calendario eventi  :: 

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26/9/2013

Three exhibitions

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art UCCA, Beijing

Tino Sehgal
2013.09.27 to 2013.11.17

co-curated by Paula Tsai and Biljana Ciric

The Berlin-based artist’s largest presentation in Asia to date questions fundamental assumptions about material value, social convention, and the aesthetics of daily life

Tino Sehgal (b. London, 1976) creates artworks out of the interactions and exchanges that constitute daily social life. With its game-like quality, Sehgal’s work invites visitors into unfamiliar situations that shift the parameters of the traditional exhibition. Through these encounters, the Berlin-based artist asks the museum visitor to reflect upon their participation in the landscape of value and meaning that comprises their everyday. These questions take on a particular resonance in China, a nation that has only recently shifted from an economy of scarcity to one of affluence. Once a society reaches a certain level of material comfort, what more do its members desire? Using the art museum as a space to inspire dialogue and reflection, Sehgal’s open-ended artworks provide the scaffolding by which visitors might engage these questions. Their interaction with the piece becomes a central component of its meaning, with no two people having the same experience. The result is a series of exchanges, both mass-produced and personalized, that touch upon philosophical, political, and economic issues—variously questioning the social conventions that underpin our daily existence.

Issuing from Sehgal’s dramaturgical framing and relying only on movement, language, and social interaction, his artworks are entirely immaterial, divorced even from the convention that they be photographically or filmically documented. With a background in political economy as well as in dance, Sehgal is ultimately interested in the possibility of creating something of value without introducing more objects into a world already flooded with them. Constructed of movement and conversation, Sehgal’s work can, nonetheless, exist and circulate as a commodity that can be bought, sold, and exhibited, and is, by virtue of its reliance on traditional forms of remembrance, remarkably durable.

About the Artist
Tino Sehgal was born in London in 1976 and now resides in Berlin. His artwork takes the form of “constructed situations,” in which one or more people stage live works within the exhibition space according to the artist’s directions. He is the youngest person ever to represent Germany in the Venice Biennale in 2005 as well as the youngest person to be given a solo show in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010). Other solo exhibitions include Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2004); Fundacao Serralves, Porto (2005); ICA London (2005, 2006, 2007); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2006); Kunstverein Hamburg (2006); MMK Frankfurt (2007); Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2007); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007); Villa Reale, Milan (2008), and Magasin 3, Stockholm (2008); Kunsthaus Zürich and Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich (2009); Kunsternes Hus, Oslo (2011); Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montreal, Montreal (2013), and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2013). His work was also included in the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2005); the Tate Triennial, London (2006); the Lyon Biennale, France (2007); and Documenta 13, Kassel (2012). In 2012, he was commissioned by the Tate Modern for its annual Unilever Series exhibition, the first live work since the series began in 2000. Sehgal won the Golden Lion award at the 2013 Venice Biennale. In the same year, he was selected as one of four finalists for the Turner Prize, the winner to be announced in December.

About the Curators
The exhibition is co-curated by Paula Tsai and Biljana Ciric. Paula Tsai is Curator at UCCA, where she has worked on over 40 exhibitions. Biljana Ciric is a Shanghai-based independent curator who has previously presented Tino Sehgal’s work in China. The exhibition is produced by Louise Höjer and Descha Daemgen, who are longstanding collaborators of Tino Sehgal’s.

Exhibition Support
“Tino Sehgal” is supported by JNBY Finery Co., Ltd and is presented in partnership with the Goethe-Institut China.
About JNBY Finery Co., Ltd
JNBY Finery Co., Ltd was established in 1994. It is one of China’s first businesses to develop design brands. Under the banner of its brands “JNBY,” “jnby by JNBY,” “Croquis,” and “Less,” the company now has over 200 dealers and 600 retailers in large and medium-size cities across every province, autonomous region, and municipality in China. Its products are sold in over 30 countries and regions, including Russia, France, Japan, Singapore, Canada, Thailand, Georgia, South Korea, and Brazil. In 2007, the company reestablished its brand concept based on the idea of cultural soft power, kicking off a new round of brand innovation and expansion. JNBY organized an exhibition at the Shanghai World Expo, strengthening the company’s influence and its integration of enterprise, brand, and culture.

About the Goethe-Institut China
The Goethe-Institut is the cultural institution of the Federal Republic of Germany, operating worldwide. When the Goethe-Institut China was established on November 1, 1988, it was the first foreign cultural center in the PRC. From the beginning, it devoted itself to the promotion of the use of the German language, to provide access to knowledge and information about Germany, and to cooperate with Chinese partners in various cultural fields such as music, dance, theatre, film, visual arts, and architecture.

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Wang Keping
2013.09.27 to 2014.01.05

Radical ‘Stars’ artist Wang Keping exploded onto the Chinese art scene in the late 1970s as the leader of a contemporary art group. He now returns to Beijing to present the largest exhibition of his work ever shown in the country to date.

