calendario eventi  :: 

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10/6/2015

Two Exhibitions

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art UCCA, Beijing

Ming Wong: Next Year
Curated by: Venus Lau and Zoe Diao

Ming Wong’s first exhibition in Beijing explores nonlinear temporality with a site-specific installation fusing the aesthetics of Cantonese opera and sci-fi movies. The exhibition also features the world premiere of his latest film 明年 | Next Year | L’Année Prochaine.

From June 11 to August 9, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art presents the solo exhibition “Ming Wong: Next Year”, comprised of two new works from the Singaporean artist. In Scenography for a Chinese Science Fiction Opera, Wong turns the Nave into a stage, fusing the aesthetics of the spaceship referenced in Chinese and American cinematic history with traditional cloud patterns based on Chinese cosmology of immateriality. Continuing the futurist theme, Wong has re-staged the French New Wave classic Last Year at Marienbad with his film 明年 | Next Year | L’Année Prochaine. The two pieces continue with thematic threads evident in the artist’s previous works, continuing his exploration of temporality.

For the installation Scenography for a Chinese Science Fiction Opera, Ming Wong closes off the Nave, mimicking the three-dimensional set design of traditional stage theater with more than ten wooden backdrops. Painted to resemble the interior of a spaceship and swirls of clouds, the backdrops are bifurcated down the middle allowing visitors to walk the length of the hall, through this man-made scene, to its conclusion-a kaleidoscopic, disorienting wheel of color. Ming Wong’s installation appears to follow a narrative: visitors emerge from the spaceship, thereby entering the space of the open sky. But in actuality, this piece contains two mismatched parts: the sky is painted after the universe found in traditional Chinese opera and ancient religious murals, abstract and bright, contrasting sharply with the dark, naturalistic spaceship. The two sets of iconography represent a multifaceted cultural landscape and a nonlinear timeframe derived from Wong’s investigations of the modernization of Cantonese opera, ancient Chinese wall painting, and science-fiction films from China and abroad. Visitors are enveloped within a futuristic science-fiction movie set then given over to a mural painting of the sky, seemingly walking towards the future yet facing the past. The installation calls into question the linear, continuous, and quantitative aspects of time.

In 明年 | Next Year | L’Année Prochaine, Ming Wong performs the male and female roles in fragments taken from Last Year in Marienbad (1961), written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and directed by Alain Resnais. The narrative follows a woman living in a lavish hotel, who meets a man by chance. The man claims that they met the year before in Marienbad, had fallen in love, and agreed to meet at the hotel to elope. His brazen attitude and proposition make the woman laugh, and at first she denies everything. In the end, she finally concedes and runs off with the man. The film is celebrated for its innovative cinematic language-the camera reflecting the pace of the mind through repetition, reversal, freeze frame, and white out-capturing reality, memory, and illusion while inventing a sequential order different even from the internal logic of the montage. In the original film, the memory loss of the main character inhibits her thought process and time-”next year” compressed into now-loses all meaning. Ming Wong prefers the highly dramatic portions of films, acting as multiple characters within the story and attempting to embody their emotions. Last Year in Marienbad subverts the objective role of the camera, using it to portray a highly subjective world. This enables Ming Wong to more easily bring emotions to the surface, and also presents viewers with a subjective world in which they are faced with their own understandings of time.

Ming Wong’s video works are generally based on excerpts of art films. From beginning to end, Last Year at Marienbad never makes reference to a specific location, and Ming Wong takes advantage of this fact to re-stage the work at Marienbad Café and Fuxing Park, both in Shanghai. Taking place in a café named after a French art film and a park combining French and Chinese gardening styles, neighborhoods and apartments that reference Chinese and Western architecture, the film hints at the notion that cultural perceptions of time remain unfixed. As a Singaporean artist based in Berlin, the artist’s cultural identity has often been used in interpretation of his work. However, cinema is inherently “transnational” and is used by the artist to reveal the synthesis of cultures. In 明年| Next Year | L’Année Prochaine, this is most clearly viewed in post-colonial Shanghai’s “Western-style” Marienbad Café, where Wong’s cinematic language and conscious structuring of the film are emphasized. The exhibition is the first installment of UCCA’s “Secret Timezones Trilogy”.

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He Xiangyu: New Directions

Expanding on UCCA’s longstanding interest in emerging practices, “New Directions: He Xiangyu” begins a new series of exhibitions focused on young Chinese artists.

From June 11 to August 9, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) begins the “New Directions” initiative with the solo exhibition of He Xiangyu, a presentation of 365 paintings from the artist’s ongoing Palate Project. Part of UCCA’s mission to present the diverse practices of emerging artistic talents from Greater China to wider audiences, “New Directions: He Xiangyu” is staged in the Long Gallery and will be followed by two subsequent shows featuring young Chinese artists later in the year, with further editions throughout 2016 and beyond.

Best known for sculptural works combining comedy and high concept, He Xiangyu here takes a solipsistic turn, revealing an inner topography depicted in a highly sensitive painterly language. During a brief stint in the U.S. where language barriers proved difficult to navigate, He Xiangyu began translating into images the ridges, bumps, and grooves of his palate through perceptions felt with his tongue. The act of translation, always aimed at demystifying the subject, here only seems to further complicate it. The phenomenological processes responsible for constructing a sense of interior space intrinsic to vocalization, the curl of the tongue that produces “rat” as opposed to “that”, become a function of He Xiangyu’s body mapping, supplanting the oral, and aural, by reaffirming the centrality of visual representation.

Executed over the course of four years, this presentation of Palate Project is composed of six groups of drawings and moves in a perennial display of watercolor, ink, and mixed media on paper. Identifiable anatomical structures dissolve and re-emerge, eventually evolving into color fields of yellow with only the slightest hints of form. Based on a seemingly obvious premise, Palate Project revels in a Cartesian split of mind and body, illustrating that, in spite of proximity to subject, art remains the annotation to a lost referent.

He Xiangyu (b. 1986) first garnered attention for Coca Cola Project, completed merely a year after his graduation from Shenyang Normal University. The piece, which has since been widely exhibited, required a long preparation period of hired workers boiling down 127 tons of Coca Cola. The application of intense heat resulted in two byproducts: an inky liquid and an earthy, dark precipitant. Fertile in its associative capacity, the virtual merde has been used for installations of varying of scale, at times filling entire rooms.

A tangential outgrowth, Tank Project was first featured in UCCA’s exhibition “ON | OFF: China’s Young Artists in Concept and Practice” (2013). Painstakingly sewn by an army of hands trained by the artist, the flaccid military machine is a life-size replica of a Soviet-style tank stitched from over 400 pieces of fine Italian leather. The material and temporal demands placed on the production of both Tank Project and Coca Cola Project, as well as the East-West dialectic conjured by He Xiangyu’s premeditated choice of cultural symbols, are indicative of a larger trend among artists of his generation to interrogate, at times to comedic effect, the contradictory trends of institutionalization and commercialization of contemporary art.

He Xiangyu’s solo exhibition, the first 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: He Xiangyu” is curated by Guo Xi.

Image: invitation

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

Opening: thuersady 11 june 2015

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art UCCA
798 Art District, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Lu
Beijing Cina

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