Knut Asdam, Miroslaw Balka, Stefan Bruggemann, Pavel Buchler, Armen Eloyan, Corey McCorkle, Shi Yong, Yutaka Sone, Luc Tuymans, Xu Zhen, Zhang Enli

ShanghART Gallery is pleased to announce INVOLVED, the first exhibition at H-Space with both Chinese and foreign artists. The exhibition is curated by Philippe Pirotte, Director of Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. Pirotte choose some of the most exciting contemporary artists from Europe, USA, and Shanghai to put together an extensive show under the elusive title INVOLVED. 

As the title indicates, the exhibition evolves around different terms of engagement and involvement - be it artistically, sexually, or politically - often focusing on what is left unsaid. The great diversity of the artists and their projects display concepts of what it means to affect, include, contain, or comprehend in today’s world, with very different aesthetic and intended ends. Often evasive, the art here approach being INVOLVED on different levels. Indeed, such complexity and contradictory perspectives thwart a one-dimensional and ideological treatment of the subject matter, and keep it open. 

New works have been conceived especially for this exhibition by painter extraordinaire Luc Tuymans, together with conceptualist Miroslaw Balka, and by Yutaka Sone, living in Los Angeles, and young London based artist Stefan Bruggemann. Projects also include paintings and drawings by Zhang Enli and Armen Eloyan, based in Switzerland, film and videos by Norwegian artist Knut Asdam and New York based Corey McCorkle, an out-door sound installation by Pavel Buchler, an archival video project by Shi Yong, a sculpture by Yutaka Sone, a three-dimensional piece by Xu Zhen, and a collaborative limited-edition sound piece by Tuymans & Balka which will also be for sale as a vinyl piece, including drawings by the artists, at the gallery.

The exhibition was realized with great support by White Cube, London, David Zwirner, New York, Maccarone Inc., New York, and Zeno X, Antwerp.

Please see below for further information on the artists and curator’s statement.

Further information please contact helen@shanghartgallery.com

Curator’s statement

In relation to recent turmoil happening in and around a certain vigorous and performing China, the Western world seems to hold to an eerie misconception of the historical condition of geopolitical initiative today. This situation is not new, but perceived as such by a West that has difficulties to abandon its grammar of superiority. This attitude is of course combined with a fascination and an urgency to participate in the Chinese economical ‘hyper-growth’. The artistic project at hand here, rather than ‘celebrating’ naïvely the effects of globalization and the encounter between different cultural spheres, cannot deny that it is partly motivated by such a particular mixed set of feelings.

We chose to bring a group of artists together under the title Involved. ‘Involved’ can mean as much as being implicated in a crime or concerned in some intricate affairs.

As an exhibition Involved addresses content, which is not announced explicitly but becomes something understood by the observer of the work as it is experienced. It is focusing on subject matter underneath that what is rendered public.  By careful use of subtexts, the exhibition instils a sense of purpose or focus to an anticipated future. Not necessary optimistic, this future is covered in an aside, sometimes through recollecting a past, suggested through that what is left out of a conversation.

Philippe Pirotte, Shanghai, September 2008

Knut Åsdam

Norvegian artist Knut Åsdam’s Untitled: Pissing is a video showing a crotch-shot of a man pissing in his pants. The main theme is in relation to masculinity, and in a simple way the video mentions masculinity and sexuality without being phallocentric. The wetting itself is not only traumatic in relation to masculinity (something the little boy does and knows he is punished for,) or something that happens solely from fear; it is also a sign of arousal and excitement even in the confrontation with the trauma; to come (on one self), have an orgasm, and furthermore has a feminine metaphor in ’getting wet’. This leads the video also to raise questions in relation to the viewer of what is erotic or simply perverse.

