1

The National Gallery of Georgia

and John Dodelande presents

CONSTELLATIONContemporary art in today's China

Tbilisi, Georgia / Baku, Azerbaijan / Astana, Kazakhstan

Published by CareOf Publishing

Curated by Ami Barak

A rT I S T S

A I w E I w E I C h E N w E I C h e n g r a n

h u X i a oy u a n L i S h u r u i L I U w E I L U P I N gy U A N

L U S h A N C h U A N M A Q I U S h A wA N g g U A N g L E

wa n g S i s h u n wA N g y U yA N g X I E M O L I N X U Q U

X U z h E N yA N X I N g ya n g D O N gX U E

ya n g X i n g u a n g z h A N g D I N g z h A N g z h E N y U

z h A O yA O z h A O z h A O

S TAT E M E N T

A M I B A r A K

B A O D O N g

C h A r L E S M E r E w E T h E r

A rT I S T S

I N D E X

PA rT N E rS

C r E D I T S

Challenging ideological conventions

by Ami Barak

Ami Barak is an independent curator and art critic based in Paris.Among recent projects: Art of the world (the Expo) the City of Forking Paths, World Expo Shanghai, 2010, Performing History the Romanian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011. Foreigners everywhere (works from Pomeranz collection) JMW Vienna, Austria, 2012, and JMTC Moscow, 2013, I am also... Douglas Gordon, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2013, Honey I rearranged the collection, works from Philippe Cohen Collection, Passage de Retz, Paris, 2013 and Multimedia Museum of art Moscow, Off to a flying start Scotiabank Nuit blanche Toronto, 2013, An Estranged Paradise, works from DSL collection, JMTC Moscow, 2014, Stuttering – Melik Ohanian Crac Sete, 2014, Taryn Simon, Rear views, star forming nebula and foreign propaganda bureau Jeu de Paume Paris, 2015, Tim Parchikov, – Features of intuition Mmoma, Moscow, 2015, Le Salon de Montrouge 61st and 62nd edition, 2016-2017, Juliao Sarmento The Real thing Fondation Gulbenkian Paris, Peter Kogler Next ING Art center Bruxelles, What does the image stand for? Biennale of contemporary image Montreal, September 2017, Life- A User’s manual Art Encounters Timisoara Biennale of Contemporary Art, October 2017.He is a former IKT President.

Contemporary art in China has broken the stalemate 25 years

ago thanks to the opening of the regime to the capitalist

market system. The artistic avant-garde had the opportunity

to openly manifest and to position itself towards more

freedom and think and act with the present time. There

are similarities and interesting parallels with the situation

of the art in the Caucasus region but also valuable cultural

differences.

That is why an exhibition in such a context is a major

symbolic event, re-establishing ancient connections

between China and Caucasus. These territories were linked

by the world’s oldest overland trade route, the Silk Road,

formally established during the Han Dynasty, which linked

China and the Middle East across the countries of Central

Asia and the Caucasus.

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metaphorical associations. At the same time this group show

is a constellation of various artists. The pluralism on display

is part of the artists’ critical approach: in order to question

the construction of meaning, they all challenge reality and

its ideological conventions, along with cultural stereotypes

and the dominance of particular, largely western, art-

historical categories.

The exhibition is made possible thanks to the commitment

and support of Georgian collector John Dodelande.

A new generation of Chinese artists, artists who did not

grow up under the shadow of Mao Tse Tung. The cultural

revolution is not their cultural touchstone, the Chinese

government is not the source of their politics, and, indeed,

China is not necessarily their focus. These artists are global in

their thinking, global in their motivation. They are moved by

humanity, technology, energy. They are concerned with the

true wheels of the world’s economics - they travel, they run

businesses, they are knowledgeable and creative.

The artworks shown in this exhibition were created recently

and are representative of the emergent Chinese avant-

garde artists, who influence the art scene in China today.

This generation of artists no longer relies on the political

history background and they have become the players of a

larger scene, global in every sense. Albeit focusing on the

contemporary production of a specific culture, the topic of

the exhibition is guided by the search of otherness. However,

it admits basic cultural similarities and dispositions, and goes

beyond a simplistic approach looking for typical cultural

signs and symbols. It shows a vision of contemporary art in

China as a cosmopolitan branch of international art and an

understanding of Chinese art as a vital and outstanding way

of dealing with political, social and aesthetic issues.

The art scene is constantly on the move, redefining itself.

Openness, movement and communication are the qualities

this project wants to promote.

The works come from private collections, yet they are not

only significant on a personal level, but also on a larger

scale. There is obviously a museum approach, which

explains why there is a wide range of media including

painting, sculpture, installation, video, and photography.

To choose this kind of approach implies making the art

accessible to the public.

The title echoes Zhao Zhao’s series of paintings in which the

artist reconstitutes the visual evidence of the after-effects

of glass shattering, and successfully melds his passion

for painting and his inclination to reject it in conceptually

oriented objects and activities. Like all the others in this

exhibition he contemplates the meaning of a significant

moment in his life and invests it with a wide range of

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“Constellations” in a Flattened WorldOn Chinese contemporary artand the Young Generation

by Bao Dong

Bao Dong is an art critic and independent curator based in Beijing.In contributing essays to the artistic dialogue and other forms of involvement,Bao has established himself as a leading curator and critic of work by the new generation. His articles have been widely published in art journals and artist monographs both at home and abroad. He has curated many exhibitions for a wide range of art institutions including Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, the Art Center of Chulalongkorn University, Guangdong Times Museum, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, etc. He was awarded Asian Cultural Council (ACC) fellowship grant in 2014, and became a nominee of Independent Curators International’s (ICI) 2014 Independent Vision Curatorial Award. Recently he was awarded Yishu Awards for Curating Contemporary Chinese Art 2016.

27 years ago, the moment when Chinese contemporary

art started to gain international attention, a whirl of

catastrophes was about to sweep the globe: the dissolution

of the Soviet Union and collapse of Eastern European

socialist camps; the seizure of global dominance by

capitalism, particularly economic liberalism; the rapid

dissemination of internet technologies through civilian

applications; the rise of multiculturalism to mainstream

agendas in developed countries in the West… These

interrelated, mutually propelling factors−from political,

to economic, technological, and cultural−together

induced, and in fact constituted, the rise of a new wave of

globalization.

It was precisely in this context, especially when impelled

by various multiculturalist policies, that the work of

Chinese contemporary artists was introduced into the

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path; joining the economic system of global capitalism, it

immediately occupied an incomparable place and, having

become the most significant beneficiary of economic

globalization, is now eager to become a rule-maker.

Meanwhile, this model of economic development also

gave rise to new cultural conditions and aspirations. As for

the generation of Chinese artists who grew up with this

economic development: they are no longer satisfied with

becoming a mere cultural sample freely selected by the

West; they refuse to use traditional, oriental signs, or political

symbols; and they despise abiding by the same arbitrary

frame of reference often employed by western media in their

critique of the Chinese society and government. They do

not deliberately emphasize, and even often overlook their

national identity; they instead prefer to see themselves as

independent individuals, not representatives of any group.

Meanwhile, the flourishing domestic art system−especially

the art markets therein−and an increasingly engrossing

global gallery-fair system have also served to support this

aspiration for individual identity; in this sense, one may

say that this individualism among the generation of young

artists in China have been largely encouraged by the global

convolution of neoliberalism. If the tickets for Chinese

contemporary art to enter the international museum-

biennale system were once sponsored by the multiculturalist

policies in the West throughout the 1990s, the resurgence of

a western focus on Chinese contemporary art today in the

2010s is mostly due to the driving force of the art market, the

appearance of a new generation of international collectors,

and worldwide curiosity for this beast that suddenly

appeared in front of them whose name is China.

West, becoming a sector of the “multiple strands” of

contemporary art acknowledged by the western vision. But

the press and museums in the West first chose the kind of

art that met their imagination of “China”: works marked by

ink and Chinese characters, referencing I Ching (also known

as Class of Changes) and Chinese medicine, or depicting

Chairman Mao, the Tiananmen Square, and the People’s

Liberation Army−in short, works composed of a plethora

of either Orientalist or Socialist symbols. In the 1990s,

ingratiating uses of these symbols in exchange for western

attentions became the most frequented path to success

among Chinese contemporary artists, and they soon grew

into a tactic that local Chinese critics termed “playing the

Chinese card.” For Chinese artists of the last generation,

this was their choice at wit’s end, in the face of authoritative

discourses, and it realistically reflects a post-colonial

condition: they willingly submit themselves to a place where

they are looked at, chosen, where they adorn themselves

according to the imagination of others. But what was really

desperate about this post-colonial condition was that, even

for those Chinese artists who did not assume a western

view, their artistic practices−which were based on locally

encountered experiences and issues−were nonetheless

read as a strategy about their cultural identity, an object

that is a byproduct of the subject: the western-centric

discourse.

As of today, this passive condition seems to have changed.

After the brief political unrest ignited by the wave of

globalization in the late 1980s, the Chinese government

seized this opportunity for self-adjustments and decided

to march on a market economy-driven developmental

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no longer how it was in the last two decades of the

20th century when everyone shared a concerted

group spirit and the same values. Neoliberalism and

globalization have torn this homogeneity apart, allowing

different individuals in the art world to develop along

different cultural logics and the tensions that come in

between.”1

Therefore, for an exhibition that attempts to lay out

a map to help perceive “Chinese contemporary

art,” the first and foremost commendable quality is

prudence, for we must acknowledge there is not one

discourse or language that is capable of enveloping

the simultaneously unravelling complex realities, and

that is gist of this proposal for “Constellation” as a

theoretical attitude and methodology. Constellation is

not a fact, but a subjective projection: several stars which

had no inherent systemic association is now perceived

by an observer in the name of a “Constellation,”

with the purpose of providing an insightful reference,

not prescribing any definition. In reality, the ongoing

practices of the new generation of artists and curators

consistently reflect a non-comprehensive, non-definitive

attitude and work method, which not only grew out of

their distrust of the grand narrative of the past, but also

because of the global state of debris they are confronted

with−the world is now flat, but this flatness of the world

came after being crushed into pieces. For them, this is

perhaps the precise condition of contemporaneity: if

“contemporaneity” refers to the conscious awareness of

a post-historical condition, then the young generation of

artists in China have long been forced into a worldwide

However, in cultural domains, things have not been

operating as streamlined as economic development.

Having acquired an economic confidence, Chinese people

today have fallen head over ears into a cultural anxiety:

China, a site of manifold experiences, this cultural entity,

has not yet attained its well-deserved representation.

The history, realities and thinking of China are far more

complex than anyone can manage to describe or conceive;

what we need to archive are thousands of years of

Confucianism tradition, a republican period that emerged

towards the end of the nineteenth century, a socialist

tradition that began in the mid-20th century, a capitalist

enterprise that rose in the late 20th century, and the

experiences of globalization today−factors that overlap

with each other but have never entirely consolidated.

Every Chinese person can feel a near splitting tension,

especially among the generation of Chinese artists born

after the Cultural Revolution and who grew up with the

economic reform, for they had no choice but deal with

these issues which are inherent to their generation. In terms

of methodology, however, they have not yet been able to

find an applicable frame of reference, be it from traditional

Chinese art, socialist art, or the strand of contemporary art

that came into form under western influences. Therefore,

at the present moment, we cannot appeal to a single social

history of art, or a conceptual history of art−we cannot

describe or expound the work of this new generation of

artists from the perspective of methodology. Just like

Chinese local curator Pi Li once observed, “it has become

admittedly difficult to understand contemporary Chinese

art through a single cultural logic. The art circle in China is

26

The Geometry of Materiality

by Charles Merewether

Charles Merewether is Curator of Contemporary Art Projects at the National Art Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia. Born in Edinburgh, he received his PhD in art history at the University of Sydney after studying literature, philosophy and art history. He subsequently taught European modernism at the University of Sydney before leaving to live in Colombia and Mexico where he taught at Universidad Iberoamericana and then at the Universidad Autonoma in Barcelona. In 1991 he received a research fellowship from Yale University and worked as the Inaugural Curator for the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Mexico (MARCO), (1991-1994), Curator at the Research Institute at the Getty Center in Los Angeles (1994-2003) and taught at the University of Southern California (USC). He was Artistic Director of the Sydney Biennale between 2004-2006, Deputy Director of the Cultural District, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi (2007-2008), Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore (2010-2013) and Visiting Professor at both Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2014) and Baptist University, Hong Kong in 2015. Since Hong Kong he has been based in Tbilisi, working on contemporary East European art. Apart from essays and articles, his recent book publications include After Memory: The Art of Milenko Prvacki, 40 Years, a co-edited volume of essays After the Event, by Manchester University Press (2010), author of Under Construction: Ai Weiwei (2008) and editor of both Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970 (2007) and The Archive (2006).

The sheer range and depth of contemporary Chinese art

practices have been singular over the past thirty years. More

than that, against the many odds facing contemporary culture

in contemporary China, at best, its artists have persisted in

experimentation, defying both market trends and government

harassment or measure of control.

Exhibition "Constellation" brings together artists of different

generations stemming back to Ai Weiwei who, following his

return to China in the mid-1990s, has charted a path, defined

by its conceptual rigor and, at times, an either explicit or

more latent critique of both the state and the market.

The selected artists in the exhibition range from Ai to a

younger generation of artists, most of whose works express

anxiety about “contemporaneity,” and have been standing

in the center of this state of anxiety for the unique stage

and place of the Chinese society today.

1 Pi Li, Pi Li: The Predicament of Post-Olympic Chinese Art, 2015, web.

had left China to live in Europe or the States, and their work

flourished elsewhere.

The cultural sphere of China in the 1990s underwent

tremendous change, in part because of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Open

door’ policy. It began an era of economic development and the

expansion of commercial trade brought with it considerable

interest in forms of cultural exchange, especially for the western

market. This meant the openings of galleries run by Westerners

and the export of work for purposes of museum and gallery

exhibitions and sales.

With the popularization of modern telecommunications tools

and public broadcast media, all major cities in China were

increasingly able to keep stride with cultural developments and

issues in the world at large. Curators and critics of contemporary

Chinese art utilized the category of ‘conceptual art’ to intervene

in developing contemporary Chinese and global art narratives.

Conceptual art’s insistence on ‘concept’ over ‘object’ made it

useful for cross-cultural assimilation.

In the introduction to the "Constellation", its curator Ami

Barak, acknowledges that:

“The title ("Constellation") echoes Zhao Zhao’s series of

paintings in which the artist reconstitutes the visual evidence

of the after-effects of glass shattering, and successfully

melds his passion for painting and his inclination to reject it

in conceptually oriented objects and activities. Like all the

others in this exhibition he contemplates the meaning of a

significant moment in his life and invests it with a wide range

of metaphorical associations.”

This constellation may be seen as an aggregate of artists

drawn together in such a way as to establish a dialogue and

correspondence across generations. Zhao Zhao (1982 Xinjiang)

both the artists’ own issues and the complex cultural and

social concerns of the country. In this regard, their practices

and strategies of artistic concept have been broadly based,

each taking their own distinct paths of development.

Labeled as ