newsfrom...: October 2016

Cass Sculpture Foundation
A Beautiful Disorder
Curated by Ella Liao, Claire Shea and Wenny Teo
Participating artists: Bi Rongrong, Cao Dan, Cao Fei Cheng Ran, Cui Jie, Jennifer Ma Wen, Li Jinghu, Lu Pingyuan, Xu Zhen (Produced by MadeIn Company), Rania Ho, Song Ta, Tu Wei-Cheng, Wang Sishun, Wang Wei, Wang Yuyang, Zhang Ruyi, Zheng Bo and Zhao Yao

Li Jinghu, Escape (My Family History) (Chain link fence, Spotlights), 2016

«Li Jinghu’s poetically-charged, minimalist approach is chiefly influenced by his personal experience of living and working in the city of Dongguan – an area that has become a major manufacturing hub in the Pearl River Delta. Using materials ‘Made in China’ to reflect on China’s contemporary socio-political, economic and cultural reality, Li’s work is characterized by its simple and restrained formal presentation, and celebrated for its powerful impact and emotional depth.

Escape (My Family History) is a socially-engaged work made from quotidian materials, inspired by the artist’s personal experience of growing up in the city of Dongguan, on the border between Mainland China and Hong Kong. The work consists of two chain-link fences – universal symbols of restraint and division –standing opposite one another on a level plain of grass. Each fence is affixed with a roving searchlight whose illuminated trajectories occasionally intersect to form a cross on the ground between them. Over the duration of the exhibition, the grass that has been continually exposed to both searchlights will grow taller and more vibrant than the surrounding vegetation, thus creating an abstract, organic sign. Li’s powerful yet understated work thus evokes the geopolitical anxiety of border controls and illegal immigration. The title alludes to the human desire to seek out a better life beyond national borders; one shared by many of Li’s family members as well as countless people all over the world.

Li Jinghu was born in Dongguan, Guangdong Province in 1972. He graduated from the Fine Arts Department in South China Normal University, Guangzhou. Li currently lives and works in Dongguan, China.

Major solo exhibitions include: Time is Money and Efficiency is Life, Magician Space, Beijing, China (2014); Gie, Yangtze River Space, Wuhan, China (2011); Snowman, Arrow Factory Space, Beijing, China (2011); Forest, Observation Society, Guangzhou, China (2009); and One Day in Dongguan, J&Z Gallery, Shenzhen, China (2009). Important group exhibitions include: The System of Objects, Minsheng Museum, Shanghai, China (2015); You Can Only Think About Something If You Think About Something Else, Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2014); 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, Shenzhen, China (2014); ON | OFF: China’ s Young Artists in Concept and Practice, UCCA, Beijing, China (2013); PAINT(erly), Bank, Shanghai, China (2013); Daily of concept: A Practice of Life, Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China (2012); Something Will Inevitably Happen, K11 Artist Village, Wuhan, China (2011); Get it Louder, Beijing, Shanghai, China (2010); Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2009) and Dream a little dream,Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong, China (2006).» [...LINK...]

Lu Pingyuan, Ghost Trap (Stone), 2016

«Lu Pingyuan works with a range of different mediums such as video, text, installation, painting and performance. In 2012, he established the group “Guest”, and is a co-initiator of digital art publication “PDF”. In recent works Lu Pingyuan explored the amusing similarity between superstitions relating to supernatural events and the creation of artistic ideas. Since 2012, he has started to collect and edit various mysterious or extraordinary stories that happened in the art world, and present them as videos, sounds and installations. As such Lu uses narrative in order to reactivate inanimate art objects for a contemporary audience.

For this exhibition, Lu Pingyuan has created a ghost story that occurs at Cass Sculpture Foundation. In this story the protagonist, a young man called Raymond, finds himself lost in the grounds where he is trapped overnight. As night falls, he sees all kinds of strange and horrifying things, which could be illusions caused by the various sculptures in the park or ghosts of these sculptures attempting to make him stay forever. The final sculptural works exhibited are two objects that remain at the end of the story; a dilapidated car and a rock inscribed with the story. This work reiterates a recurring question in Lu’s works: does the story serve as the reason for creating thesetwo ‘artworks’, or do these objects serve as props for this story? Which is the actual ‘artwork’? Lu’s work provides viewers with new and unexpected perspectives for considering key concerns in contemporary art, particularly materiality versus immateriality and narrative versus visual form.

Lu Pingyuan was born in Jinhua, Zhejiang province in 1984. He graduated from Shanghai Institute of Design at the China Academy of Art in 2007. Lu lives and works in Shanghai, China.

Exhibitions include: ON KAWARA, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai (2016), Unexpected Discoveries, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai (2015); Waiting for an Artist, Goethe Open Space, Goethe Institute, Shanghai (2013); Not Included, Hemuse Gallery, Beijing (2012); Autonomous Breathing, in M50 Creative Space, Shanghai (2010). He participated in numerous group shows among which: the Liverpool Biennale (UK), Inventing Ritual at ART Sanya (2015); the 6th Moscow Biennale, Russia; the Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; Super Archives at Cc Foundation, Shanghai (2015); Archipelago, V Art Center, Shanghai (2013); Reperforming History, Bund 18 Gallery, Shanghai (2011); and Reflections of Minds, MoCA, Shanghai (2010).» [...LINK...]

Zheng Bo, Socialism Good (Plants), 2016

«Zheng Bo's practice mainly focuses on socially engaged practice. He often works with a diverse range of communities, which has included the Queer Cultural Centre in Beijing and Filipino domestic helpers in Hong Kong. He also uses a diverse range of materials. Recently he has begun to use plants, conventionally considered weeds, in order to layer his work with political metaphorical symbols, hint at subversion and draw on Chinas rich and complicated history. There is an insidious and critical commentary on social history being played out in Zheng's work that gradually becomes apparent as you begin to understand the intention behind materials and their compositional relation to other objects in works.

Socialism is Good is a site-specific work. Following research related to the vegetation at Cass Sculpture Foundation, Zheng Bo chose to use red, yellow and green plants to form a popular political slogan banner from China in the 1950s: ‘Socialism is Good’. The work will remain in the grounds of Cass Sculpture Foundation for an extensive period of time, allowing it to evolve. During the winter months, the characters of the slogan will blur as the plants wither. In the spring, legible slogan will reveal itself again as the plants regenerate. These plant-based installations bearing political slogans were common features of Tiananmen Square, often appearing as part of the National Day celebrations before the 1990s, as a vehicle for political propaganda.

Zheng Bo was born in Beijing, China in 1974. He holds a PhD in Visual & Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, and teaches at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Zheng Bo lives and works in Hong Kong.

Zheng Bo has exhibited in many public institutions internationally, and are in the collections of the Guangdong Museum of Art, Hong Kong Museum of Art, and Singapore Art Museum. Recently he produced an online platform (awallproject.net) for the preservation of Chinese socially engaged art, commissioned by Cass Sculpture Foundation, The Space and British Council. He received a Prize of Excellence from the 2005 Hong Kong Art Biennial, and a Juror’s Prize from the Singapore Art Museum in 2008. His essays on Chinese socially engaged art have been published in multiple journals and books and he is a member of the editorial board of ‘Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art’.» [...LINK...]

Zheng Bo, Socialism Good, 2016 (maquette)

Zhang Ruyi, Pause, 2016

Jennifer Wen Ma, Molar, 2016

Bi Rongrong, Breath (Aluminium, Concrete, Paint, Grass), 2016

«Bi Rongrong’s work most often takes the form of paintings, murals or installations. Drawing is always the starting point of her work and acts as a way of recording spaces and places. She considers her installations to be three-dimensional extrapolations of her drawings. As a child, she often saw the surrounding mountain landscape as a geometric abstraction, whilst in contrast to this she became fluent in creating highly detailed studies of the landscape during her MFA in Chinese Landscape Painting. Bi’s new spatial constructions are a combination of her early interest in the geometry and abstraction found in nature, and her classical training in landscape painting.

Breath is a new site-specific installation for Cass Sculpture Foundation. Bi Rongrong has punctured the earth’s surface using abstract, geometric shapes commonly found in her paintings and drawings. By lifting up these sheets of grass towards the sky and employing sunlight as an essential part of her composition, the work Breath suggests the use of the 17th century Chinese gardening principle of ‘borrowed scenery’, a principle that incorporated views beyond the garden itself. Here, Bi employs the third principle, yangjie (仰借) known as ‘upward borrowing’ in reference to its inclusion of views of the sky. Bi intends for these panels to draw the sunlight down and create new patterns and reflections on the ground. These interventions in the texture of the landscape provide both a glimpse into what lies beneath, but also encourage viewers to think about the way the work interacts with the sky above.

Bi Rongrong was born in Ningbo, China in 1982. She received a BA in Chinese Traditional Painting from Southwest Normal University in Chongqing in 2005. She obtained an MFA degree from the Chinese Landscape Painting Department of Sichuan University in 2008. Bi lives and works in Shanghai, China.

Solo exhibitions include: Manchester CMYK, Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, China (2014); 7:3 Colors, public art project at the Shanghai World Financial Centre, Shanghai, China (2013); The Landscape is Called Sweet Faith, Museum aan de A7, Drachten, The Netherlands (2011). A selection of group exhibitions include: The 2nd CAFAM Future Exhibition, Central Academy of Fine Art Museum, Beijing, China (2015); Presenting Recital Louder Than Paint, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China (2014); A Tangible Shadow, Building C, Sifang Collective, Nanjing, China (2014); Waves, Bund 18 Temporary Art Space, Shanghai, China (2013). Bi has participated in residencies at Les Verriers Residences-ateliers de Pont-Aven, France (2012); Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai, China (2013) and Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester, UK (2014).» [...LINK...]

Bi Rongrong, Breath (Aluminium, Concrete, Paint, Grass), 2016

Song Ta, Why do they never take colour photos?, 2016 (centre) and Keir Smith, Stefano, 1996 (right)

Bruce Gernand, Star and Cloud, 1999 (left), Xu Zhen (Produced by Madeln Company), Movement Field, 2016 (centre), and Bill Woodrow, Endeavour, 1995 (right)