ShanghART Gallery Syndication

Middle East Contemporary Art Exhibition, Curator: Xu Zhen

Preparations for this exhibition started in 2008.It is China’s largest and most specialized exhibition on Middle East Contemporary Art, presenting Middle East art’s most representative works.

Part of the international contemporary art world is consisted of Middle East contemporary art. This exhibition authentically reflects the freedom and the variety of the artist creation in the Middle East contemporary cultural environment, it particularly focuses on Middle East new generation of artist’s technique, language, new media art as well as experimental and exploratory aspects their artistic creation.

With a sophisticated cultural background and thanks to their love for culture, Middle East people can randomly create world’s richest and most active art. This contemporary art phenomena appears totally surreal when set back in the Middle-East social openness and swift economic development context. This exhibition’s mission is to testify this Middle East contemporary art situation: its increasingly rich plastic language and its strong focus on the society. Middle East artists don’t associate themselves with this notion of a shattered realist society; they show a certain challengeful resistance to it. Middle East contemporary are expends its energy, raising waves in the international art scene.

Middle East Contemporary Art Exhibition is composed of 30 artworks (group), including paintings, sculptures, photography, videos, constructions, installations etc, which occupy three exhibition spaces of Shanghart gallery. Exhibited works reveal Middle East actual young generation of artists’ conceiving on life and society in this Information Age. The success of Middle East contemporary art opens a new window enabling Western and Eastern public to understand Middle East current living situation, contemporary culture and art. This exhibition will give the public an impression of an emotional sky, fresh and attracting, where sophisticated works reflect Middle East artists’ knowledge and creativity. This exhibition constitutes an effective attempt of exchange and dialogue between Western and Eastern art.

Curator: Xu Zhen

Organizer: Shanghart Gallery

Opening time: September 10th,6-8pm

Exhibition time: September 10th--October 10th

Exhibition Venue: H Space, bldg16, 50 Moganshan road.

2009-06-25 17:09

MUTE: a group exhibition from ShanghART artists

Artists:
Li Shan, Shao Yi, Shi Yong, Hu Jieming, Yang Zhenzhong, Lu Chunsheng, Bird Head,
Liu Weijian, Xiang Liqing, Liang Yue, Xu Zhen, Zhou Zixi, Zhang Qing, Shi Qing.

Date: June20,2009— July 15,2009

Place: ShanghART Gallery

We are  pleased to bring  you the new  group exhibition MUTE. The 
works seemingly peaceful  remind us the situations we up against 
and handle. Silently waiting for the unknown future,we still plan 
for it. That’s how they represent themselves—theworks in MUTE may 
not be noticeable in other occasions, whereas they tend to ‘keep 
in touch’ with audiences here, somehow,in MUTE mode.

2009-06-07 12:49

METAMORPHOSIS

ShanghART Gallery

796 Huai Hai Lu

Opening: June 28,2009 Sunday, 3-5pm

Date: June 29-July 30

Featuring artists: Sun Xun, Li Shan, Tang Maohong, Xu Zhen, Liang Shaoji.

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream

Edgar Allan Poe

ShanghART is pleased to announce the exhibition METAMORPHOSIS that splits the line between the rational and the magical.

While each work on display has its own distinct tone, thematic and look, the art presented add up to a coherent and complex opus. There is no repetition but, rather, a suggestive relationship. Taking the writing of Poe as its point of departure, the show combines naturalistic imagery and metaphorical content to create beautiful, yet unsettling works.

Generating tension between judgments of aesthetic and conscience, these surrealistic tableauxs function as mirrors of the psyche, which prompt self-examination. The exhibition calls forth nature’s inherent regenerative powers to temper uncertainties of the subconscious mind. The artists create both magnificent and downplayed vistas as sites for the enactment of life, death and regeneration. In their inventive allegories, people and animals negotiate a tenuous balance between knowledge and irrationality. They reconcile the disturbing eventualities of his actions by grounding them in organic elements which assert nature’s boundless forces of reclamation and rebirth.

