The Paper's reporter Lu Sijia
On August 7th, the day of Gengzi Liqiu, the new exhibition "In the Name of Flowers" of Shanghai Pearl Art Museum was opened. The exhibition presents the creation of 25 artists such as Araki Jingwei and Xu Bing with the theme of "Flowers". When you first enter the exhibition hall, if you see the "flower market", under a closer look, there are questions about life everywhere. In the middle of 2020, pain and decay are always around, and the imagination and relaxation given by art are an escape and resistance to reality. At the end of the exhibition, the small flowers blooming between the stone crevices are also encouraging people to never give up the hope of life.
Autumn is over, and the heat is still hot. Flowers that leave the soil are the hardest to feed in this season. The flowers were "transplanted" from the soil and water to the art museum, and the special "climatic soil" gave them a richer connotation and a longer life.
Ai Jing "Flowers in Every Door" installation 2012
Artist Ai Jing made a door out of antique Chinese Qing Dynasty door panels and flowers. Push open "There Are Flowers in Every Door" and walk into the latest exhibition of the Pearl Art Museum, "In the Name of Flowers". Compared with the international exhibitions of "Tadao Ando", "Louis Vuitton Travels", "Mucha" and "Hugo" since the opening of the museum, the new exhibition has a little more "inner circulation", and most of the 25 artists on the exhibitor list are from China.
The museum uses the term "emergency call" to describe the exhibition, which is very appropriate. The planning stems from the soothing of people's hearts after the epidemic, and responds poetically to the present with the theme of flowers. More than 150 works bring together painting, photography, video, sculpture, installation, performance and various forms related to space. In the usual sense of the exhibition, there is always an "exhibition line", which is unfolded according to time or some logic. But this exhibition is like a flower market suitable for roaming. Today, the traditional bustling flower market has almost disappeared in Shanghai, and the exhibition hall intertwining real and imaginary flowers is unique.
Exhibition site
At the end of the exhibition, in an installation that mimics the cracks in the earth's surface, a ribbon of flowers is picked up from a clear water bottle. This scene is reminiscent of the writer Lin Xi's essay "Life Between the Stone Crevices". These soft and colorful little flowers, through the death-like cracks in the ground, are still fresh and beautiful, just like each one has overcome all the difficult and precious lives in 2020.
Sun Yue's "Whispers of Time" documentation berlin nursing home project
Near this installation is a dialogue between the works of two young artists. Sun Yue exhibited with a documentary on "Whispers of Time", produced in Berlin, a project she implemented in an abandoned nursing home on the outskirts of Berlin. This nursing home was dedicated to the treatment of tuberculosis patients during the two world wars. On an abandoned old red sofa in the courtyard, Sun Yue placed her own white porcelain dandelion between the gaps in the sofa and left traces of lung disease, rescue and oblivion with the shutter. "Time is a game where no one can look at it coldly. I use porcelain clay and plants to make time visible and to make the demise last forever. Sun Yue wrote.
What makes people feel very good is that the curator placed Xu Xinhua's ceramic sculpture "Museum of Life - Flowers" next to Sun Yue's work, and his group of white ceramic flowers, from the combination of real flowers and clay, after firing at 1330 degrees Celsius, the flowers "shed their mortal fetuses". The non-flower flower, illuminated by the dim light of the exhibition hall, is like a bouquet of death on the albino lungs.
Xu Xinhua's "Museum of Life - Flowers" ceramic sculpture
The flowers offered at the sacrifice range from cold to photographs that are as splendid as Araki. Araki's childhood home, close to the cemetery Jingxuan Temple. The flowers he first photographed were the "other side flowers" in the Temple of Jingxian Temple. After the death of his beloved wife Yoko, Araki fell into the sea of flowers more wantonly, photographing flowers in large numbers, both black and white, and color. In the exhibition, a group of photos with close-up shots and flashes and gradually approaching the flower buds is his typical approach. In contrast to the different colors and different forms of flower photography in the exhibition hall, Araki's group of photographs is unforgettable.
Araki Keisuke Lust Flowers series Photography 2004
The same photography, the same in the face of physical pain and death, Hu Weiyi made a romantic resistance with his imagination. At the height of the epidemic, his creation was blocked for a while, until he saw the X-ray of the hospital and the inspiration reappeared. Using the "blue sun" method in imaging technology, he reproduced the local bones of the human body in X-ray films, and decorated the bones with flowers at his fingertips, conveying contradictions, conflicts and restlessness in a surreal way. A more sophisticated technique is also reflected in another set of color photographs: the background color of the flowers in the photographs is colored from a liquid directly extracted from the flowers. A flower was reborn in his photographic experiments, beautiful and cruel.
Hu Weiyi "Blue Bones" Photography Blue Sunburn in Watercolor Paper 2020
Of course, the overall tone of the exhibition is not so heavy. In Lin Minghong's exhibition area, the audience can sit on a room like "Northeast Kang" and see a room of colorful flower cloth patterns, and there are extremely comfortable large pillows at hand. Healing and decompressing, there is Clara Kristalova's coarse glazed pottery "Peach", which is spontaneous and cute.
Exhibition area of Lin Minghong's works
Clara Kristalova "Rosé" Tungsten Pottery 2017
In the exhibition, there are artists who are relatively familiar with people, such as Yu Youhan, Xue Song and Zhang Enli, who now live in Shanghai; Xu Bing, who works with "Heavenly Book" and "Earth Book"; Liang Shaoji, who insists on silk art; Sichuan artists He Duoling and Zhou Chunya; and Japanese artist Kiyokawa Ashami, who has exhibited more than once at the Pearl Art Museum. Xu Bing's two photographs, Silkworm Flowers, record his first exhibition at the Barde College Art Gallery in New York in 1998. Xu Bing used fresh mulberry leaves to form a huge bouquet of flowers, on which were placed hundreds of silkworm babies who were about to spit silk. After the opening of the exhibition, silkworms nibbled on mulberry leaves on branches, and soon the mulberry leaves left only the branches. After that, the silkworm continues to spit silk on the branches as a cocoon... What Xu Bing is interested in is the uncertainty of things like water.
Xu Bing's "Raising Silkworms in the United States Series III: Silkworm Flowers" video recording 1998
In the wandering of the "Flower" exhibition, the works of the "old artists" are more like conspicuous road signs, with either intuitive, nostalgic, or familiar appearances, prompting a thematic exhibition called "in the name of flowers".
He Duoling, "Miscellaneous Flowers Sketch No.2020-19", Oil on canvas 2020
Zhang Enli, "Garden 16", oil on canvas, 2017
Li Dandan, director and curator of the Pearl Art Museum of Shanghai, said: "These works connect the Yoshimitsu Katayu in art history, the customs and customs of other places here, and are also the viewing, reproduction, creation and contemplation of 'in the name of flowers', exploring art, life, death, desire, nature, emotion, the future and other issues that have never been far away from and have never been so urgent." ”
In the name of flowers
Venue: Pearl Art Museum, Shanghai (8th Floor, Aegean Shopping Park, No. 1588 Wuzhong Road)
Exhibition period: August 8-December 6, 2020
Editor-in-Charge: Weihua Gu
Proofreader: Yan Zhang