PERSISTENCE

Artist:Qin Ga, Shi Qing, Wang Wei, Wu'er Shan

Curator:Li Zhenhua
22,Aug - 24,Oct 2009

Gallery Hours:2:00 - 6:00 pm. Wednesday - Sunday.
Place:China Art Archives & Warehouse (click here) 

“Persistence”comes from an attitude. These four artists have formed a relationship to their art based on this common outlook.

After the Post-sense Sensibility exhibitions in 1999, Experimental art continued its explorative, experimental, skeptical and complex style. However, after 2005, influenced by the art world's highly commercial atmosphere, contemporary art confronted many unique challenges that came not from the art system, but from the inherent desires of humanity.

I can ascertain that this exhibition does not reflect any traces of the post-2005 market hype, even its curatorial approach is reminiscent of the self-initiated style from the 1990s.

The financial crisis and subsequent the collapse of Chinese contemporary art market in 2009 allows us to reconnect with the vestiges of experimental art of the 1990s and revisit issues of individual identity among emerging and culturally diverse phenomena. Returning to one's roots, rebuilds an singular approach that no longer needs to represent a group or collective consciousness.

Site-specificity is a way from which art's internal reforms originate new methods. Artists use such methods as they steer towards a new artistic trend. In the past, the intervention of the self or other into the work brings additional meanings to the artwork that extends to actual experiences and sentiments of the self.

However, in this exhibition the four artists have to a certain extent abandoned working with the body as a medium, and have left behind the the mixed elements that were seen prior; their works show an orderly and simple impression.

The lack of intervention with the body seems to be a metaphor for something. Such an absence restores a space for artwork, audience and the artist – a site that is no longer only relevant to corporal expression, but now open to a concentrated discussion of concepts and the objects beyond concepts.

Sensible sense withdraws , rational sense begins to surface.

Selections from Li Zhenhua's curatorial text

Exhibition views


Wang Wei, Natural History 1, installation 2009

Shi Qing, A Folk History of the North 1, installation, 2009

Qin Ga, Glorious, installation, 2009

Wu Ershan, Captured Knights, installation, 2009