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5/10/2010

Three exhibition

Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Isaac Julien
Ten Thousand Waves

Isaac Julien's critically acclaimed, nine screen film installation TEN THOUSAND WAVES - starring Maggie Cheung, the legendary siren of Chinese cinema - is to receive its London premiere at the Hayward Gallery on 13 October, as part of the exhibition Move: Choreographing You. To co-incide with the exhibition Victoria Miro is delighted to present a new body of photographic work also titled TEN THOUSAND WAVES which opens on 7 October and continues until 13 November.

Shot on location in China this epic work poetically weaves together stories linking the nation's ancient past and present. Through an elaborate architectural installation the work explores the movement of people across countries and continents and meditates on unfinished journeys. A single screen version of the film called Better Life, premiered at The Venice Film Festival last week, where the Telegraph's David Gritten, descibed it as "a sorrowful, strong and haunting work".

Conceived and made over four years, TEN THOUSAND WAVES sees Julien collaborating with some of China's leading artistic voices, including: screen goddess Maggie Cheung; rising star of Chinese film Zhao Tao; poet Wang Ping; master calligrapher Gong Fagen; artist Yang Fudong; acclaimed cinematographer Zhao Xiaoshi; and a 100-strong Chinese cast and crew. The film's original musical score is by fellow East Londoner Jah Wobble and The Chinese Dub Orchestra and contemporary classical composer Maria de Alvear.

Filmed on location in the ravishing and remote Guangxi province and at the famous Shanghai Film Studios and various sites around Shanghai, TEN THOUSAND WAVES combines fact, fiction and film essay genres against a background of Chinese history, legend and landscape to create a meditation on global human migrations. Through formal experimentation and a series of unique collaborations, Julien seeks to engage with Chinese culture through contemporary events, ancient myths and artistic practice.

The original inspiration for TEN THOUSAND WAVES was the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, in which 23 Chinese cockle-pickers died. In response to this event, Julien commissioned the poet Wang Ping to come to England and write Small Boats, a poem that is recited in the work. In the successive years, Julien has spent time in China slowly coming to understand the country and its people's perspectives and developing the relationships that have enabled him to undertake this rich and multifaceted work.

Through conversations with academics, curators and artists both in China and the UK, Julien uncovered a symbolic body of material which he has used to create a work that explores modern and traditional Chinese values and superstitions. These are encapsulated in a fable about the goddess Mazu (played by Maggie Cheung) that comes from Fujian Province, from where the Morecambe Bay cockle-pickers originated. The Tale of Yishan Island tells the tale of 16th Century fishermen lost and in danger at sea. At the heart of the legend is the goddess figure who leads the fishermen to safety. Using this fable as a starting point Julien deftly draws on this story and the poignant connection between it and the 21st Century tragedy of Chinese migrants who died struggling to survive in the North of England.

Following ideas surrounding death, spiritual displacement, and the uniquely Chinese connection with 'ghosts' or 'lost souls', the film links the Shanghai of the past and present, symbolising the Chinese transition towards modernity, aspiration and affluence. Here, Julien employs the visual language of ghost stories, with recurrent figures and images appearing and disappearing. Mazu's spectral figure traverses time and space, serving as a guide through the interlocking strands of the work. Mirroring the goddess of the fable, a ghostly protagonist (Zhao Tao) leads us through the world of Shanghai cinema via the Shanghai Film Studio, to a restaging by Julien of scenes from the classic Chinese film The Goddess (1934), and finally to the streets of Modern and Old Shanghai.

Isaac Julien is as equally acclaimed for his fluent, arresting films as his vibrant and inventive gallery installations. TEN THOUSAND WAVES is his most ambitious project to date with the nine-screen installation forming a dynamic structure which choreographs the viewers experience of the multiple narratives. Julien deploys the visual and aural textures of the film to elicit a visceral response from the viewer, submerging them in the world of his making.

TEN THOUSAND WAVES | TOUR INFORMATION
TEN THOUSAND WAVES was shown in May this year at Sydney Biennale and at ShanghART during the Shanghai Expo. It is currently on view at Kunsthalle Helsinki, until 10 October. It will form the central work in a major solo show by Isaac Julien at the Bass Museum, Miami from 2 December 2010 to 6 March 2011.

NINE-SCREEN INSTALLATION| Hayward Gallery, 13 October 2010 - 9 January 2011
TEN THOUSAND WAVES is included in the exhibition 'Move: Choreographing You'.
PHOTOGRAPHIC WORKS | Victoria Miro Gallery, 7 October - 13 November 2010
Isaac Julien has created a new body of photographic works which will be exhibited at Victoria Miro to co-incide with the films UK premier at the Hayward Gallery.
TEN THOUSAND WAVES was produced by the LUMA Foundation
The work was made with the kind support of the Udo and Anette Brandhorst Foundation; Coleccion Helga de Alvear; and the Linda Pace Foundation. The artist would also like to thank Toby Devan Lewis and those who wish to remain anonymous for their kind support. Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England

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Yayoi Kusama
Flowers That Bloom Tomorrow

New outdoor sculptures to go on show in London and a solo presentation at FIAC and the Tuileries Gardens in Paris for Japan’s most revered artist.