2009-06-04 13:35

Emerald Tablet—the solo exhibition of CHEN Xiaoyun

ShanghART Gallery is pleased to present Emerald Tablet—the solo exhibition of CHEN Xiaoyun. The exhibition, including multi-screen videos, photography and large scaled installation, will be held in ShanghART H-Space and last one month. The Emerald Tablet, also known as Smaragdine Table, Tabula Smaragdina, or The Secret of Hermes, is a text purporting to reveal the secret of the primordial substance and its transmutations. It claims to be the work of Hermes Trismegistus ("Hermes the Thrice-Great"), a legendary Egyptian sage or god, variously identified with the Egyptian god Thoth and/or the Greek god Hermes. 2009-05-25 18:57

Don’t Go So Fast — Zhang Qing Solo Exhibition

Curator: Philip Tinari

Opening: Saturday 30 May 2009 at 4pm

Date: May 30 – June 21, 2009

Location: ShanghART Beijing, No. 261 Caochangdi, Beijing

T: +86-10-6432 3202

F: +86-10-6432 4395

E-mail: infobj@shanghartgallery.com

Opening hours: 11am – 6pm (Closed on Mondays)

Shanghart Beijing is pleased to present the latest work of Shanghai-based artist Zhang Qing. Entitled Don’t Go So Fast, the exhibition presents a cycle of photographic and video works set in the mud cave-homes of Shaanxi province, one of China’s poorest provinces. These images depict a group of attractive young professionals, wearing the signature name-brand uniform of the urban upwardly mobile, as they inhabit the signature ramshackle spaces of China’s far interior. Despite their incongruous surroundings, Zhang’s subjects carry themselves as if they had never left Shanghai’s Xujiahui or Beijing’s CBD, frenetically pacing in and out of humble homes as if these buildings were the gleaming office towers of the coastal cities. Their actions play out not only against the backdrop of these rural surroundings, but also against a series of outlined images of developed splendor which the artist has scrupulously chalked onto the interior and exterior walls of the village dwellings. Here, a young woman applies lipstick, sitting on a fire-heated kang with an image of a canopy bed from Dubai’s most luxurious hotel behind her; there, the assembled group stands between a pile of corn stalks and a peasant home across which runs a drawing of the Pudong skyline.

Don’t Go So Fast weaves images still and moving into an extended reflection on the disparities of China’s development and the technologies of control which make that development possible. At the heart of the project lies a nine-screen television wall, showing a rolling loop of footage shot by static surveillance cameras placed around the village. Unlike in his posed still photographs, here Zhang Qing abandons control over his lens in favor of an omniscient, "neutral" perspective identical to the one taken by the thousands of security cameras that audit life in cities around the world each day. The cameras’ grainy remove from their subjects, along with the resolute stillness of their angles, belies the intricacy with which the artist has scripted the actions which they record. Installed in configurations that mirror the architectural layouts of the spaces in which it was shot, the works manage to drive home to the gallery-going audience the disparity between these two basic poles of contemporary China.

This expansive photographic and video project continues a turn toward the filmic—and a bending of the line between fiction and reality—that first emerged last year in Zhang Qing’s video installation Don’t be Cruel. For that piece, Zhang tracked down individuals he remembered for having given him dirty looks during his childhood, and subsequently layered his intricately crafted moving portraits of these individuals flashing their "mean" expressions over his own voiced recollections of the incidents that led to such displeasure, or perceived displeasure. In this exhibition, Zhang pushes this investigation further, choreographing the movements of a team of actors in a spectacle that courts realism even as it defies reality.

Zhang Qing, born 1977 in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, has been a key, if underappreciated, voice in Shanghai’s experimental art scene for nearly a decade. After an undergraduate training in architecture, he participated in a number of the key alternative exhibitions of the millennial moment, including Home? (Shanghai, 1999), Parabola (Chengdu, 2002), and It’s All Right (Hangzhou, 2006). His first solo exhibition, Frame, was mounted in 2007 at Shanghai’s BizArt Center.

