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13/6/2007

Thermocline of Art

ZKM_Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe

New Asian Waves

Curator: Wonil Rhee
Co-Curators: Peter Weibel, Gregor Jansen

This exhibition, with 117 artists representing 20 Asian countries from the Middle East to Far East, from Southeast Asia to Near East and Central Asia, offers the first comprehensive picture of contemporary Asian art production. The show’s title refers to a climatic phenomenon: just like the whirlpool that one can see shooting from the water’s surface when ocean waters experience a considerable change in temperature, the exhibition “Thermocline of Art. New Asian Waves” makes visible Asian art, which is still largely undiscovered in the West, from an Asian perspective. The exhibition focuses on the multiple realities and hybrid identities that have arisen in Asia through the effects of globalization, post-colonialism, and the poly-contextuality of the diverse cultural, political, religious, and economic systems. The artists react with fantasy, satire, scepticism, humor, and cynicism to the conflicts, paradoxes, and absurdities of the social systems between tradition and inn ovation. The Korean curator, Wonil Rhee, artistic director of the Media City Seoul and co-curator of the 6th Shanghai Biennale, is a recognized expert on Asian art. He will present not only internationally renowned artists who have immigrated to the West, but primarily up-and-coming artists who still live in their home countries, from Kazakhstan to Korea, from Malaysia to Indonesia. This art reveals different values and criteria than Western art or the art that is produced in the West and for a Western art market. It is a contemporary and global, but also postmodern and post-ethnic art, including paintings, installations, films, videos, photographs, sculptures, and objects, that unveils the potential conflicts of globalization and its effects on the Asian realm. It opens a panorama of art that expands the boundaries of a Western concept of art.

Wonil Rhee: Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves

Thermocline, the theme of the exhibition, means a layer in a large body of water where warm and cold currents meet to cause a sudden change of water temperature. As a metaphor, this natural phenomenon, that is, the collision between huge currents in the deep ocean symbolizes the encounter between West and non-West, Europe and Asia, and the world and Asia primarily and secondarily, the change of water temperature as the outcome of the physical collision represents a multi-layered system of meaning about the comprehensive change of history, culture, and topographical map, to put it another way, the 'change-the conversion of reality'.

As if shedding light on the 'thermocline' phenomenon occurring in the depth of the ocean, the exhibition aims to explain the acculturation and collision between globalism and locality, the discord and conflict between tradition and modernity, the collision and coexistence between high and low culture and so on, which all have run though the waves of dynamic upheaval of modern and contemporary history and contemporary art, with the understanding of over-all tendency of the infiltration, stream, chasm and absorption of philosophical, humanist thoughts.

What gives special significance to this exhibition is that it could be considered as a sort of report to communicate the results obtained during the curator visited and discussed with the participating artists and co-curators from twenty countries for two years: it reports the visual outgrowths of incessant cooperations and communications of the Asian artists who strive to identify the new values, the new time-spirit of the changing era, in the process where they incorporated and debated on the issues of many Asian regions and people that are forced to have an active thought on the new social and cultural orders of the 21th century though they have undergone the dissolution and deconstruction of traditional values in their history.

Additionally, the exhibition finds and introduces a great number of new emerging artists of many Asian countries, as a way of providing information to meet the interest and expectation of the international art world. As is suggested by the subtitle, 'New Asian Waves', it will give a panoramic view of the new trend and topographical map of Asian contemporary art.
++ Text excerpt from the Catalogue Thermocline of Art. New Asian Waves

Image: Yong-seok Oh: Drama No. 3, 2004-2005

More information: http://www.zkm.de/thermocline

Press contact
Irina Koutoudis phone: +49(0)721 – 8100 – 1220 fax: +49(0)721 – 8100 – 1139 e-mail: presse@zkm.de

Opening: Thurs, June 14th 2007, ZKM_Foyer, 7pm

ZKM | Center for Art and Media
Lorenzstrasse 19 76135 Karlsruhe, Germany
Opening hours:
Wed-Fri 10 am – 6 pm
Sat, Sun 11 am – 6 pm
Mon, Tue closed

Guided tours:
Sat 2 pm
Sun 4 pm

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