The Paper's reporter Wang Yi
The exhibition "Past Futurism: Past and Future in Chinese Contemporary Art", jointly presented by Beijing Beizhan Culture and Art Center and Beijing Contemporary Art Fair, recently opened at the Beijing Exhibition Center. The Paper saw in a special media preview on June 22 that the theme exhibition focused on the representative works of 40 artists. The exhibition focuses on the rethinking of Chinese history and the rich imagination of China's future by artists of different generations over the past century.
The exhibition "Past Futurism: Past and Future in Chinese Contemporary Art" takes "Futurism" in the context of art history as the starting point and extends to the discussion of the unique concept of time in Chinese culture. As the value engine of the entire exhibition, "futurism of the past" also opened the 2021 Beijing Contemporary Art Fair.
"Futurism" is an artistic movement that originated in Italy in the early twentieth century, celebrating the charms of industry, machinery, technology, power and speed. The creative interests of Futurist artists cover almost all art styles, including painting, sculpture, poetry, drama, music, etc.
Italian artist Antonio Sant'Elia, a 1914 Futurist painting The New City. Detail）。 Image from the web.
This soaring movement is not so much a subversion of the art form as it is a certain vision and imagination of human beings for the future social form at the beginning of the last century. As the painter and sculptor Umbert Boccini (1882-1916) put it in his Manifesto on Futurist Painting in 1910, "We will do our utmost to fight against the old beliefs that are outdated, blindly believed, and inspired by the museum of sin." We have to rebel against outdated traditional paintings, sculptures and antiques, against everything that is dirty and decaying in the passage of time. We must have the courage to resist everything. This spirit is young and new, accompanied by the destruction of the old life of injustice and even sin. ”
Today, "futurism" is a historical term, but in fact it has shaped the temperament of this entire era. The exhibition attempts to ask: When the artistic ideas of the past have become reality, and today's reality is even ahead of the artistic concept, can art once again play the role of foresighter? "Today, mankind is once again facing 'a major change that has not occurred in a hundred years', and we need to rethink the future of China and even the world." At the end Chinese of this "Preface to curation", I quoted a sentence from Wang Xizhi's "Preface to the Orchid Pavilion", "Looking at the present after the present, but also looking at the past." That is to say, future people look at us today as we look at people in the past. Bao Dong, the curator of this exhibition, said. It is understood that the Beijing Contemporary Art Fair takes the exhibition form as a breakthrough point and is committed to the promotion of the value of Chinese art. "Art Story • STORY" is the curatorial unit of "Beijing Contemporary", as the value engine of the entire exhibition, inviting artists and their important works to participate under the framework of artistic value combing under the framework of curatorial system, providing a cognitive map with a valuable narrative path for contemporary art appreciation and collection. With the launch of the "Art Narrative" unit, the 2021 Beijing Contemporary Art Fair has also officially kicked off. This year's Beijing Contemporary Art Fair will be held at the Beijing National Agricultural Exhibition Center from August 26 to 29 as scheduled, and 57 galleries and art institutions will now participate in the fair. The exhibition "Futurism of the Past" will work with the Beijing Contemporary Art Fair to create a "summer of art, a common festival".
Beijing Exhibition Center at night
Looking back, futurism was mainly born and developed in Italy alone, but it also had a huge impact on other countries. In the 1920s and 1950s, the development of this artistic movement was particularly spectacular in the former Soviet Union, and was practiced and highlighted in the country's megastructures of the same period. These buildings are often imposing, towering, symmetrical in layout, and richly decorated, showing the revolutionary passion and glory of communism. Influenced by the Soviet architecture of this period, the Karl Marx Street complex in East Berlin after World War II, the Publishing House in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, and the Warsaw Palace of Science and Culture in Warsaw, the Polish capital, were also concocted. In China in the 1950s, with the rise of the Beijing Exhibition Center (formerly known as the Soviet Union Exhibition Hall) and the Shanghai Exhibition Center (formerly known as the Sino-Soviet Friendship Building) in Beijing and Shanghai, these two neoclassical Soviet-style buildings showed the vision and yearning for the "future" as they moved towards a new society.
