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20/11/2014

Polit-Sheer-Form

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art UCCA, Beijing

curated by: Philip Tinari, Bian Ka, Guo Xi

The artistic collective Polit-Sheer-Form was founded in 2005 by artists Hong Hao, Xiao Yu, Liu Jianhua, Song Dong, and curator Leng Lin. In the past nine years they have pioneered a way of working in which artistic commentary on cultural and spiritual life in contemporary China grows out of a relational regimen of ordinary, communal activities: talking, traveling, eating, reading, and playing together. Polit-Sheer-Form: Fitness for All is the collective's largest institutional survey in China to date. The show, which opens in conjunction with the 2014 UCCA gala and benefit auction for which Polit-Sheer-Form have provided artistic direction, occupies the Central Gallery, Nave, and Long Gallery and runs from November 21, 2014, until January 4, 2015.

Born in the 1960s, Polit-Sheer-Form's five members belong to a special generation with memories—albeit only childhood memories—of life during China's socialist high tide. In their art, they reconstitute the visuality and affect of that earlier moment, distilling its previously political imperatives into pure (sheer) forms, devoid of programmatic content. Their signature "Polit-Sheer-Blue," as ubiquitous as it is innocuous, is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this singular tendency.

At the heart of the varied works shown in Polit-Sheer-Form: Fitness for All—which range from a composite portrait of the five members as their collective avatar Mr. Zheng, to the new performance Whip It! in which a performer in a Polit-Sheer-Blue suit batters the museum's walls, to a beautifully produced multi-channel video of volunteers coming together to wash a public bus as they heed the dictate Do the Same Good Deed—lies an ongoing interest in how art can make ideological structures visible. They do this with brotherly camaraderie and self-effacing humor, a side of their practice perhaps most clearly visible in the exhibition's titular piece, in which fitness machines identical to those found in community spaces around the country are appropriated into the gallery context for the cheerful, perhaps winking, betterment of the viewer. Through a healthy regimen of artistic exploration, Polit-Sheer-Form urges us at once to savor the intellectual freedoms, however ambiguous, of a moment where substantive dogma has given way to instrumental rationality, and to yearn for the lucid moral imperatives, however problematic, of a bygone era. In so doing, they champion a value system based on happiness that might prove instructive for our shared future.

Polit-Sheer-Form: Fitness for All is curated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari together with exhibitions manager Bian Ka and assistant curator Guo Xi. CP and WTi Group are the new media art production partner. Chronus Art Center is the new media art partner. Special thanks to MABSOCIETY and Catherine Lee for their support.

Image: Polit-Sheer-Form, Fitness for All, 2014. Installation, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Polit-Sheer-Form and MABSOCIETY.

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

Opening: Friday 21 November 2014

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
798 Art District
No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu
Tuesday-Sunday 10:00-19:00
Free Admission

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