Group Exhibition Power Station of Art, Shanghai
Curators: Dot Zhihan Jia, Kechun Qin
Artists: Yuchen Chang, Chen Zhe, Avita Guo, Han Mengyun, Kanthy Peng & Menglan Chen, Amiko Li, NZTT Sewing Co-op, Sixing Xu, Chris Zhongtian Yuan, and Jasphy Zheng
Exhibition Design: amass studio, studioEki Ong
Poster Design: sub:order
About the Exhibition
“Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.”
– Hélène Cixous
Writing is an act - not only writing with a pen on paper, but also the threading of a needle on a cloth, or a child's scribble, or even a collage of images. It is an extension of bodily experience. French writer Hélène Cixous’ concept of “Écriture feminine” emphasizes the interconnection between writing and the body, putting individual experience before linguistic normativity to resist rational dualism. In today’s cultural dilemma of emerging individualist tendencies, to slow down and reflect on the idea of “empathy” as the ability to understand the world around us may help to generate more diverse social relationships and closer social bonds, free from prejudice. In this exhibition, ten groups of artists, through a semi autobiographical narrative, place their desire to communicate within the folds of different materials and dimensions, capturing and translating the flow and passage of sentiments in the crevices of words through the mediums of text, sound, drawing, and video, and constructing a space that flows and which opens and closes freely.
If we re-imagine writing as a process of weaving oneself, the exhibition is filled with moments of hesitation and pause, vulnerability and alleviation. Here, individual narratives take different shapes and stories set off in different ties: the trip to Lugu Lake which mother is always reluctant to talk about, the poem that was once incomprehensible and suddenly understood by random encounter, the coral that is transformed into hieroglyphs to understand language, the world depicted by the daughter through lines, "Miss Elevator" and her monologue, two attempts to write essay of a same topic across nine years, the embroidery on the soft towel, the love letter that was never sent, the blind date in the museum garden, the loneliness that has nowhere to go...before the story is concluded, every utterance shall not be named, so that the moments of murmuring and incoherency can be remembered.
The books that scattered around the exhibition space are evidence of the flashes of inspiration – from “Tower of Babel” to “Siddhartha”, from Rilke to Woolf – her, his, them eventually merge into us. The interwoven affects flow naturally within the narrative logic of "translation - metaphor - fiction"
whilst preserving the irreducible differences between individual experiences. At the margin, we encounter, understand, and eventually renew each other.
Press:
The Dwelling Place of the Other in Me x Mengyun Han Online Chat | Swiss Cultural Foundation
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