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You as Me,Hold the Gaze
Duration:Feb. 17, 2023 – May 28, 2023
Artist:aaajiao, Carsten Nicolai, Darren Almond, *LLND, Oreet Ashery, Hu Yun, Tobias,Tobias Rehberger, Li Liao, Lee Bul, Lee Yongbaek,Li Binyuan, Lin Ke, Lin Tianmian, Liu Wei, Lu Lei, Markus Lüpertz,Shi Yong, Tong Wenmin, Yang Jiechang, Ye Linghan, Yu Ji, Zhang Peili, Zhou Wendou, Zhou Xiaohu
Curator:Xu Tianyi
Venue:F1, HOW Art Museum (Shanghai), #2277 Zuchongzhi Rd., Pudong, Shanghai
Organizer:HOW Art Museum
HOW Art Museum is pleased to announce that the exhibition You as Me,Hold the Gaze will be on view from February 17th , 2023.
My age, my beast, who will ever
Look into your eyes.
And with his own blood glue together
The backbones of two centuries?
Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) wrote down the poem The Age (1923) at the beginning of the 20th century. While expressing his visions and hopes for the age, it also shed light on the conflicts between “poet and his time”. In another poem he wrote later, it read: “No, I am no one's contemporary”. (1924)
The Age as quoted in Giorgio Agamben’s What Is the Contemporary? and Alain Badiou’s The Century . In What Is the Contemporary?, Agamben explained “The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure.” Badiou, when quoting the poem at the end of the 20th century, pointed out that Mandelstam’s “beast” as a newborn and fragile presence was doomed to be transient. What Badiou was trying to break was exactly this “backbone”.
It is widely acknowledged that the 20th century was a century of division. And to gain insights into such “division” takes not only knowledge of what happened in this century, but also of what the people of this century were thinking. If we merely label things that happened without probing into what the people of the century were thinking, we can neither get to truly know the present nor prevent things from repeating themselves. In this same logic, this century would have nothing to with the “future” since its very beginning.
You and I as people of some experience of the contemporary are the minimum unit to constitute the complex and multi-layered veins of time of contemporaneity. Hence we shall not follow linear time to describe the nature of things. The exhibition on view, as celebration of the fifth anniversary of the HOW Art Museum (Shanghai), features 37 installations and videos by 24 artists both at home and from abroad including Lee Bul, Liu Wei, Zhang Peili, Tobias Rehberger, Lin Tianmiao and Carsten Nicolai,Markus Lüpertz. Different from the usual curatorial approach that follows a linear timeline to present the works within museum collection, the exhibition follows the principle of “contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time”. Under the title “You as Me”, “you” and “I” are the core of the dialogue with the space, to fill up the absence of subject and scene, reflect upon the tragedies of the century, build connections between contemporary events and past reference, define time from a sociological perspective, treat the “contemporary” as a dividing point between the past and the future, disrupt and reverse language on the cultural level through social installation, rethink of the cultural representations beyond the physical body to confront the fragmented digital world, and morph into an organic life form that cannot be written off in this digital world.
However, the attempt to construct non-linear histories through creative reassemblages of time is in itself trapped in the modern view of history. The underlying narratives among different works are merely judgements based on information fed to us from the outside. You and I need to firmly hold our gaze so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness.
The exhibition will run through May 28, 2023.
Ulay: The Great Journey
Dates: Nov. 13, 2022 - Mar. 12, 2023
Artist: Ulay
Curator: Sherry Lai, Hana Ostan Ožbolt
Venue: HOW Art Museum (2F, No. 1, Lane 2277, Zuchongzhi Road, Shanghai)
Organizer: HOW Art Museum
Co-Organizer: ULAY Foundation, SPURS Gallery
Supporter: Art Algorithm Capital
Curated by Sherry Lai and Hana Ostan Ožbolt
With The Great Journey, HOW Art Museum presents the first institutional posthumous exhibition of the groundbreaking oeuvre of Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay (1943–2020), in Asia. The exhibition is co-curated by Sherry Lai, partner SPURS Gallery, and Hana Ostan Ožbolt, ULAY Foundation Director.
Comprising approximately 70 works, The Great Journey emphasizes the variety and the experimental, uncompromising and intimate character of the work and the legacy of Ulay, the pioneer in Polaroid photography, performance and body art. The exhibition is a journey through Ulay’s life and his body of work, focusing on three different periods: his artistic activity in the early 1970s, his collaboration with Marina Abramović between 1976 and 1989, and his work as a solo artist in the late 1990s.
Ulay had a long-lasting and personal relationship to China, that inspired a great deal of his oeuvre. The exhibition highlights various series of works, which respond to China’s vastness and greatness, its landscape, culture, religion and people.
The body as a reference, as a starting point, as Ulay’s medium par excellence: “As soon as I began using the Polaroid camera, mainly pointing it at myself – a practice I called Auto-Polaroid – I immediately discovered its performative elements. Taking Polaroids was a performative act for me: I performed in front of the camera”. 1 In the early 70s, Ulay developed an approach that was novel in both method and subject matter, using the Polaroid camera as a tool to capture the transformations of his own body, manipulated in a myriad of ways, and investigate the subject of identity. In those fleeting, intimate performances without an audience, Ulay explored socially constructed issues of gender, his masculine and feminine sides, as well as photography’s slippery identity between the real and the illusory.