The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art is proud to present “Wang Keping” an exhibition of more than 50 works by one of China’s first contemporary sculptors. The show contains sculptures from various moments in the artist’s 35-year career and covers a wide range of different subjects and themes.

Wang Keping (b. 1949, Beijing) is an artist of near-monomaniacal dedication to his chosen medium: wood. Wang’s artworks range in size from 30 cm to several meters tall, variously evoking grotesque deformity, sensual beauty, and sublime abstraction. The artist’s seemingly anachronistic, lyrical sculpture cuts an intriguing figure in an art world dominated by increasingly complex and reflexive systems of meaning and signification. His works are evocative of Constantin Brâncusi’s Modernist explorations, Han Dynasty funereal figures, and African fertility sculptures, though their warped formal abstractions and embrace of eroticism place them squarely into a class of their own.

Wang Keping started out making political sculpture as part of the charged environment of late 1970s Beijing. After moving to France in 1984, he shifted to a more naturalistic way of working. The artist’s work can be roughly divided into five thematic categories—men, women, birds, couples, and pure forms—into which they are grouped for the UCCA exhibition.

Wang Keping’s practice evinces a patience beyond that of virtually any artist practicing today. To prepare the wood for his sculptures, he will let logs sit for months, sometimes years, allowing the innate features and fissures of the material to grow and deepen until they take on their own distinctive, biologically-determined shapes. Wang’s decades of woodworking experience allows him some measure of foresight into how the wood will splinter, though every piece contains an element of chance. For each sculpture, Wang blends his aesthetic perspective with the form determined by the wood itself, a quasi-Modernist Michelangelo living in the age of contemporary art. As Wang has said, “The wood tells me something, gives me an idea. Each tree is like a human body: there is flesh and there is bone; there are tender parts, hard parts, solid parts, and fragile parts. You cannot go against its nature but must follow it.”

The artist is remarkably consistent, even to the point of defiance. Wang Keping’s defiant streak first emerged in the late 1970s, as a founding member of one of China’s first experimental art groups, The Stars. Alongside fellow members Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, and Ai Weiwei, Wang fervently championed artistic freedom in China. Though he has lived abroad for nearly 30 years, his defiant streak persists, now articulated as aesthetic rather than political rebellion: He is an outspoken critic of the French art establishment and of the contemporary art scene as a whole, insistent that his sculptural practice is a more honest and sincere artistic expression than those which blindly follow new trends.

Wang Keping also bucks the current trend of delegating artistic production to studio assistants, completing his sculptures entirely on his own. As the artist has put it, “Making a sculpture is like making love to a woman. No one can do it for you, nor would I want others to take my place.” From the initial collection of the wood, to the carving, firing, burnishing, and glazing of each piece, Wang exerts total control over his artworks, a craftsman of obsessive dedication.

Despite distancing himself from the mainstream art establishment, the artist sees no contradiction between his style and the spirit of contemporary art. Of his work, Wang has said, “In my sculpture, I strive to find that which is universal in primitive Chinese form, and the further back I go to the origins of this art, the closer I am to my idea of contemporary art.”

About the Artist
Wang Keping was born in Beijing in 1949 and has lived in Paris since 1984. He is a founding member of The Stars (Xing Xing), often called the first avant-garde contemporary art movement in China. Wang is primarily a sculptor of wood and is inspired by the figurative form, both female and male. He strives towards simplicity, creating symbols of human nature and sensuality. His work has been exhibited widely around the world, including in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée Maillol, and Musée Zadkine in France; in the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland; in the Brooklyn Museum in the US; and in the National Art Museum of China and He Xiangning Art Museum in China. His work has been acquired by several important international art institutions, including the Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Olympic Games Park, Seoul; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taizhong; M+ museum, Hong Kong; Musée Cernuschi, Paris; and Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

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Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII
2013.09.27 to 2014.01.05

The artist’s most extensive exhibition in China to date displays the culmination of four years of extensive research into 18 bloodlines and their individual stories.

The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art is proud to present “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII,” a major body of work by the American artist Taryn Simon (b. 1975, New York). For four years (2008-2011), the artist crossed the globe researching bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the work’s eighteen chapters, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. Simon’s subjects span a wide range of topics and social relations: the titular Indian man whose relatives had him declared dead in official records to inherit his father’s land; victims of the Bosnian Genocide, represented by the bones used to identify them; a group of Ukrainian orphans, united by their lack of discernible bloodline; and laboratory-bred rabbits in Australia used to test the efficacy of a virus designed to eliminate their invasive presence.