Victoria Miro is delighted to present an ensemble of three new flower sculptures by Yayoi Kusama from 7 October – 13 November. The giant triffid-like flora will unfold in all their psychedelic glory, against the backdrop of the Gallery’s canalside garden creating a surreal landscape of nature and artifice. Enormous clusters of sinewy stems in bright shades of pink, green, blue, red, and yellow – polka dotted and netted - anchor enormous multihued blooms. These massive sculptures are fabricated in fiberglass-reinforced plastic and painted in high impact–hued urethane to shiny perfection. Kusama’s preoccupation with the infinite and sublime to be found in pattern and repetition date back to her earliest paintings from the 1950s. However, it is in these most recently developed works - which encapsulate the surreal and the instinctual within the pop and the decorative - that we find an extension of Kusama’s practice into her ninth decade that is as fresh and provocative as ever.

Narcissus Garden installed in Tuileries Gardens as part of the Louvre’s Sculpture Programme for FIAC
Yayoi Kusama’s iconic work Narcissus Garden (1966-) will be installed in the large pond of Tuileries Gardens as part of the Louvre’s Sculpture Programme for FIAC this year from 21 – 24 October. Narcissus Garden dates back to 1966, when Kusama first participated in the 33rd Venice Biennale. The work comprised hundreds of mirrored spheres outdoors in what she called a ‘kinetic carpet’. As soon as the piece was installed, Kusama began selling each individual sphere for $2, until the Biennale organisers put an end to her enterprise. Perhaps one of Kusama’s most notorious works, Narcissus Garden was as much about the promotion of the artist through the media as it was an opportunity to offer a critique of the mechanisation and commodification of the art market. Various versions of Narcissus Garden have been presented worldwide at venues Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2003 and as part of the Whitney Biennial in Central Park, New York in 2004 and now in Paris.

Solo presentation of new works by Yayoi Kusama at FIAC
Yayoi Kusama will be the subject of a solo presentation of new works by Victoria Miro at FIAC (21 – 24 October) which will centre on three large new aluminum pumpkins. Kusama's acclaimed presentation in the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993 - which consisted of a mirrored room filled with tiny pumpkin sculptures in which she sat in colour coordinated magician's attire - marked the beginning of the artist's preoccupation with the pumpkin motif. Following the Biennale she went on to produce a huge, yellow pumpkin sculpture covered with an optical pattern of black dots. This pumpkin came to represent for her a kind of alter ego or self-portrait and remains one of her signature series of works. In this new series of aluminum pumpkins the surface of the pumpkin becomes a mirror punctuated with holes that allow the view to look through the sculptures, which are painted in a range of solid hues.

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Hernan Bas
The Hallucinations of Poets

Victora Miro is delighted to present The Hallucinations of Poets, the third solo exhibition with the gallery by Hernan Bas.
The American painter Hernan Bas’s practice has always been intrinsically linked to an exploration of literature and the written word. For an exhibition earlier this year, Bas presented works referencing the American Transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott) - or, in Bas’s words, the ‘original hippies’, as their writing suggests a ‘back to nature’ perspective. In The Hallucinations of Poets, Bas delves into the more foreboding preoccupations of Dark Romanticism. Whilst Poe, Melville, Hawthorn and Dickinson shared the belief with the Transcendentalists that nature is a deeply spiritual force, they took an inherently sinister stance to the Transcendentalists’ innately optimistic views. For these Dark Romantics, the natural world is full of shadows, decay, mystery, ghosts and death. These works, the first series in Bas’s oeuvre to directly address the realm of poetry, are characterized by a somber palette and charged, mysterious atmospheres.

In one painting, The Hallucinations of Poets (dandelion), a young man in a shimmering landscape encounters a floating dandelion seed, which seems to possess a luminous magic. In another work, The garden always felt different at night, a boy approaches the edges of dense foliage in an ominous gloom, his torch carving shards of light through the leaves. Youthful males – alone or in pairs – inhabit these territories: landscapes full of the fantastical somehow borne of the banal. Darkness and light, the known and unknown, are all forces that coexist in Bas’s works, creating otherworldly, rich images, regions defined by the outer reaches of imagination, and a nature rendered both familiar and strange.

This is the first body of work completed entirely in Bas’s new home in the city of Detroit. Here, far from Miami where he had lived since birth, Bas encountered an entirely different version of nature in his garden surroundings. Inspired by these experiences together with his readings, Bas’s works endeavor to capture the poetic imagination, and suggest that moments of reflection allow the ordinary to become extraordinary.

Hernan Bas was born in 1978 in Miami Florida. He currently lives and works in Detroit, Michigan. A major survey of Bas’s work opened at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami in 2007 and toured to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2009. Bas has exhibited works in group exhibitions at significant venues including ‘The Collectors’, Nordic Pavilion, 2009 Venice Biennale (curated by Elmgreen & Dragset); KaDE, Amersfoort, the Netherlands; 6th Busan Biennale, Korea; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; Deste Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art, Athens; Saatchi Gallery, London; the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art; The Moore Space, Miami; and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.

Image: Yayoi Kusama with a new flower sculpture, 2010 (production shot)

Kathy Stephenson
Director of Communications 0207 549 0422 kathy@victoria-miro.com

Private View Invitation: Wednesday 6 October 2010 6 - 8pm

Special Reception: Tuesday 12 October 3 - 5pm and artist talk with Isaac Julien at 4pm

Victoria Miro Gallery
16 Wharf Road - London N1 7RW
Open Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 6pm
admission free

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