For further exhibitions news and artists information, please visit www.shanghartgallery.com

2009-05-17 11:02

BLACKBOARD

Curator: Fu Xiaodong

Opening Reception: May 23, 2009, 6-8pm
May 24th, 2009 - June 30th, 2009
Venue: ShanghART H-space, bldg 18, 50 Moganshan Rd., Shanghai
Opening Hours: 1pm-6pm

Before the Golden Age—when the high-tech Consumerism multimedia teaching and large acreage low-priced inkjet are popularized, blackboard was once a prevailing tool of publicity and education. As the cheapest, easiest and simplex daily entertainment among the masses, blackboard has naturally formed a style of brief and concise, with text and pictures, rough but dazzle, subtle but moving over the years. It has been quietly hanging on the backwall of classroom with spider web, the gate of industrial and mining enterprises, by the corridor of community and rural brigade. It makes those young folk art lovers fully expressed their original talents. Each active artist now was once more or less participated in early aesthetic enlightenment national art practice, with the way forced, initiative, helpless, and positive, to accomplish the task.

Blackboard, the most common, political, serious, stereotyped, vacant, popular, flourish way of art creating, solely makes those precious, lifelike, inspired, hysterical, weird, irrepressible art be displayed initially and with glory. Even if it is a tool like propaganda, so ideology, so immobilized, so fascistic and different inside out, it can’t hold those talent artists back from the sensitivity of formal languages and those earthshaking talent can also be revealed tirelessly in the aesthetic standard of 1970s or 1980s. So how should artists who have obtained fully liberation and liberty today to face a once familiar and so plain blackboard?

Using blackboards as the basis of work form, the exhibition refers to property, creation factor, form carrier, background provider, and media experiment. In such an inflexible size and material, a space of 1m×2m, and facing those cheap non-professional materials of enlightenment period, then what kind of imagination will artist have? How to defuse those long years depressed desire of creation and expression? I wish this cross medium exhibition which has never been developed by aesthetic field in art history will remind all audience those dusty memories and unexpected surprise.
by Fu Xiaodong

2009-05-05 15:24

To Review is to Learn Something New: Xue Song Solo Exhibition

Opening Reception: May 16, 2009, 3-5pm

May 17th, 2009 - June 16th, 2009
ShanghART at 796 Huaihailu
796 Huaihai Rd. Middle, Shanghai
Opening Hours: 10am-7pm

ShanghART Gallery is pleased to present To Review is to Learn Something New, a solo exhibition with Xue Song.

The exhibition features compelling new works (2007-2009) created in Xue Songs signature style, the carefully assembled collages. His canvases with bright colorful and clean compositions, of everything from famous actresses’ portraits to well-known Chinese landscapes, appear to be based on mediated images. However, not always realist as such, Xue Song’s work is a response to reality and to the images that capture the artist. He freely adapts various visual languages, such as old photographs and fragments of manuscripts, and employs the most suitable for every picture.

Xue Song’s distinctive collages represent the many different aspects of Chinese culture; he incorporates traditional Chinese paintings, ancient calligraphy, folk art, religious icons, legendary figures and historical photographs, effectively erasing categorical imperatives. His methodology is one of appropriation, manipulation and subversion in order to create a subjective universe that manifests his personal memories. Referring to the title of the exhibition, these images evoke many questions about the past, but like all significant art works they offer new discoveries upon repeat viewing.

Xue Song, belonging to the generation of artists who grew up in the crucial years of the Cultural Revolution, appropriates the imagery of pop without falling into the cliché of repeating foreign patterns. In his collages he adapts that imagery to a personal style populated with characters and objects that speak loudly of China. Xue Song manages in this series to tune renowned icons of history and mythology into the present drama of life.

Xue Song was born in 1965 in Anhui province. He graduated from the Shanghai Drama Institute, Stage Design Department in 1988. He resides and works in Shanghai. Xue Song has exhibited widely since his first solo-exhibition in 1999. His most recent exhibitions include a solo show at Shanghai Art Museum (2009).

2009-05-04 17:43

From Paris to Shanghai--Bandi Panda Fashion Night

ShanghART 796, 796 Huaihai Road Middle, Shanghai

Date: Apr 21, 2009 18:00-19:30 pm

March 20th 2009 Zhao Bandi held his stunning Bandi Panda fashion show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Welcome Zhao Bandi back to Shanghai! ShangART and KEE sincerely invite you to join the Bandi Panda Fashion Night!

