Arthub Favorite: Week 33
Arthub often keeps our followers informed of the happenings in Shanghai, but this does not mean that there are not extraordinary events occurring across the country. This week we would like you to take a trip West with us. And no, we do not mean to Europe. Chengdu – home of the pandas – and also L-Art Gallery, opens a new contemporary group exhibition that makes us want to hop on a flight right now. If you’re lucky enough to be slurping up that spicy Sichuan hot pot and delighting in the city’s greenery, then make sure not to miss the opening of Illusion of Reality this Saturday.
Opening: August 20 at 3:30 PM
Duration: August 20 – October 16, 2016
Venue: L‐Art Gallery
Area C1, Tianfu Software Park, Tianfu Avenue, Chengdu, China
Artist: Ma Haijiao, Wu Ding, Xu Bacheng, Ye Funa
L-Art Gallery presents the new exhibition Illusion of Reality, featuring video works by artists Ma Haijiao, Wu Ding, Xu Bacheng and Ye Funa, as well as related photographs, installations and paintings. In Illusion of Reality, participating artists present their thoughts on identity, society, history and philosophy. Their works combine real world material, their unique individual reflections and unified perceptions to form a new language of imagery.
Ma Haijiao’s three-screen video work, Lying Dream; Lie about Dream is his second work in a multi-screen video instillation project involving figures and landscapes.
The landscape concealed outside the window resembles several slow full-‐length shots being played silently. The figures repeat their lives in indoor space. The crack of time between their action becomes a reason to fabricate a “lie”. Only “dream” can make us feel that this life truly exists. Another photo collage and light box work This is Perhaps What You Know/I don’t know was created during Ma Haijiao’s art residency in Norway in 2014. The artist associates the strangeness for a city with newspapers that cannot read the city. He interprets this feeling by using image to explain image.
Wu Ding’s new work The propeller return to the origin from the diagonal and The synthesis No.1 is another project centered on “interior order”, following his Realistic Dimension. It will showcase his latest video, picture and literal works. The “rhythm” here may be understood as a shape, status or structure, which can be material or non-‐material. The limit of the rhythm overlaps with the ultimate rhythm. They tangle with each other, deconstructing and reconstructing. Their connotations are translated during the process of interweaving with one another. The artist uses the dialectical relationship of things in different structure, layer or status as the main clue. What he discusses is the cognitive return established during the interweaving of realistic layers, knowledge and experience.
Hand-painted animation Time-Turning Pages is the biography of Xu Bacheng’s self-examination on the birth and the finality of “object”. This work was initiated from an accompanying project implemented in 2015, which is selecting an object easy to carry around but not often to be carried around in daily life and recording the experience of using it in 3-month-time. From the turning pages of Time-Turning Pages, we see a second-hand world and an epitome of the life of the artist and his “object”. The contingency and the continuity of hand-painted animation tightly grasp the things that have been ignored. Those repeatedly-revised lines appear delicate and fragile on the screen, but meanwhile are filled with imagination and tension. The beginning of the animation is a scene of a hand opening the catalogue, which makes the audience feel that they are observing everything through the artist’s eye.
The Muses is Ye Funa’s research on the typical images of female in the art history. In the video, photography and installation works, the artist borrows the female images from Mona Lisa, Pre-Raphaelites, Neoclassicism painter Frida Kahlo, Jeff Koons and other contemporary artists. Through the method of roleplaying, the artist reproduces the female images in the paintings through editing, interpreting and integrating personal understanding and reading of foreign classic art works.
Text by L-Art Gallery. For more details about the exhibition, please click here.