May 28 – Jul 20,2011 UCCA
798 Art District,Beijing
UCCA presents three varied displays: acclaimed Swiss artist and sculptor Not Vital‘s ” Full On“, young Chinese multimedia artist Li Hui‘s “ V“, “Curated by…” series”s Su Zhiguang solo exhibition.
Not Vital: This Acclaimed Swiss artist and sculptor Not Vital is an aesthetic alchemist who delights in mixing up improbable combinations of materials – metal, plaster, fiberglass, tea, coal, animal remains, melted pink Camay soap – in his quest to transmute the base into the sublime. Now, for the very first time, he is expanding his eclectic practice to include painting. Full On features an entirely new, never-before-exhibited body of work: oil on canvas portraits inspired by Not Vital‘s life in the Caochangdi district of Beijing, where he has recently established one of his many studios.
These blurred, emotionally sensitive paintings depict the artist in his various guises, as well as some of the people he has met here: his Tai Chi teacher, neighbors, assistants and friends. Executed in a simple palette of white, black and grey, they resemble x-ray or infrared images, transient portraits of people glimpsed in passing. Substantial wooden frames and thick glass gives the canvases a more threedimensional, sculptural quality, transforming ephemera into portraits-as-objects. They reveal the many ways this versatile, restless, globetrotting artist mirrors, and is mirrored by, his surroundings.
Li Hui: Young Chinese multimedia artist Li Hui employs a vast array of media, materials and techniques to create futuristic installations and “light sculptures” that transcend the boundaries of language, logic and linear time. More an archeologist of the future than a spiritual shaman, Li Hui allows us to viscerally experience the realities of this world while anxiously contemplating the mysteries of the next.
His dazzling special effects are the stuff of science fiction; his themes eternal. On some level, all of Li Hui‘s works explore questions of life and death, existence and transcendence, materiality and spirituality, technology and humanity. But it is his penchant for melding the organic and the inorganic that foreshadows a world in which mortal and machine have become one, making people indistinguishable from their tools.
Su Zhiguang: the latest exhibition in UCCA’s long-running “Curated by…” series, internationally-acclaimed artist Gu Wenda introduces the work of Su Zhiguang, an emerging talent on the Chinese art scene.
For Su Zhiguang, dust is both medium and metaphor, a substance symbolic of the fluidity and chaos of China’s modern cities. Like an urban anthropologist, he collects and archives the detritus of our floating lives, painstakingly cataloguing the samples for posterity. That this posterity is so tenuous, and his creations so ephemeral, only heightens the sense of beauty and pathos. Dust Manual , an elegant volume of 46 “sketches” rendered in dust, was modeled after Mustard Seed Garden , an early Qing Dynasty manual of painting. But unlike the original, which remains in print to this day, Su Zhiguang‘s creation is a fragile codex, a text whose wisdom seems destined to fade away.
Upon returning to New York after her first visit to China, Soraya Broukhim provides a review of Wang Qingsong’s "When World's Collide" exhibition of photographs and videos at ICP. (Read more)
Upon returning to New York after her first visit to China, Soraya Broukhim provides a review of Wang Qingsong’s "When World's Collide" exhibition of photographs and videos at ICP. (Read more)
Three displays at UCCA:Not Vital/Li Hui/Su Zhiguang
May 28 – Jul 20,2011
UCCA
798 Art District,Beijing
UCCA presents three varied displays: acclaimed Swiss artist and sculptor Not Vital‘s ” Full On“, young Chinese multimedia artist Li Hui‘s “ V“, “Curated by…” series”s Su Zhiguang solo exhibition.
Not Vital: This Acclaimed Swiss artist and sculptor Not Vital is an aesthetic alchemist who delights in mixing up improbable combinations of materials – metal, plaster, fiberglass, tea, coal, animal remains, melted pink Camay soap – in his quest to transmute the base into the sublime. Now, for the very first time, he is expanding his eclectic practice to include painting. Full On features an entirely new, never-before-exhibited body of work: oil on canvas portraits inspired by Not Vital‘s life in the Caochangdi district of Beijing, where he has recently established one of his many studios.
These blurred, emotionally sensitive paintings depict the artist in his various guises, as well as some of the people he has met here: his Tai Chi teacher, neighbors, assistants and friends. Executed in a simple palette of white, black and grey, they resemble x-ray or infrared images, transient portraits of people glimpsed in passing. Substantial wooden frames and thick glass gives the canvases a more threedimensional, sculptural quality, transforming ephemera into portraits-as-objects. They reveal the many ways this versatile, restless, globetrotting artist mirrors, and is mirrored by, his surroundings.
Li Hui: Young Chinese multimedia artist Li Hui employs a vast array of media, materials and techniques to create futuristic installations and “light sculptures” that transcend the boundaries of language, logic and linear time. More an archeologist of the future than a spiritual shaman, Li Hui allows us to viscerally experience the realities of this world while anxiously contemplating the mysteries of the next.
His dazzling special effects are the stuff of science fiction; his themes eternal. On some level, all of Li Hui‘s works explore questions of life and death, existence and transcendence, materiality and spirituality, technology and humanity. But it is his penchant for melding the organic and the inorganic that foreshadows a world in which mortal and machine have become one, making people indistinguishable from their tools.
Su Zhiguang: the latest exhibition in UCCA’s long-running “Curated by…” series, internationally-acclaimed artist Gu Wenda introduces the work of Su Zhiguang, an emerging talent on the Chinese art scene.
For Su Zhiguang, dust is both medium and metaphor, a substance symbolic of the fluidity and chaos of China’s modern cities. Like an urban anthropologist, he collects and archives the detritus of our floating lives, painstakingly cataloguing the samples for posterity. That this posterity is so tenuous, and his creations so ephemeral, only heightens the sense of beauty and pathos. Dust Manual , an elegant volume of 46 “sketches” rendered in dust, was modeled after Mustard Seed Garden , an early Qing Dynasty manual of painting. But unlike the original, which remains in print to this day, Su Zhiguang‘s creation is a fragile codex, a text whose wisdom seems destined to fade away.
(Text and images courtesy by UCCA )