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Exhibition
Well-WishesDuration_ November 9, 2018–January 5, 2019
Opening_ Friday, November 9, 6–8 PM Curator_ Sun Dongdong |
VACANCY
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Chen Fei
Well-Wishes, 2018 Acrylic and textile on canvas 80 x 100 cm 31 1/2 x 39 3/8 in In Well-Wishes (2018), Chen Fei makes his subject matter a basket of assorted fruits, which is commonly used in Chinese culture as a blessing gift for friends or family in the hospital. The variety of fruits provides multiple options for patients to choose for their own good. The more varied the fruits, the more thoughtful and capable the visitor is. The basket of delicious-looking fruits gradually becomes a symbol of wealth and riches. The taste is irrelevant; the vibrant and vivid color combinations of the fruit ironically reflect the superficial quality that is valued nowadays in society. A marble shelf sets this fruit basket statically, while a hand-spray-painted semi-transparent glossy paper covers the top to give this scene a sense of kitsch and the alluring impression of a vanitas painting translated for contemporary vocabularies. The glaring sheet is to prevent the fruit from rotting and to obtain the longevity of freshness, plus maintain optimal appearance, which is absurdly reminiscent of a wax figure in Madame Tussauds. The basket of assorted fruits is given an ever more surreal atmosphere in its state of mortality, a perfect contradiction to the melancholy black flora-patterned backdrop, which is a vintage curtain cloth sourced from the city of southern Beijing. Southern of Beijing used to be and still is regarded as the most quintessential aspect of life in Beijing, even though this area is now divided and repartitioned into two new governing districts. During the research of Chen Fei’s experimentations in materials in this new work, he realized that the hustle and bustle in the streets of southern Beijing, where many old fabric stores gathered, became vaporized due to newly scheduled construction. Thus, all the small workshops and household businesses had to either go home or go online in order to cope with the national industrial upgrade policy in the major cities. One of the fabric store owners sold a piece of curtain cloth to Chen Fei at one-tenth of its original price before he left, and gave up his inventory that he could not move away in time. Chen Fei then adopted this cloth and primed it onto the canvas. The patterns remain unveiled on the back, representing the longing of the provincial immigrants who came to bigger city for a better life, while in reality, the old market—which made a living for common people—was already gone. The basket and the flora curtain juxtaposed onto each other portray our society and its diaspora. |
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Ceal Floyer
Downpour (Torstrasse), 2004 (video preview) Projector with sound 5’56” Courtesy of Ceal Floyer and Esther Schipper Ceal Floyer is known for her work in a variety of media that share a humorously wry approach to language and the semiotics of the everyday. Floyer's oeuvre is characterized by a distinct voice: exuding a quiet but forceful presence, her works address us with playfulness and profundity. Slight alterations to found objects that are usually familiar from everyday experiences create surprising interventions that heighten the awareness of our surroundings. In Downpour (Torstrasse) (2004), Ceal Floyer has filmed windy storms in various locations, where rain was blown in diagonal directions. By tilting the camera, Floyer captures an image of perfectly vertical rainfall, the illusion given away only by the border of the frame. This work reflects Floyer’s manipulations of every day situations, testing the slippage between function and implication, the literal and the imagined. The ideal of perfection is substantiated by a delusive state of being as free as possible from flaws and defects. Each of the restless attempts accomplishes in the other’s failure, leaving the perfect rainfall still up in the air. |
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He Xiangyu
Untitled, 2018 17 sets of framed letters and postcards, wallpaper The experimental practice of He Xiangyu can be seen as both a material testing ground and a conceptual laboratory that investigates diverse personal, social, and political themes. Untitled (2018) is the first series by the artist pertaining to his interest in exploring a convention established by common practice, and how it is affected and changed over time. This particular work consists of 17 postcards in between the years 2015 to 2018, including one drawing by his firstborn child as a new-year present. Sending a postcard to a friend is a virtual gesture that shares the values and perspectives of the sender, as well as an expectation that the recipient will cherish the arrival of the thoughtful greeting. To the artist, this consensual assumption in the relationship between the two parties virtualizes a performative, affectionate, and temporary filiation of a social network in a broader sense. The image of the postcard might remind the recipient of the time and place of the trip, or a specific imagery that the sender wishes the recipient to have, while the limitation in the size of a postcard also synthesizes the high points of a journey into a few important words. A postcard is a traditional format, parallel to the prevailing behavior of sending texts or pictures via smartphones. The backing paper in each of the frames in this series are chosen by the artist as an alternative way to express his feelings and the assumption of the intention of the sender when the postcards arrived. An interactive yet imaginary communication in social norms then becomes a property of fortune to be possessed in this wide-spreading picture wall. 
