenes, showing natural emotions and breathing in a personal way, and experimentally exploring the close and subtle relationship between people and the environment.
Yang Yongliang: The Lost Coast
On April 12th, the exhibition hall on the second floor of HOW Art Museum (Shanghai) launched Yang Yongliang's solo exhibition "Vanishing Shores", presenting more than 10 works by Chinese artist Yang Yongliang in the past five years, including the multi-channel video "Night Travel" and "Polar Night Neon". Among them, "Lost Shores" is the latest art film and the work of the same name in the exhibition.
Yang Yongliang's solo exhibition "Lost Shores" exhibition highlights
Yang Yongliang "Polar Night Neon" (video still)
Dual Screen 4K Video 9 min 50 sec 2022
"Lost Shores" marks Yang Yongliang's first foray into narrative filmmaking. In his past creations, under the influence of long-term study of traditional painting, the artist has built his works on classical landscape painting, and constantly used modern digital imaging technology, and the picture is mixed with the grasp of light and shade and perspective system.
Methodologically, it is a revolution under new technologies, and in terms of content, Yang Yongliang's nostalgia for the wonderful ecological environment of the past and his reflection on rapid urbanization, the image is used as a tool to create fictional narratives. In this context, although the ancient paintings that appear in the artist's works do not completely get rid of the halo of the originals, they stand on the new meaning, raise the essential questions about the originals and reproductions, and form a wider space for interpretation.
Yang Yongliang "Vanishing Shore" (video still)
Experimental Cinema 27 Minutes 2023
"Lost Shores" revolves around the exile of two children who leave their homeland and try to navigate the balance between freedom and regret by reaching the ocean. This is also the first time that Yang Yongliang does not focus on landscapes and architecture, but places human figures in the picture.
Through the camera, the artist concretizes the inner world of himself or her, which is not only their feeling of real life, but also their various interpretations of the whole social reality. This work is a reflection of the artist's own state in recent years, while also supplementing what cannot be explained in past works.
Li Hanwei: Just practice
Li Hanwei's solo exhibition "Just Go to Practice" opened on March 31 in the exhibition hall on the third floor of HOW Art Museum (Shanghai). The exhibition focuses on the themes that artists continue to be interested in, and examines the flow and transformation of information as a cultural carrier, presenting the artist's latest creations in the "Practice" and "Witness" series.
Li Hanwei's solo exhibition "Just Go Practice" exhibition view
"Overall, this exhibition is the result of my attempts to think about image communication. I have a lot of images stored in my phone, whether I took them myself or not, whether they are related to me or not. The huge amount of time spent on the Internet every day makes me very clear about things that I have never seen before: through the push of big data, the information will always present the filtered facts in front of me, and there will always be a kind of guidance, but we know that this is only a superficial phenomenon. This prompted me to be very keen to paint an image – the image of the information as it was. Li Hanwei said.
Li Hanwei "Practice" series
UV printing, digital file Dimensions variable 2022-2024
"Exercise" adopts the usual forms of showing the virtual world—screens and wallpaper—and its special sense of form allows the artist to focus entirely on the virtual space. Lee Hanwei will first use his brush and finger to make the most basic smudge strokes in reality, or even directly from others, and then shoot them and continue to create them in cinema4D.
In this process, the artist quickly and unconsciously completes each image, reverting and revising until the satisfactory result is saved. Here, the original body posture of the painting is replaced by the only wrist manipulation of the mouse.
Detail of Li Hanwei's "Witness-Little People".
Polylactic acid, carbon fiber, UV printing on canvas, stainless steel, plastic
240x240x7cm 2024
"Witness" also sees the tool logic of the 3D printer as a source of formality, and its size limit requires that it can only be printed within a limited cube, which is forced to produce a modular effect. Using the phone's depth camera function, the artist first displaces each pixel of the image to squeeze out a virtual thickness, and after confirming the model, sends it to a 3D printing farm for batch printing, a process that produces a geological-like visual effect, with each layer recording the location of the pixels in the image.
"Throughout the process, I have been remotely transmitting the recorded data information in real time through the app, controlling the textures, lines, and even accidental defects that are retained. Li Hanwei said.
Xu Jinjin: Percussion
Xu Jinjin's research art project "Percussion" opened on March 31 in the exhibition hall on the third floor of HOW Art Museum (Shanghai). "Percussion" systematically sorts out the documentaries, collected documents, and sound materials created by the artist in the past eight years, and explores the relationship between the viewer, the documenter, and the recorded from multiple perspectives.
Installation view of Xu Jinjin's research art project "Percussion".
"Knock" is derived from Xu Jinjin's poem "Against this earth, we knock", which is both an action and an echo of sound, symbolizing women's demands and expressions to each other and the world. The project was deeply influenced by Grandma He, the last natural inheritor of Nüshu, who once lamented that "Nüshu is a star that sheds tears in the sky", because when her grandmother wrote Nüshu, tears always flowed unconsciously—Nüshu is a way to tell the world about suffering, and it is also the art of listening.
Xu Jinjin, "What Would You Hear If You Can?#9:
"It's as if we're walking between waking up from a dream"
Local video installations, projections, resins, old cloth (collected locally), mirrors
Dimensions variable 2024
Since 2017, Xu has been traveling to nine countries with the support of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. She collects the secrets, longings, confessions, and tears of displaced women on the margins of Asia, Africa and Europe, and delves into the inner workings of women's life experiences, transforming fragmented materials into vivid expressions with a poetic touch. Her artistic practice combines the media of video, document, sound, text, performance, and installation to construct a diverse cross-border artistic experience, revealing the intertwined bond between language and existence.
徐今今《在女性庇护所之外（I）》
Digital Image 1:58 2017
Nüshu is not only a writing system, but also a symbol of cultural and social practice that carries the experience, knowledge and values of a specific group. Xu Jinjin connects poetics with "Nüshu", takes poetry as the foundation, and challenges the limits of empathy by revealing the taboos in intimate relationships, mother-daughter confrontations, and forgotten individual memories, and constructs a new kind of "testimonial poetics". This poetics challenges the audience's cognition, deepens the exploration of the human condition, and captures and presents the echoes and dreams hidden in the depths of everyday life.
Text|HOW Art Museum
Picture: Ma Liang, Li Xiaoliang, Yang Yongliang
Li Hanwei, Xu Jinjin, Hao Art Museum