From 1976 to 1988, Ulay collaborated with former partner Marina Abramović. They met in 1975, when Marina held a performance at de Appel in Amsterdam. It was the beginning of an intensely symbiotic relationship in both love and work that lasted twelve years. Ulay no longer posed questions about his own masculine and feminine sides but, joint with Abramović, strived towards unification, towards an intersex state: that of the hermaphrodite. Between 1976 and 1980, they traveled through Europe in a Citroën van, creating performances in which they explored their relationship, and in particular their physical and mental limits. These are known as theRelation Works; performances that Ulay himself described as cathartic, very realistic, minimalistic, and highly erotic. Both artists wrote a manifesto, entitled ART VITAL, to ground their work. At their core, the performances are straightforward: no theatrical effects, no props or outside interference. Seminal in their sobriety and intensity, they are today considered iconic in the history of performance art.
CJ Zhang: Somewhere from Nowhere
Dates: Mar. 03, 2023 – Apr. 14, 2023
Artist: CJ Zhang
HOW+ Curator: Zheng Guo
Venue: HOW+SPACE ONE (3F, No. 1, Lane 2277, Zuchongzhi Road, Shanghai)
Organizer: HOW+
HOW+SPACE is pleased to announce that Somewhere from Nowhere, artist CJ Zhang’s solo exhibition, will be on view at HOW+SPACE ONE since Mar. 3, 2023.
CJ Zhang: Somewhere from Nowhere
The world prefers roses. Since the development of civilization, roses have been gave with symbolic significance in various periods and have strong consciousness guidance. From the era of the gods in ancient Greece to the Renaissance, the rose has been praised as the symbol of Aphrodite (goddess of love), and has also been shown its rich humanistic significance by scholars, artists and philosophers.
CJ Zhang’s new solo exhibition “Somewhere from Nowhere", takes the "CJ Rose" series as the core. Through the clear and traceable contact creation, the artist weaves a complex multi-phase scene from far, but a strange space indexed by the non-phase rose when getting close. The artist deconstructs and reconstructs the deified and materialized rose from a metaphysical point of view, making it more contemporary and thus arousing the resonance of contemporary people.
Tracing CJ Zhang’s artistic career and his previous works, His brushwork and artistic thoughts are sharp and active, he constantly witnesses and inherits the spirit of the flower. The contact point in the painting is infinitely extended and evolved until it can reach the forefront of this era. Then go deep into the boundless fantasy land in the art world to explore the intersection of the diversity of forms and the unknown.
The irrational lines and strokes in the artist's paintings dispel the boundary between nature and non-nature, and overlap them into a state of being or not being. In the context of loss, exploration, growth, immersion and rebirth, subvert the imagination and consolation that represent love and beauty, overturn the solidified impression in people's subconscious. The rose, which has lost its labels and separated from the traditional framework, has abandoned the appearance of the object, and will open up the inner circle of infinite, enter the realm of speechless true self, and go straight to the essence of nature.
Rose is the exuberant expression of life and desire, like the flowing water of life, invisible and endless. CJ Zhang created a new context for this exhibition. It represents the artist's creative technique: from point to line, line to surface; Then form symbols and contacts, then imagine an opposite world and a parallel universe by observing everything. Explore the unexamined area between human dominance and recessiveness. With a new starting point, open a new opportunity.
Tian Xiaolei: Twenty-eight Fables
Dates: Mar. 03, 2023 – Apr. 27, 2023
Artist: Tian Xiaolei
HOW+ Curator: Zheng Guo
Venue: HOW+SPACE TWO (3F, No. 1, Lane 2277, Zuchongzhi Road, Shanghai)
Organizer: HOW+
HOW+SPACE is pleased to announce that Twenty-eight Fables, artist Tian Xiaolei’s solo exhibition, will be on view at HOW+SPACE TWO since Mar. 3, 2023.
Tian Xiaolei: Twenty-eight Fables
In Homer, Sisyphus offends the gods. As punishment, he needs to push a huge boulder from the foot of the mountain to the top of the mountain, but because the boulder is too heavy, it often rolls back to the starting point before reaching the top of the mountain. The repeated and endless invalid word became the most severe punishment for him by the gods.
Nowadays, when people and technology are closely integrated, the giant stone of Sisyphus has evolved into the scientific and technological civilization we are carrying. In the process of continuous advancement, technology seems to dissipate time, the future is a mountain top that can be seen but can never be reached.
The new solo exhibition "Twenty-Eight Fables" of Tian Xiaolei, will focus on the relationship between human being and technology, the artist stands on the dividing line between the present and the future, leading contemporary people to escape from the accustomed environment through artistic creation, and leave twenty-eight contemporary fables for future generations.
Ticket Prices
Single full price ticket: RMB 120
Single concessionary ticket: RMB 90
*Concessionary tickets
Only available to full-time undergraduate students or senior citizens aged 65 or above, who must bring relevant documents to purchase tickets at the Hao Art Museum
*Free tickets
Free tickets for senior citizens over 75 years old, children under 120cm in height and disabled persons with valid documents
Warm Tips
1. The Hao Art Museum will resume night-time operation and will be open from 12 noon to 8.30pm from Tuesday to Friday, and from 10am to 8.30pm on weekends and public holidays, and will be closed on Mondays.
2. The Hao Art Museum reserves the right to adjust the opening hours and activities of the exhibition hall.
3. Children under 1.2m are free of charge; senior citizens over 75 years old and people with disabilities are free of charge with valid documents (valid documents must be presented at the front desk of Hao Art Museum); full-time undergraduate students or below and senior citizens over 65 years old can purchase discount tickets, which must be purchased at the front desk of Hao Art Museum with valid documents.
4. Please keep your tickets in a safe place and keep them for inspection and other use after entering the museum.
5. Once sold, tickets are non-refundable and are valid for one entry during the exhibition period.
6. No food, water, drinks, lighters, prams or tripods are allowed.
7. Large backpacks and duffel bags must be stored.
8. No video or audio recording is allowed without permission, and no strong flashes are allowed for photography.