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

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.