Zhang Hui The sky has a pink city (the Shanghai Exhibition Center, the sister building of the Beijing Exhibition Center, appears in the work) 2021
With this level of understanding, it is not difficult to find that the exhibition "Past Futurism - Past and Future in Chinese Contemporary Art" is held at the Beijing Exhibition Center. In the middle of summer, walking through the huge fountain in front of the museum, the water mist drifting with the wind makes people squint their eyes, and looking up at the red five-pointed star on the spire of the tower above the central building is more reminiscent of the line in the movie "Sunny Day", "All the seas are brothers, and the five continents are shocked and precious." "Walk through the curved colonnade lined with 18 carved columns on both sides, enter the hall, and climb up the stairs to the exhibition site of Hall 2. Curator Bao Dong said that looking at the subtitles of the exhibition "Past" and "Future", the two sides of the U-shaped exhibition hall are naturally divided into two narrow and almost symmetrical exhibition areas, "the artist's imagination of the past again and the artist's bold prediction of the future, like two time tunnels, connected by rough and mixed reality." ”
"The past", a reimagining of the modern architecture that is well known
The dome inside the Beijing Exhibition Center
The exhibition area on the left-hand side of the U-shaped exhibition hall is intended to face the "past". The first work in the exhibition, Wang Luyan's "W Two-Way Automatic Pistol D14-03", breaks the unidirectional nature of the flow of time in the exhibition. "Wang Luyan was one of the earliest promoters of Chinese conceptual art, he participated in both the 'Star Painting School' and an important member of the 'New Scale Group', and his creations have always adhered to a certain paradoxical thinking. In this work, the bullets in the pistol are reloaded in both directions and fired in both directions at the same time—a metaphor for the theme of our exhibition, facing both the past and future dimensions of time. Bao Dong said.
Wang Luyan W Two-way Automatic Pistol D14-03 2013 Brushed Stainless Steel 136×220×45 cm Beijing Contemporary Art Fair · Artistic description
Cui Jie's "Palace of Culture" is a unique building of socialism, the Workers' Club (also known as the Palace of Culture). The artist reimagined this well-known modern building: the use of two complementary colors disrupted the structure of the Palace of Culture, as if to dismantle it—the exterior was inverted, the internal structure was turned outward, and the building became a place of contradiction. At the same time, the work expresses the highlights of the metal building surface by leaving blank rather than covering it – further blurring the sense of space that the building should have in the work, and thus the "Palace of Culture" further transitions from architecture to sculpture.
Cui Jie Cultural Palace "Palace of Culture" 2016 Colored lead on paper 21x29.6cm antenna space
Li Yousong's "Industrial Triumphal Arch" and "Dam" with a very socialist aesthetic have built an ideological "strange building". The towering dam that appears in "The Dam" is a landmark building in the process of socialist industrialization since the founding of New China, and the artist has incorporated the style of classical relief architecture when depicting the dam, and replaced the flag originally flying on the dam with red corn. In "Industrial Triumphal Arch", in addition to being decorated with typical elements representing industrial construction such as lifting equipment, ships, and launch towers, the entire "Triumphal Arch" is a smoke-filled thermal power plant and a crane tower high-rise building under construction, and a "liberation" truck stands at the base of the foreground. It is also worth mentioning that the number "1968" placed at the center of the "Arc de Triomphe" happens to be the year of the artist's birth, which seems to imply Li Yousong's double tribute to history and personal.
Industrial Arc de Triomphe, 2010, oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm photo to thank artists and extraordinary art spaces
Originally titled Balcony, liu zhan's installation of 65 semiconductor radios looks at first glance like a rotating radar or a satellite operating in outer space. The work was placed outdoors to retrace the collective memories of the past accompanied by shortwave and characteristic noises, "In the Beijing Exhibition Hall, the building itself is so strong that it can only play rustling sounds, which no longer come from a radio station, but are the background radiation of the universe." Bao Dong explained.
Exhibition Liu Balcony 2018 Installation 268x100x268cm Eccentric Gallery
Wu Yuchi Travels West | Pig Gang Hyena 2020 Charcoal Sketch 38.9×54.6 cm Beijing Contemporary Art Fair · Artistic description
In this exhibition area, the works of the oldest and youngest artists in this exhibition live next to each other. Comic book master Zhang Guangyu (1900-1965) and the post-zero small painter Wu Yuchi travel through a hundred years to have a dialogue through the "legend" of the journey to the west. During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Zhang Guangyu used a paintbrush as a weapon to expose the corrupt behavior of the bureaucrats of the National Government in Chongqing, and the new color comic strip "Journey to the West" completed in 1945 is a model of this. The style of this comic strip is easily reminiscent of the old Shanghai month card and cigarette label paintings, divided into 10 times, each of which is accompanied by text descriptions. The content is similar to the chapter back novel, satirizing the society at that time with mythology. In the final scene of the series of paintings, "HuaguoShan is actually modernized", Sun Xinger's "children" no longer live in the water curtain cave, but show smiling faces in the windows of structuralist residential buildings.
Zhang Guangyu, Journey to the West, Chapter 7, Page 6
What will the "future", the "tomorrow" of mankind, look like?
