Meomo to the Unknown

Jun. 23, 2012-Jul. 22, 2012

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He Xiangyu, Sun Xun, Chen Wei

 

Text/ Lucien Y. Tso

Memo to the Unknown is like a presumptive scenario existing in parallel to the real world and witnessing individual experimental cases that might be omitted from the mainstream of Chinese contemporary art scene lately. This exhibition invites He Xiangyu, Sun Xun and Chen Wei, these three Chinese young artists whose artistic practices and working approaches have brought the methodology of making art into question which has been discussed or maybe disregarded by their fellows. Artists who grew up after 1990s have experienced the capitalization of economic system and the injection of immense broadcasting power along with the rapid development in China’s communist society. Sources of fragmental images changes the way artists observe and consequently the subject matter depicted in their artwork; a phenomenon satisfied by personalization and privatization emerges and accelerates the need of self-regard when creating works. With instincts, artists convey painful entangling feelings derived from emotional conflict of self-consciousness and consumer social reality into an illusory self-constructed style. The inter-dynamic relationship between daily life and traditional cultures in art, which have come along from the history, is now inevitably diluted and substituted by a simplistic focus on emotional expressions in a conventional way. Through these three artists' seemingly unscientific or irrational artistic approaches illuminate the logic of how the young generation artists absorb, digest, understand and respond to the thinking of contemporary art. Artworks on display in this exhibition present the artists’ ideas which can be seen in the attempt of combining artwork making with traditional expertise in a self-taught manner; and this could become a strategy that once again bond contemporary art with Chinese cultural heritages.