12.02.2017 → 12.31.2017
Northeast socialist Baroque isn’t simply are a representation of Baroque aesthetics, nor is it merely about discussing the region of Northeast Asia. Instead, it is a response to globalization a construct of maritime trade, while at the same time introducing another much older method of trade attached to the inland by both culture and exchange. Reiterating the importance of interiority is both a means of establishing to correlation between contemporary art and Chinese cultural threads, as well as the foundation and internal logic for projecting contemporary art into Chinese contemporary culture.
There is indeed a no more suitable place than the “Northeast” for opening the discussion on interiority. Beginning with the Russo-Japanese War, the South Manchuria Railway Company and Manchukuo, on to the image of the “the elder brother of the Republic” found in the era of socialist construction; all the way up until the 90’s and present day with the “Lay-off wave” of factory workers and decline under new globalization. The Northeast presents a different kind of development from that of oceanic globalization.
The art of the Northeast exhibits a mixture of reverberations and alternatives to reality-influenced by the artistic awakening during the new wave period of 85 and continuing on into the narration and depiction of local villages and industrial cities in Northeast China.
This aberration flourished together with the Chinese social and economic development, continuing to transform in its own divergent manner. It is for this reason precisely that the Northeast provides such an internal perspective and calls us to revisit it. Deleuze views Baroque as the concept of folds: a variant model of multidimensionality. The “northeast” in this project plays the role of refraction, however, it is not the only region involved.
The exhibition begins with two artists from Shenyang, Song Yuanyuan and Geng Yini. Distinguished from the sense of enlightenment found in the former Northeast artists who portrayed the reality of life in industrial cities; their work is more concentrated and fragmented, their images contain sort of consumption propensity while retaining an intense use color which is distinct of the Northeast palette. Yang Yuanyuan begins with the history of colonialism in Dalian. Panning from a perspective of an interloper she connects many strangers, switching between fiction and reality, and continues her writing about the boundaries of cities in multitudes of time and space. Born in Jiangxi and currently living in Shanghai, Xiao Jiang retains the interiority temperament and pictorial language-traces of daily life under modernity. His other landscape painting is the direct embodiment of the observation mode found in interior history.
Correspondingly, is the work style of Liang Shuo, he connects the structural features specific to the Northern Mountains and transfers them into the contemporary space. Not satisfied with remaining stagnant on the visual surface, he also rewrites the relationships in artistic production. The project appointed Liang Shuo as a commission to complete the terrain in the exhibition hall, where he “folds” the mirrors to mirror the work of other artists.
Song Yuanyuan’s decorative motifs, Geng Yini’s paintings and their use of foreign imagery, all gather here in Qi Wenzhang, marking a turning point in cultural history. The classical image of the humanities appears playing the role of an ape. This fold from imagery to culture is more concealed and penetrated here in Xu Tan’s work “Botany” has been shaped by the transformation of social semantics in this project. He mentioned that the transposition of animals and humans has become the intimate relationship represented in the context of the Chinese perspective “In you there is me and in me there is you”. Taking a reflexive look at Qi Wenzhang and Geng Yini’s paintings of the apes, you can no longer find the difference between animals and humans as in the Western discourse. They together with Liang Shuo’s and Xiao Jiang’s “cultural terrain”, the solid Baroque imagery found in Song Yuanyuan’s pictorial language, come together to form a multifaceted interior folding image, distinct from the flat sea surfaces of globalization forming a sort of interwoven, awkward geography.Download Checklists Download Press Release