Huang Ran
A (Cheeky) Self-Portrait, 2015 Oil on canvas 180 x 150 cm 70 7/8 x 59 in A (Cheeky) Self-Portrait (2015) is an ongoing painting project alternative to filmmaking for Huang Ran. In this work, he writes the screenplay, directs, and acts all on his own by projecting himself onto the role of Martin Kippenberger and emulating Kippenberger’s work to create a nonsensical Guinness World Records. Through borrowing the absurd texts—“Golden Palace Dot Com Silverman,” he implies an optimistic attitude towards the future, which can be seen as the artist’s self-implemented psychotherapy. Contrary to the rational structure of a background consisting of grids, shameless tactics becomes a possible way to defy fate. On the other hand, by appropriating Kippenberger’s abstract imageries in Huang’s own name, he is able to get closer to Kippenberger’s life attitude. This nonsensical Guinness World Records is further shaped into a form in which encouragement and coaxing coexist. The nature of his practice reflects on how history has manipulated contemporary art practice, questioning at the same time the relational dilemma between them. |
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Li Ming
MOVEMENTS, 2014 (video previews) 8 channel digital video Color, sound Channel 1-4 2’30” / 5-8 3’50” In MOVEMENTS (2014), Li Ming performs a series of motions: running, skating, pole climbing, trolley sliding, and jumping off vehicles—van, bicycle, skid-steer loader, truck, and tuk-tuk (those commonly seen in everyday life). By juxtaposing one another, the 8 acts synchronized in 8 video channels under the same scenario, this ambitious work mimics the long-take technique in filmmaking and exploits the relationship between acting and watching in a video. Usually a long-take involves sophisticated camera movements and elaborate camera blockings, underlining a dramatic spatial span to imply the genuineness of acting in a staged scene. Li takes up this idea but deliberately sets the camera moving towards the same direction, at the same pace, as much as possible with his movements, while striving through and completing his acting by keeping up in the center of the proceeding camera frame. In the intervals of riding each vehicle, Li’s endeavor showcases his body moving along with the camera, a competent mediator for neutralizing the relative concept of space and time in motions. Throughout the video, Li eventually accomplishes all of his journeys and ends up running on foot. By this point, the video seems to resume the movements of the beginning of the video loop. The painstaking and spontaneous actions remain in the same position in video, as if running on a treadmill and going nowhere. In this work, movement explains itself through a self-consuming process in a fixed camera frame, illuminating the relative and interactive relationship in obliteration and renew between the individual and its surroundings. |
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Los Carpinteros
Comodato, 2018 (film still) Single channel 2K video, 21:9 Color, sound 22’36” © Los Carpinteros Image: Courtesy of Los Carpinteros and KOW, Berlin Comodato (2018) is a voyage of observation through the scenes of Cubans’ private lives. Los Carpinteros takes an unbroken shot passing through the twelve rooms of one house. Sumptuous interiors decked out in the accouterments of wealth give way to more modest and finally humble dwellings. The shift from the living conditions at the top end of Cuba’s social scale to those at the bottom is so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, until the discrepancy becomes increasingly unmistakable. The film refutes the myth that Cuban society knows no class distinctions—and yet its story is not one of division into rich and poor. It is all too conspicuous that each interior is the other’s equal in its distinctive dignity and beauty; the ways in which people make themselves at home are too similar; the continuity of a social sphere with its rising and declining resources too salient in this one environment. 
Ni Hao
Smoke Party, 2015 Ashes, 10 ashtrays, cigarettes, acrylic paint dimensions variable Ni Hao's Smoke series (2015-2018) is an on-going exploration on the common global ritual of smoking as a distillation of those unique moments during the act of smoking. For this series Ni collects different brands of cigarettes and ashtrays from all over the world to turn them into intricate sculptures for those specific moments when smoking in different places and different time. Ni is interested in the contradiction in the act of smoking. Nicotine is both a sedative and a stimulant. Nicotine causes the release of dopamine in the pleasure and motivation areas of the brain, yet it causes cancer. It is addictive and bad for environment while one billion people in the world practice this ritual daily in order to live. Considering all the above, the Smoke series often changes to different shape and form to reflect the varied moments in our lives when different people in different occasions take part, implying a sense of improvisation usually seen in happening art. This group of work seemingly invites the audience to join a bizarre and quirky party. The ash bridges swirl into sky like tracks of a roller coaster in an adventure park. They both provide an open relationship in people’s coming and going, a temporary pleasure for a getaway in the middle-class lifestyle. 