Zhao Bandi was born in 1966 in Beijing, where he lives and works. He graduated from the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1988. Since 1993, his works have been shown at international exhibitions, including the Sydney Biennale (1998), 48th Venice Biennale (1999) and 1st Guangzhou Triennale (2002). His project “Zhao Bandi & Panda” has been on public display in Shanghai, Milan, London and elsewhere.

2009-04-14 19:21

Not Related - Huang Kui, Xiang Liqing, Zhou Zixi 3 Artists' Exhibition

ShanghART 796, 796 Huaihai Road Middle, Shanghai

Opening Reception: Mar 17^th, 2009 6-8 pm (Tuesday)

Date: Mar 18, 2009 —— Apr 8, 2009

ShanghART's proud to announce the first brilliant exhibition in 796 space in 2009--"Not Related - Huang Kui, Xiang Liqing, Zhou Zixi 3 Artists' Exhibition". As the forth space of the gallery, 796 space would present an experimental mixture of Chinese contemporary art which evolutes from subculture and metropolitan culture. We sincerely to invite you to visit the exhibition， and participate in the growing of Chinese art.

"Not related" seems a kind of indifferent statement that is carved out of the boundaries between people. In the exhibition, we don’t discuss the relationship between people but artistic creation according to the different art works. Huang Kui, Xiang Liqing, Zhou Zixi were all born in the 70s, but they are totally different, and “not related” in art. Perhaps is subject to regional influence in Shanghai, the artists in Shanghai had a relatively independent creation environment. After they live and work in Shanghai in the years, has also do the creation of experience and independent individuals. But more importantly, since the development of contemporary art, art factions increasingly watered down, artists have also become creative on pluralism and various, while artists concern at present they also pay more attention to highlight their unique works of arts advocates at the same time.

2009-03-13 19:27

Halfway House - Shi Qing Solo Exhibition

Curator: Colin Chinnery

Opening: Saturday 21^st of March at 4pm

Date: March 21 – May 10, 2009

Location: ShanghART Beijing, No. 261 Caochangdi, Beijing

T: +86-10-6432 3202

F: +86-10-6432 4395

E-mail: infobj@shanghartgallery.com

Opening hours: 11am – 6pm (Closed on Mondays)

Shi Qing will present his latest installation work in a solo exhibition in March. The artist has been exploring different ways of looking back at history, specifically between the process of Chinese modernization and its internal development; and is trying to find potential possibilities that are influential to today’s social economy. The installation Factory consists of furniture-sized ‘architecture’ that is installed in the layout of a traditional factory. A mixture of office furniture and living appliances from the planned economy era fit inside these factory buildings. The size of each building fits around one piece of furniture like a glove. The strict economic system of units, the eradication of personal space, and the collectivization of labor all achieve a certain kind of convergence in this installation. In a rogue reconstruction experiment, the artist exposes the necessity for reality in China to change the form of modernity we live under.

The installation Farm, in which Shi Qing transforms a household balcony into a micro-farm, originates from the Chinese urban experience of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Such family agricultural units form a stark contrast with the excesses of industrial production, which has resulted in over-consumption and environmental damage. While doubting western progressionist values, Shi Qing raises a more pressing question: how can we substantiate our original system of values and make them heard? Now that the current global economic model has bitten its own tail, it may be the perfect time to explore these issues.

Shi Qing’s research based creative process is quite unique amongst Chinese artists today. His work has constantly evolved in content and form. His explorations include the psychology of symbolism and ritual, the social contexts of personal history, urban politics, global economic histories and their effect of culture, and the relationship on Chinese recent history of globalization.

Shi Qing, born in 1969 in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, lives and works in Beijing. A selection of major exhibitions in which Shi Qing has participated includes: Santa Fe Biennale (U.S.A, 2008), Guangzhou Triennial (China, 2005), Prague Biennale (Czech Republic, 2005), Busan Biennale (Korea, 2004).

For further exhibitions news and artists information, please visit www.shanghartgallery.com

2009-03-10 17:43