Stefan Brüggemann

Brüggemann (Mexico City, 1975) uses text in a rather unusual approach, combining a formal, and quite traditional conceptual approach to art with a rough and critical attitude. Brüggemann has been creating works of art that are expressed through tautological premises, not only within themselves but also in relation to the context in which they are conceived and inserted. His language-based works are founded in rebellion, irony and in institutional critique. He continues with the conceptual tradition of using industrial media that have a primordial utilitarian function. However, its contents also come from those same vernacular contexts, as if putting together message and medium he is able to reveal its hidden possibilities to express deeper meanings than the apparently superficial ones perceived at a first glance.

Some of his text pieces ambiguously present a cynical, nihilist and lucid reflection on certain economical and philosophical aspects related to the production and reception of cultural goods, art included. Brüggemann’s texts resound that same attitude of rebellion, discontent and skepticism. He has a contradictory behaviour, oscillating between criticizing and doing nothing. It’s hard to find a better tribute to punk.

Often, his text pieces make direct reference to the conceptual practices in which the artist inserts himself. However, there is a slight difference regarding orthodox conceptualism, and it lies in mockery and auto-irony: few conceptual artists play about their processes or question the validity of their redundancies, and that’s Brüggemann achievement, to tease about his own influences and creations.

At Shanghart he will create a very big vinyl text: “NEW” and wallpaper a room with “Conceptual Decoration”. Next to that he will try out graffitied paintings with mirrored dollar signs.

Pavel Büchler is a Czech born artist, lecturer and writer, living in the United Kingdom since 1981, where he is also a Research Professor at Manchester Metropolitan University. Büchler’s work evolves around two fundamental concerns: time and the manipulation of found materials. Concerned with the distortions of language, he gives a critical attention to the gaps in communication, fascinated as he is with the limits of the communicative properties of visual language. Particularly interested in art’s old links to language and literature, Pavel Büchler will show a group of works he conceived over the years with Marconi Sound projectors from the 1920’s and text-to speech software to read a text. In this particular piece Büchler uses a quotation from Franz Kafka’s The Castle, a quintessential text about labyrinthine bureaucracy and its control systems. The short section chosen by Büchler recounts the resentment with which the locals suffer Josef K’s presence in the village. It includes the words of a village landlady: “You are not from the Castle, you are not from the village, you aren’t anything. Or rather, unfortunately, you are something, a stranger, a man who isn’t wanted and is in everybody’s way...” The key passage from Kafka’s novel articulates the unclassifiable identity of a stranger in the closed social matrix of the village-castle. The Castle is about the struggle to fit in and its failure. Booming out through the antique speakers, the text recalls old factory or street propaganda announcements, this one declaring that assimilation is impossible and the stranger will always remain on the outside. Büchler is particularly interested in the different resonances it can have in the different cities where the work is presented: in a city of migrants and Byzantine codes of behaviour like Istanbul, or in a more provincial old European capital like Bern. The text is narrated in German and English using text-to-speech voice synthesis and loudspeakers designed by Marconi in 1926, the year of the publication of the book. The soundtrack is interrupted by bursts of music remixed from 1950s Eastern European propaganda repertoire.

Armen Eloyan

Armenian painter Armen Eloyan has swathed ‘figuration-as-we-know-it’ in a loud and greasy perverse painterly realm, carrying the viewer towards that last grain of bare and violent vulgarity, which one sometimes - in a horrifying unguarded moment - recognizes in oneself. The enthusiasm these paintings incite however, finds its origins in a dynamic-vitalistic way of painting. The paintings derive an enormous visual impact and energy from a field of tension that exists between gesture and story and from the historical short circuit and constant interaction between painting as action and painting as narration. Though operating on an epic scale, Eloyan pushes the narrative - in all likelihood his motivation or even excuse to paint - to the background. The act of painting with the whole body - rather than with the wrist alone - is not only a manner of expression but it becomes a risky enterprise of dangerous yet funny acrobatics, as if one were running in too big shoes.  The urge to paint and the instinct to tell a story, continuously keep each other in an unstable balance in favour of the formal composition, which requires constant commitment on the part of the painter. The artist devotes himself to pictorial research with what is for many a touching and authentic dedication but, balancing between an apparent unpredictability and purposefulness, his large-scale pictures are often based on the conscious study of the colour scheme and composition of constructivist examples. Indeed, ‘innocent’ painting is today less possible than ever. For his motifs Armen Eloyan often turns to folk-art and folklore, basing his paintings at times on 19^th century Eastern European woodcuts and embroidery with representations of fairy-tales and stories, or on animation movies, comic strips and other popular art forms. As in an oral tradition, the digested and assimilated references suggest a domain of received stories and ideas. In visual sediments, the paintings mimic the transmission of cultural material.

