Everything asks
During the exhibition period of "Ask Every Day - Hu Xiangcheng Solo Exhibition", "Chimney PSA" will continue to launch the "Everything Asks" column, using questions as clues to interpret the rich and interesting details of the artist's works and explain his passionate creative story.
Why are there car toys hanging from wooden poles?
Part of "Asking Every Day".
Sound installation, hand-cranked mechanism and percussion, Hu Xiangcheng, 2024
Installation view of "Asking Every Day - Hu Xiangcheng Solo Exhibition", Power Station of Art
Are wooden dolls whispering?
365 pieces of daily necessities constitute a large-scale installation in PSA's new exhibition "Asking Every Day - Hu Xiangcheng Solo Exhibition", its name is "Asking Every Day", do you want to know its creative concept and gameplay? Look down~
Why "Ask Every Day"?
"Tian Tian Q" is a large-scale hand-cranked device, the mechanical rotation symbolizes the constant change of time and man, and these sounds are like people asking everything every day: "Why is it called Tian Tian Q? Because our understanding of the world is always limited." Qu Yuan's "Tianwen", then we add the word "Tian", ask every day, ask everything, that is, we have to put forward all kinds of imagination for the present and the future. Artist Hu Xiangcheng said.
How do you capture traces of sound?
In Hu Xiangcheng's view, the sound produced by the shaking of this hand-cranked device has an intimate and complex meaning: "In space, people cannot perceive sounds, and the situation of other planets is unknown. The sounds we can make and perceive on Earth are important human heritage. Unfortunately, just as species are disappearing in large numbers, the diversity of human language and the production of various sounds is disappearing. In order to avoid the appearance of a situation of a thousand cities, and to prevent the future human homeland from being too monotonous, it is very important to protect the diverse memories. "Although many objects have changed shape in the washing of time, when familiar sounds are mixed together, time also has visible traces.
How to play?
There is a rocker arm on the "body" of this device, and when you gently shake it, you can see these small objects swaying from side to side following the roller.
There is also an invisible "play" in the installation, which can be listened to on the TV next to it - there will also be a unique performance by Hu Xiangcheng and Hu Danfei, Zhang Zujing, and Xia Fei using percussion trumpets and rapping in the local dialect of Shanghai. At a time when the global ecological crisis and the rapid development of artificial intelligence are being developed, artists are trying to give people a short-term sense of pleasure and solace through music and dynamic installations. At the same time, the installation is also a metaphor for the crisis of the rapid disappearance of small languages and regional languages in the world, for which the artist hopes that the endangered languages hidden in various regions can be reborn.
After reading these, what else do you want to ask? Come to the PSA showroom and ask while playing~
Related Exhibitions:
A series of exhibitions from the Chinese Contemporary Art Collection
Ask Every Day - Hu Xiangcheng Solo Exhibition
Curator: Fumio Nanjo
Duration: April 14, 2024 to June 9, 2024
Location: 1st Floor, Power Station of Art
Organiser: Power Station of Art
Admission: Free
From April 14, 2024 to June 9, 2024, the Power Station of Art (PSA) presents "Tian Tian Wen", the largest solo exhibition project of Chinese artist Hu Xiangcheng in recent years. The exhibition features a selection of paintings, videos, sculptures and materials from the 1970s to the present, as well as a number of new large-scale installations based on PSA's architectural history and specific spaces. Hu Xiangcheng, who is full of creative passion, constantly asks questions and thinks about the present and the future in different ways, and he uses the museum as an experimental space for "generative exploration", as well as a "field" that connects people and fields in society.
About Power Station of Art
Founded on October 1, 2012, Power Station of Art is the first state-owned contemporary art museum in Chinese mainland and the main venue of the Shanghai Biennale. The Power Station of Art building was renovated from the former Nanshi Power Plant, and was the "City Future Pavilion" during the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. It has witnessed Shanghai's urban transformation from industry to the information age, and its rough and uninhibited industrial architectural style has provided artists with rich imagination and creative possibilities. As the "production workshop" of the new urban culture, it is the source of life for this museum to constantly renew itself and constantly keep itself in progress. The Power Station of Art (PSA) is striving to provide an open platform for the public to display and interact with contemporary culture and art, to eliminate the barriers between art and life, and to promote cooperation and knowledge production between different cultural and artistic disciplines.
(Article from Chimney PSA)
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