Each of the work’s chapters contains three parts: on the left, a portrait panel, an ordered set of portraits of every living relative of the “point person” central to each chapter; in the center, an annotation panel, a written description of the events that inspired Simon’s research into the bloodline; and on the right, a footnote panel, documentary images related to the narrative events.

The unique format offers three distinct modes of engaging with the often dramatic events depicted in each chapter. In the portrait panel, the unsmiling figures in front of identical white backgrounds compose a strictly ordered archive, the artist restricting her creative input to the unsparing application of this clinical format across a range of contexts. The annotation panel provides a straightforward textual description, elaborating on the socio-historical background of each narrative. By contrast, the footnote panel offers a more intuitive, visual foothold into the issues surrounding the central dynamic of each bloodline.

Worth noting is the rigorous and demanding preparation that goes into each of Taryn Simon’s works. As the artist herself has said, “90 percent of my photographic process is, in fact, not photographic. It involves a campaign of letter-writing, research, and phone calls to access my subjects, which can range from Hamas leaders in Gaza to a hibernating black bear in its cave in West Virginia.”A sense of tenacity and performance pervades much of her practice, whether in the extensive correspondence to gain access to restricted spaces for An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar or in the near-sleepless five-day photography session to capture the stream of over 1,000 seized goods entering JFK International Airport for Contraband.

Taryn Simon’s process itself reflects an interest in how individuals relate to and interact with institutions and systems, be they governmental, corporate, religious, or ideological. For “A Living Man Declared Dead,” Simon spent four years exhaustively researching different bloodlines and tracking down their every living member. Absent members are even represented by blank portraits with captions listing the reason for their absence, ranging from fear of abduction to imprisonment to Dengue Fever.

The cumulative effect of the installations leads to one overarching question: what do these intertwined systems of individual and bloodline, of chance and fate, of order and chaos, add up to? The viewer is witness to literal, abstract juxtapositions of history and bloodline, yet the lived experience of these inherited histories is left to the viewer’s imagination. The sum of these objects is only the collection itself—inviting further speculation while denying certainty or finality. Is there a pattern to these events, something by which we might change the course of our existence, or are we, in Simon’s words, merely on repeat, enacting the same histories over and over again?

This exhibition comes to UCCA and to China after a series of shows in major institutions around the globe, including MoMA, MOCA Los Angeles, Tate Modern, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. While Simon has been shown previously in China—notably at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre as part of the 2010 Caochangdi-Arles Photo Festival—this is the most extensive exhibition of Taryn Simon’s work in China to date.

“We are excited to present the work of such a conceptually rigorous and intensely cosmopolitan artist to our global Beijing public,” said UCCA Director Philip Tinari. “We believe that Taryn Simon’s unique ability to combine photographic image, journalistic research, and writerly narrative will find a receptive audience here.”

About the Artist
Taryn Simon was born in New York in 1975.
Simon’s artistic medium consists of three equal elements: photography, text, and graphic design. Her works investigate the impossibility of absolute understanding and open up the space between text and image, where disorientation occurs and ambiguity reigns.

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII was produced over a four-year period (2008-11), during which Simon travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate.
Contraband (2010) is an archive of global desires and perceived threats, presenting 1,075 images of items that were detained or seized from passengers and mail entering the United States from abroad. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007) reveals objects, sites, and spaces that are integral to America’s foundation, mythology, or daily functioning but remain inaccessible or unknown to a public audience. These unseen subjects range from radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility to a black bear in hibernation to the art collection of the CIA. The Innocents (2003) documents cases of wrongful conviction in the U.S., calling into question photography’s function as a credible witness and arbiter of justice.

Simon’s photographs and writing have been the subject of monographic exhibitions at institutions including Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012); Tate Modern, London (2011); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2011); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2008); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007); Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2004); and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2003). Permanent collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Whitney Museum, Centre Pompidou, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2011 her work was included in the 54th Venice Biennale. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Image: Taryn Simon, Excerpt from Chapter VI, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other, Chapters I–XVIII, VI, B, 15. No. 337, 28 Mar. 2009. Inglewood, Queensland, Australia. 16. No. 338, 28 Mar. 2009. Inglewood, Queensland, Australia. 2011. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Editorial contacts:
Carmen Yuan, UCCA: carmen.yuan@ucca.org.cn
Phoebe Moore, Sutton PR Asia: phoebe@suttonprasia.com

UCCA
798 Art District, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China 100015
Tuesday to Sunday 10:00am – 7:00pm
Last entry at 6:30pm
Free admission from September 5 to 9
Holiday Closures:
January 1 to January 3, 2013: Closed for New Year’s Holiday
February 8 to February 15, 2013: Closed for Spring Festival
ADMISSION FEES
General admission: ¥10 per person
FREE for:
students (with valid ID)
UCCA members (with card)
children under 130 centimeters
disabled visitors
seniors over 60 (with valid ID)
FREE admission on Thursdays

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