Corey McCorkle is best described not as an object-maker (although he does produce meticulously crafted things) but as a spatial interventionist.

Film is a growing component of McCorkle’s production, not least because of its presumed transparency. Recent films include: Preah (2005), a portrait of a reportedly mystical white cow in Cambodia; Tower of Shadows (2006), a vision of Le Corbusier’s famous unfinished monument in Chandigarh, filmed from dawn till dusk on the shortest day of the year; and Bestiaire (2007), a slide-show-like view of a defunct zoo outside Istanbul. In each case McCorkle adopts a neutral approach, employing static close-up shots (and in the case of Tower of Shadows a single take) that divest the camera of subjective personality while simultaneously highlighting its function as framing device. (In fact, McCorkle modelled Bestiare’s shots on views by the 18th-century fantasy landscape painter Nicholas Robert.) It would seem that for McCorkle meaning exists outside our efforts to harness it, just as this application to meaning is all we can ever claim to have. At Shanghart the artist will show March, 2008 his video about The Knickerbocker Greys, a historic after-school leadership program for children and teenagers, has been shown at the Park Avenue Armory. Featuring the Knickerbocker Greys, a paramilitary drill club for children that has practiced at the Park Avenue Armory since 1881, McCorkle explores the club’s weekly pageant, highlighting the neo-gothic interiors of this historic building. Most of McCorkle’s work - a mix of architecture, sculpture, installation, and traditional documentary technique - explores utopian communities and zones of public space.

Shi Yong’s work embraces modernization and the ideology of consumerism as the basis for self-imagination and creation. He has produced a series of photo-based works around the concept of the ideal Shanghai citizen. It is an ongoing multifaceted project that explores images of consumption, commodity and the development of the culture industry. One series, entitled “Made in China – Welcome to China” (1999), consists of hand-painted plaster models of a young businessman in a Mao suit, sunglasses, briefcase and waving. The image of the ideal citizen used for the statue was the outcome of an Internet project through which Shi Yong asked volunteers to vote for the ideal way of looking. The individual now transforms the identity of his or her self by following the logic of commodity market surveys. It is a composite image that Shi Yong has repeatedly used in other pieces such as “Longing For” (2000) and “You Cannot Clone It, But You Can Buy It” (2001). The iconic figure is morphed through the agency of the marketplace. Recently, Shi Yong has focused his attention on large-scale installations and architectural models imbued with an absurd twist of humor. Most notably, his mixed media installation “Flying Q” is of a UFO built with the purpose of opening up the sky. The flying object comes with no additional explanation, but might be recognized as just another signature vision of and interventions into the imaginary world of Shi Yong. His subversive approach pokes fun at architecture based on rules and pre-established schemas. Shi Yong fabricates a colorful and ironic architectural structure that is at once a parody of serious design and its synthesis. In short, his work is an amalgam of Shanghai’s eclectic ‘anything goes’ attitude towards the built environment.

Luc Tuymans is is an artist more concerned to problematise than to delight. The 50-year-old Belgian is probably the most influential painter of his generation. His hauntingly vacant images are compelling yet elusive to the point of seeming wilfully obtuse. They put you in a mood (a blue one, generally), but you come away from them with a generalized sensation rather than specific visual memories. Although they often focus on singular objects or events, they are somehow too tricky and shadowy to submit to memorability. He tackles loaded political themes — past shows have taken on the Holocaust, Belgian meddling in post-colonial Congo, and the press response to the September 11 attacks — in ways that are teasingly tangential. It is history as experienced by the numbed, the apathetic, the befuddled. One of the strangest aspects of Tuymans’s project is his strict rule of finishing each painting in a single sitting. This is particularly perverse because ‘alla prima’ painting is usually intended to achieve freshness and spontaneity, whereas Tuymans has more than lived up to his anti-heroic ideal of the “authentic forgery.” Far from conveying any kind of speed or dashed-off painterliness, his surfaces have a flat, matter-of-fact delivery that is usually associated with a slow, deliberate hand. But they do have a sense of belligerent unfinish and of apathetic awkwardnesses. It is as if they wanted to convey as much alienation and unease in the way they are made as in the way they will be received. The pervasive unease in Tuymans’s work amounts to a sublimated violence. His imagery deals with conflicts and problems obliquely: Seemingly intent on capturing the banality of evil rather than its drama.

Xu Zhen. It is hard to think of another contemporary talent as prolific as Xu Zhen. His projects articulate frivolity that entails multiple subject matters. The artist takes intrinsically slight material and plays with it without condescension: His work entails theatrical humor as well as social critique, neither entirely serious nor obviously ironic. Xu Zhen’s extensive body of work includes photography, installation art and video evoking moments of complexity. His projects are informed by performance as well as conceptual art.  His video installation “8.848-1.86” (2005) documents an expedition to Mount Everest. Here, Xu Zhen removed 1.86 meters of the mountain’s peak and transported it home to be exhibited in a large display cabinet. The video, among other allusions, is a subtle and humorous commentary on China’s official policy of reclaiming Tibet. r

As a signifying device he often uses the concept of the ’body’, such as in the short video “Rainbow” (2000) displayed at the 49th Venice Biennale. It features four tense minutes, during which an anonymous naked back gradually changes color according to emerging and clearly defined flesh marks. Caesuras coincide with slapping sounds that strike the skin in a sudden and unexpected manner. Featured in the INVOLVED exhibition will be a spare new sculpture entitled It, consisting of a tiny speck of mud viewable through a microscope. One viewer at a time discovers that the minute sculpture depicts the famous image of Neil Armstrong’s first footprint on the moon. With this installation, Xu Zhen continues his ongoing investigation of fact and fiction by referencing the controversial debate over the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing. Various conspiracy theorists claim that during the Cold War era, the United States government faked the American lunar landing in its haste to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. Thus, by creating a faux artifact from a possible non-event, Xu highlights the media’s role in directing modern-day history and poses the question: where do we stand?

Zhang Enli. Writings on Zhang Enli’s work often focus on his subtle depictions of humanity and solitude. His early works revolve around the unavoidable transformation of the way of life, disturbance and the suffocating pressure that ensues, often threatening displacement. He sites dislocation as a primary condition of life, using it as a constructive backbone for a narrative praxis. Tales of permanent loss and subsequent retrieval are returned to the social and public realms to be tested for their potential to define contemporary conditions in the metropolis. Zhang Enli creates both a comforting and uncomfortable consciousness of presence. He illuminates the underside of society and his bold and unpretentious brushstrokes often reveal the grotesquerie of contemporary civilization. He portrays details from ordinary objects that are often neglected or downplayed in conventional painting. His brushstrokes come close to traditional Chinese ink painting where every stroke on the canvas articulates parts that are significant to the whole.

Zhang Enli’s mode of engagement entails photographically documenting his close environment. He then employs the photographs’ claim on the real to develop his observation of his surroundings, though in a more intuitive and fragmented manner on the canvas. The circuitous route by which Zhang Enli comes to the image is typical of a methodology based on the experience of memory. It is not the repeated image that is central to each painting, but rather the process of reflecting on the events and objects that led him to it.

Accordingly, in his current paintings of trees, only fragments are revealed to the spectator. As in his other work, these paintings come across as ’un-finished’ because they are semi-transparent and leave some of the white canvas exposed. This can be understood as the emergence of reality in the sphere of art, or, perhaps, vice versa. INVOLVED will feature two of Zhang Enli’s recent, more abstract, paintings evolving around ‘light’.