Qiu Xiaofei
Temple Base, 2014-2015 Acrylic on canvas mounted on board, old white porcelain hook, plastic mesh bag, wood balls 210 × 144.1 × 13.5 cm 82 5/8 x 56 3/4 x 5 1/4 in Temple Base (2014-2015) is a canvas-mounted-on-board painting by Qiu Xiaofei, representing the artist’s uncompromising exploration of the history of abstract paintings and the meaning of materiality in image. The painting consists of a luminous evergreen in the upper center that is surrounded by a fiery orange nimbus opposite tangling, messy passages of curling bands in white and gray extending to the center and bottom of the canvas. A semi-figurative silhouette of Buddha sits in meditative repose beneath, on the lower right, facing other hollow shapes left coincidentally through repetitive mark-makings to achieve autonomy in materiality against any potential denotation of the images. Among the rather inexplicit forms and shapes, there are two wood balls in a mesh bag absurdly suspended on a porcelain hook attached to the surface of the painting, rendering a sense of humor in its similarity to a penis and testicles in their appearances. In the contradiction and comparison of the elements employed in this painting, Qiu wittily puts the relationships between image and object, abstract and figurative, the spiritual and the secular into service. A swirling gesture puts together the metaphysical dialogue that exists in equal parts of disorderly abstraction and elements that are distinctly articulated. |
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Tao Hui
The Tangible Ones, 2018 (on-site video preview) Digital fan projection and sound 10’35” Edition of 3+1AP Tao Hui spent his childhood on the foggy top of a mountain in Chongqing, where the Yangtze River could not be seen. With limited accessibility to the internet and information in the outside world, the young Tao Hui loved the stories that older women in the village used to tell, gossips and mystery tales that oral retellings made into fantastical, riveting stories. Mass cultural productions – television series, films, reality shows – have also put a great influence on the artist’s practice since he was young. This experience expands Tao’s visual properties and gives him liberty to observe, to re-associate, and to reinvent plots and anecdotes that blink into his mind. In The Tangible Ones, Tao Hui created a fictional narrative in which two young women, a French and a Chinese, try to deliver their thoughts of someone by telling their stories alone to the open air. A melody playing along with the singing and storytelling throughout the video portrays the characters and their time in the vivid descriptions of day-to-day experiences and the soliloquy of wondering. Tao probes the relationship between the media landscape and the social body, and reflects on the fraught ethics of belonging in a hyper-mediatized reality. The random association between the subjective audio and the visual fragments creates a narrative structure that is not only postmodern, but also an open-ended demonstration of Tao’s subversive thinking in the linear narrative of video art. 
Xu Qu
Rubber (Jing’an Temple), 2018 (details) Rubber Pad and steel wire dimensions variable Xu Qu works in a broad range of media including video, photography, sculpture, installations, and painting. In this work, Xu visited Jing’an Temple and took pictures of pilgrims who came to pray or redeem a vow to Buddha. These sacred moments intrigued Xu’s interest in the rituals that people conduct to contribute their will and wealth in expressing devotion in various religions. By observing among the visitors who bowed and dropped to their knees, Xu turned back and took pictures of the crowds at a vantage point that was the same as the perspective of Buddha on the shrine. The silhouettes of prayers, incense burners, incense sticks, fiery stoves for paper money, and the architectures of the temple itself, according to the artist, are regarded as an accumulation of the wealth and property donated by the devotees through different solemn ceremonies. Xu adopts the scenes and cuts rubber pads according to the shapes and forms of these scenes. The installation Rubber (Jina’an temple) (2018) in this exhibition celebrates industrial thrift but renders a decadent ambience at the same time. Through these rolled-up rubber pads lain on the exhibition floor, questions of believers in religion and economy are sprucely brought up. 
Yang Jian
Rain, 2018 (details) Keys and motor dimensions variable Yang Jianis usually motivated by an urge to preserve and elevate the linkage between rescuing trash from its redundancy and placing his treasures on pedestals for reinterpretation. In Key Chain (2018), Yang collects unused, discarded keys varied in function and shape from multiple places to hang them in a chain that circulates in a loop to connect the two exhibition venues, the gallery and the rental room across the alley. Each of the keys shall respond to a door or window which opens up a passage, allowing access between buildings or to different rooms for someone, while to Yang a trigger to cross the very moment that shackles imagination. By putting these anonymous keys in the loop passing through the rooms, the space in the same compound and the daily routines of ordinary people, who chat, shop, and commute on the street, are brought to life via hundreds of various function of keys marching in the wind, suspended across the slender alley. It bears witness to the urban density and the beholden wishes of the residents. |
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