Passing through the corridor built by artist Xu Hongxiang with a painting up to 20 meters long, visitors can come to the "Tunnel of the Future" opposite. Bao Dong said that he has always wanted to find a place to display this huge aluminum plate work, and the tall display space in the North Exhibition Hall just met his long-cherished wish. "Like steel and cement, industrial prefabricated aluminum is also the most common building material, and China's aluminum production accounts for 90% of the world's current production." The artist presents a large number of industrial production scenes and lively crowds on aluminum to tell the humanistic scene in the process of urbanization in China today, especially the combination of urban and rural areas. ”
Xu Hongxiang "One Life" 2019-2021 Aluminum Plate, Marker, Oil Paint, Acrylic Art Triumph Gallery
The first work in the "Future" section is the artist Liu Fang's "Gong", "Gong" is probably the most similar work in the entire exhibition to the beginning of Italian Futurism, focusing on movement and emphasizing that the audience can look around a work. It splits the movements of the ballet and can be viewed in a 360-degree rotation. Liu Fang is also a non-hereditary inheritor of Tianjin Face Sculpture Art, and I hope to introduce her 'traditional' identity into this future-oriented exhibition." Bao Dong introduced.
Liu Fang Gong 2021 Sculpture 80×80×80(h) cm Beijing Contemporary Art Fair · Artistic description
From the alien landscape constructed by Jiang Zhi and Gao Lei's lunar soil specimens, it can be seen that human beings have ambitions and explorations for distant "outer lands". Among them, the artist Jiang Zhi's four micro-spray works "Destined Things" are made by using iron filings to naturally form crystals similar to alien minerals under the action of magnetism, and then use amplification technology to enlarge. "I deliberately chose two works each of blue-purple and reddish-orange (color) because in the universe the two ends of the spectrum are ultraviolet and infrared." Bao Dong said. Gao Lei's work "Moon Landing: The Signature of All Things" places common objects on earth, such as eating leftover duck heads, corn cobs, cones and taps, in the high imitation moon soil, "The moon is vacuum, these objects do not decay and rust on the moon, and become 'holy relics' that occupy the lunar surface in the form of a monument." ”
Gao Lei Moon Landing: Signature of Everything 2020 High Strength Concrete Blank Space
Crypto art is an art form that spreads through the blockchain and is issued through NFTs (non-homogeneous tokens). In this exhibition, Liu Jiaying's "Red Gold Art Museum" is a cryptographic art work in this cutting-edge form. "Red Gold" is a blockchain virtual art space built in Cryptoxels, in the first half of 2020, affected by the epidemic, people's going out was constrained, which created the prosperity of the virtual world, and people began to use blockchain technology to build a virtual world. Here, people can use digital currencies to buy and sell land, hold parties, auction and display art works. Liu Jiaying purchased the land of Cryptovoxels in the first half of 2020 and built the Red Gold virtual space, while convening the builders of the community, making Red Gold a virtual space where multiple people edit online and are constantly changing.
Liu Jiaying Chijin Art Museum 2020 CV Architectural Video 5'00'' Beijing Contemporary Art Fair · Artistic description
What will the "tomorrow" of humanity look like? You may be able to glimpse a corner from Cao Fei's "People's Walled City" and Fan Wennan's "China 2098". Born in 1998, Fan Wennan graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts majoring in game design and now works at ByteDance. Last fall, the painter posted his personal work "China 2098" online, imagining what China and the world would look like when he was 100 years old, and then constructing a shocking landscape under the picture of "the glaciers melting in the 2060s and the sea level rising sharply". Such a set of traditional farming civilization and culture supplemented by the "infrastructure madness" feast of modern heavy industry has exceeded 100 million in the reading volume of Sina Weibo. Looking closely at Fan Wennan's works, it is not difficult to think of the domestic heavy industry style science fiction film "The Wandering Earth" a few years ago, which is different from the "thousands of roads, safety first" that flashed in the movie, the funny meaning of the slogan is different, and the slogan hanging on the huge mechanical façade or beam in "China 2098" is full of retrospectives and tributes to the past time, such as "Zhiqingjing New Village". On the scaffolding of a "completion of the resettlement site project on time and with quality", a line of slogans with white characters on a red background, "Everyone has a house to live in, and some people live in a house", which shows a certain continuation of the thinking of the current real estate industry governance proposition.
East Water West Introduction, 2020, Digital Print, Variable Size
In the view of the curators, these classic or brand-new works not only present the future imagery, imagination and narrative in contemporary art, but also show China's historical expectations in the past hundred years and the current future prospects in 2021, and also embody a kind of China's endless view of historical time: the future looks at the present, and the present looks at the past. After visiting the exhibition, down the marble staircase of The Second Hall, Chernyshevsky's famous phrase "Art comes from life, and is higher than life" is engraved on the wall opposite the staircase in three large characters in Chinese, Russian and English. Yes, whether the artist's imagination and vision of the future is wishful thinking or a cliché, the contemplation of art and life is always mutually superficial and endless.
Slogan inside the Beijing Exhibition Center Photo by Wang Yi
The exhibition will run until August 31.
Editor-in-Charge: Ruoxi Chen
Proofreader: Liu Wei