State of the Arts: 3 Exhibitions You're About to Miss
State of the Arts is our regular arts column whereby we take a look at the newest moves in Beijing's creative scene. In this edition, we highlight three exhibitions you should seek out before they conclude.
Inside Out Museum - Stacks of Paper, Riot of Color: The Politics of Taste
Inside Out Museums’ Inside-Out Practice fourth installment Stacks of Paper, Riot of Color: The Politics of Taste is a small show comprised of several editorial projects and installations in an attempt, according to its curator Yan Tiange, to answer the question: “How art can genuinely engage with society without losing its autonomy?”
The exhibition occupies an area outside of the usual museum space, which is normally earmarked for documentation and editorial support of the exhibition on display. On the shelves, usually used to stack guides and literature, viewers are introduced to the artists' works; stacks of paper used as a conduit either to explore socially engaged ventures or to problematize the aesthetics surrounding themes or interests selected by the artists and the encompassing medium (i.e. books and documentation).
Particularly interesting are the works included in the series Chaotic Reality, in which the artists, such as Tessa Zettel, and the multi-disciplinary collective Sponge Gourd Collective engage in social action to record major urban transformations in urban mammoths Mexico and Beijing; as well as Wang Bo’s work – part of the section labeled ‘Aesthetic Taste’ – in which the artist uses the book as a metaphor of memory and territory by making them transcend their roles as receptacles of content by turning them into living installations with multiples levels of interpretation.
Stacks of Paper, Riot of Color: The Politics of Taste will be on view until Nov 11. Tickets cost RMB 10. We recommend combining with Pang Tao’s Dancing Notes exhibition, still on view at the museum’s main premises.
Star Gallery - The Burdens of My Life
Our next recommendation this week is Li Jikai's solo show The Burdens of My Life at Star Gallery. The gallery, tucked inside off-the-beaten path’s Qikeshu Creative Park, might not be your kind-of-on the-way-to-somewhere-else spot; however, their program brings to the fore contemporary Chinese artists who have paved their way both in the national and international arena.
Li Jikai’s work falls into the post-'70s cartoon generation, and it’s full of symbols that in this particular series of works realized between 2016 and 2018. These can be read as references to the tensions between the rural and urban realities where the main characters – seemingly migrant – move or lay with their burdens, represented ironically as light cotton-looking candy lumps floating on their backs. The exhibition encompasses ceramic work, paintings, and drawings where the artist avails multiple textures and materials.
Li Jikai's slightly surreal work tends toward autobiographical but according to the artist, his works are not the result of a preconditioned volition but instead the result of a process-based practice that gravitates towards the "unconsciousness": that is, being unaware of what the outcome would ultimately be. Other pieces accompanying the drawings and watercolors are the artists’ ceramic vases, which also possess the whimsical motifs present in his drawings.
While you’re there, make sure not to miss Wang Yifan’s self-portraits series, in which the artist, taking elements of the selfie-culture and more classical self-portrait tradition, documents his daily life in a series of paintings and drawings that play with the idea of performance and representation of the person behind the persona.
The Burdens of My Life and Wang Yifan Self-Portraits at Star Gallery are free shows and will be on view until Oct 28.
UCCA - I'll Be Back
Finally, we land at UCCA’s New Directions series with works by Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying. Entitled I’ll Be Back, the exhibition focuses on how (pre- and post-colonial) Sino-African-Europe relationships have evolved. The title echoes the line made famous by Arnie in Terminator, but here is used more as a language re-appropriated by the individuals who come from previously colonized regions. In essence, they're haunting the European psyche no matter their new role in the current or foreseeable state of affairs.
The exhibition comprises a few installations that while pushing away from tropes normally touched upon when discussing colonialism, bring to the forefront necessary elements of analysis and themes necessary when framing post-colonial relationships. A good example would be the recognition and material redistribution of pieces of art that in the course of history left their original cradle to start wandering all over the world.
The installation The Sculpture includes a film lecture about certain pieces that were meant to be returned to their original homes, and yet have not been successfully relocated. Accompanying the lecture, Musquiqui re-enacts the famous 1954 photo of writer Andre Malraux posing for the French magazine Paris Match with the pages of his then-forthcoming book Le Musée Imaginaire de la Sculpture Mondiale. However, in Musquiqui’s take, instead of a bust next to the writer and artist, it's the blazing eyes of a Terminator that mark the future, one in which the colonial powers are shifting and new tensions and questions emerge with regards to what shape it will take.
I’ll Be Back at the UCCA runs until Oct 28. Tickets for the main exhibition Xu Bing’s Thought and Method retrospective (read more on that here) and I’ll Be Back are RMB 100.
Never miss a show. Check out the Beijinger's full list of arts and culture events, here.
For more information and to follow up their upcoming programs, follow the spaces’ official WeChat accounts: Inside Out Museum (ID: zhongjianmeishuguan), Star Gallery (ID: stargallery), and UCCA (UCCA_official).
Photos courtesy of Star Gallery, UCCA, Wang Bo
