calendario eventi  :: 

X

20/8/2015

Two Exhibitions

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art UCCA, Beijing

Korakrit Arunanondchai

Influenced equally by an adolescence spent surrounded by Thai pop culture and an artistic training and career based in the U.S., Korakrit Arunanondchai’s (b. 1986, Bangkok) practice mines globalized subjectivities for their underlying tensions. Rather than linger on geographically specific subject matter, he adopts denim—a fabric as universal as any in the world today—as a physical and symbolic means of intensifying these investigations. Originally a staple of the working class wardrobe which later became a universal sign of youth, the textile can be found across Arunanondchai’s recent paintings, sculptures, videos, and performances, as well as in this, the artist’s first solo show in China—a country known for its prodigious export (and, increasingly, consumption) of denim goods.

For his UCCA exhibition, Korakrit Arunanondchai shows a grouping of works including video, installation, and painting, expanding this presentation through on-site performance. Special treatment is given to his ongoing video trilogy, which collages fictive narratives with experiences taken from his family and artistic life, arranging them based on the interlocking themes of death, purgatory, and rebirth. The videos are a visual construction of the artist’s thinking on memory, mortality, identity, and masculinity. The exhibition is produced in collaboration with MoMA PS1.

----

Tao Hui: New Directions

Growing up in a small mountain town overlooking the Yangtze river in Sichuan, Tao Hui (b. 1987, Yunyang) was surrounded by verbal transmissions of folklore and tales of bizarre happenings that befell his neighbors and friends. A collector of such stories and a natural raconteur, the artist transforms these anecdotes into video installations, acting as portals through which the audience can travel to a space not unlike the misty village of his childhood: a special purgatory where ghostly realms and the human world become intertwined, a reality stranger than fiction.

In this exhibition, the second in UCCA’s ongoing series “New Directions”, Tao Hui presents a group of new and existing works in the Long Gallery. Told through a multipart video installation filmed especially for this exhibition, Extraneous shares the story of a young girl whose extra finger causes disagreements in her family, eventually leading her to sever it with a kitchen knife and burn it to ash. In 1 Character & 7 Materials, the tired, disembodied voice of a woman heard through wireless headsets recounts the scandalous story of falling in love and having a child with one of her music students, while a large screen toggles among disparate and outlandish narrative scenes. The final piece in this triptych, The Acting Tutorial, follows thirteen actresses methodically reproducing various extremes of human emotion as a technical exercise. As their exhaustively histrionic enactments crescendo, their artifice also slips into a horrible reality and the viewer is left at a surreal intersection between performance and the real world.

Tao Hui’s solo exhibition, the second installment of the “New Directions”series, is accompanied by a monograph supported by Post Wave Publishing Consulting. “New Directions” is initiated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari. “New Directions: Tao Hui” is curated by Felicia Chen.

Image: Korakrit Arunanondchai

Press Contact:
Ling Chen, UCCA, ling.chen@ucca.org.cn

Opening: fry 21 August

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
798 Art District, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Beijijng
Tu. We. Th. Fr. Sa. Su 10:00 - 19:00

stampa

permanent link