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He Xiangning Art Museum has always been concerned with the condition of young artists’ practice. It is with great honor that we invite Guangzhou Academy of Art professor Hu Bin and independent curator Yuan Fuca to co-curate an exhibition titled “The Ecstasy of Time: Reframing the Medium of Knowing.” The exhibition features eleven individuals and collectives of young Chinese artists and commisions a performance installation “Prosecuting Sweat, Neon Dreams” in accordance with the theme.

The works presented in this exhibition respond to different aspects of the complex relationship between “technology and art.” Using the context of postmodern language on the questions of technology and representation, Fredric Jameson once proposed that art today is re-productive art, while at the same time suggesting that the representation machines of late capitalism presents a challenge to our aesthetics. How is the world recreated by technology? How does this recreated world reconstruct our methods of viewing and thinking? Correspondingly, when the judgement criteria of modernism are no longer applicable to today’s media environment, how does one read the fragmented information contained in the works in light of the smooth content of the interface of production? In reality, with the gradual reduction of life itself to a commercialized image of imitation and replication, the elimination of the historic significance of incidents, as well as the reality of the audience’s pursuit of the pleasure of pure language, how can we reflect on the changes rising from the transformation of science and technology?

Here, the reintroduction of the concept of time possesses a certain political necessity. Correspondingly, the material and sense forms of time receive interests in this exhibition. Within time, man is no longer the starting point for the news, but has become at various times the recipient, indicator, code, and medium supporting the news, and sometimes the news itself. This view of time redefines human plasticity—a sort of mechanism for establishing communication and discernment, a moment in time that includes the past, present and future, much like the concept of “ecstasy” described by Martin Heidegger, which is therefore a material manifestation of the “authentic present.” In this everaccelerating space-time relationship that promotes globalization, how do we understand the resistance of the form of time? Considering especially the speed of society above all else in China’s postmodern reality, how do we think deeply about the problems created by technology to establish individual judgment and resistance? We hope for “The Ecstasy of Time” to serve as a critical starting point.

Floating worlds
By Emma Lavigne, Guest curator

Since its creation in 1991, Thierry Raspail, Artistic Director of the Biennale de Lyon, has asked each guest curator to think about a keyword, assigned for three editions. The 2017 Biennale de Lyon is the second volume of a trilogy around the word “modernity”, and it was with this word that Thierry Raspail invited Emma Lavigne, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, to imagine this 14th edition, at the Sucrière and macLYON from 20 September 2017 to 07 January 2018.

“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”
Charles Baudelaire

In a context of relentless globalization, generating constant mobility and accelerated flow – the “liquidity” of the world and of identities in Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis –, the Biennale is exploring the legacy and scope of the concept of “modernity” in the art of our time. We have taken the poet Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as «the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”

The Biennale unfolds as an atmospheric and expanding, mobile landscape that is constantly reconfiguring itself in the manner of some of the masterpieces of modernity from the Centre Pompidou (National Museum of Modern Art) – here celebrating its 40th anniversary. Calder’s random orchestration of shapes suspended in space, for example, or Fontana’s paintings that open out onto infinite cosmogonies. The White Cube cracks and metamorphoses into an organism, a constellation, in which, with artists such as Hans Arp and Ernesto Neto, Lygia Pape and Daniel Steegman Mangrané, art and space become biomorphic and lead on to projects that challenge the abstraction of European modernity in order to reassess its influence around the world. Like the white sail of Hans Haacke’s, Wide White Flow, or the kites of Shimabuku’s When Sky was Sea, a wind of radical uprisings, poetic effulgence and contemporary aesthetic incandescence has swept through the Floating worlds of the Biennale de Lyon.
Six trails link the artworks on show at the macLYON to the ones on show at La Sucrière and the dôme, place Antonin Poncet: Archipelago of Sensation, Expanded Poetry, Ocean of Sound, Electric Body, Inner Cosmos and Endless Circulation.

Art duo Jingfang Hao & Lingjie Wang create hybrid objects and environments. In Over the Rainbow, a rainbow created by light reflecting on the work’s iridescent surface is presented as a fleeting moment, to be captured. Visible only from certain standpoints, the arc moves with the viewer, then disappears. The resolutely minimalist installation underscores the delicacy of the apparition, and the sensory, meditative aspect of the work, focussing our attention on phenomena connected with the passage of time, shifting light, or the limits of human perception. All around, traces of lotus pollen evoke a contrasting, cyclical sense of time. Lotus pollen is the “male” component of the plant’s reproductive system, the essence of its future germination, but also its fossil: that which remains when the rest has rotted away, and which is capable of surviving for thousands of years. Historians and paleobotanists use pollens to analyse changes in the climate and species. Pollen also symbolises immanence, and the Buddhist concept of the three stages of existence: the past, present and future.

With generous backing from Cristallerie Saint-Louis

©DR

We are delighted to announce the opening of the artist duo Jingfang Hao & Lingjie Wang’s first solo exhibition at WHITE SPACE BEIJING on June 3rd, 2017. This show will survey the artists’ installation-centered practice in recent years.

Jingfang Hao & Lingjie Wang’s creations focus on nuanced changes in nature. Through utilizing devices and mechanisms of materials science and engineering, the artists continuously explore human perceptions and emotions correlated to the physical world. Presented this time are a series of installations including long-term projects Sun Drawing and Rainbow. With an in-depth research into and application of optical elements, thermosensitive materials and mechanical design, Hao and Wang take natural elements such as light, gravity and time as their primary artistic materials, gradually lessening the importance of the technological aspect and renewing at once the viewer’s personal experience on the sensual dimension.

Jingfang Hao (b. 1985, Shandong) & Lingjie Wang (b. 1984, Shanghai) currently work and live in Mulhouse (France) and Shanghai. The artists graduated from Shanghai Maritime University in 2017 with B.E. in industrial design; obtained their MA and Diploma national supérieur d’expression plastique at École Supérieure d’Art de Lorraine in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Their recent exhibitions include 14th Biennale de Lyon: Floating Worlds, Lyon, France (2017); 62e Salon de Montrouge, le Beffroi, Montrouge, France (2017); Over the Rainbow, La Grande Place / Musée du Cristal Saint-Louis, Saint-Louis-lès-Bitche, France (2016); The Second Nature, La Regionale 17, HeK Basel, Basel, Swizerland (2016); This Coming Summer Has Already Gone, MoCA Pavilion, Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, Shanghai, China (2016); Nonfigurative, Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2015).

UNE PROPOSITION DE BENOÎT BILLOTTE AVEC LES ARTISTES JINGFANG HAO ET LINGJIE WANG, MICKAËL LIANZA, NICOLAS MULLER, ANNE-CHANTAL PITTELOUD.

Autour de cette thématique commune, chacun des artistes se plait à jouer de la polysémie de ce terme. Ils s’approprient la notion d’unité tant dans le domaine scientifique, architectural, linguistique que conceptuel, allant même jusqu’à redéfinir des formes d’unité ou des outils de mesure.
tous les jeudis à 18h30
4 mai : conférence de B. Frommel
11 mai : projection de films d’artiste
18 mai : nuit des bains

28.04.2017 — 20.05.2017
vernissage 27.04.2017 — 18h30

La 62e édition du Salon de Montrouge s’inscrit dans le profond renouvellement initié en 2016 sous la direction artistique d’Ami Barak, l’un des catalyseurs les plus actifs de la scène artistique contemporaine et de Marie Gautier, co-directrice artistique.

Sur les 1500 m2 du Beffroi, photographies, sculptures, dessins, vidéos et installations se révèlent au grand public au sein d’une véritable exposition collective via 4 grands chapitres, un parti-pris impulsé par le regard curatorial d’Ami Barak et de Marie Gautier. Le 62e Salon de Montrouge consistera ainsi en une véritable cartographie de la jeune création contemporaine, dans une scénographie à la fois sophistiquée et élégante de Ramy Fischler et Vincent Le Bourdon, et une identité visuelle entièrement conçue par les jeunes graphistes Camille Baudelaire et Jérémie Harper.

Les 53 artistes de la sélection 2017, venus de France, de Belgique, d’Espagne, du Royaume-Uni, mais aussi du Brésil, du Togo, de Colombie, du Maroc, de Russie, de Corée du Sud et de Chine, ont été sélectionnés par Ami Barak et Marie Gautier, aidés d’un comité composé de personnalités de l’art contemporain. Ils seront soumis aux regards expérimentés d’un jury présidé par Bernard Blistène, directeur du Musée National d’Art Moderne, qui leur remettra, lors du vernissage le 26 avril prochain, les prix du Salon de Montrouge.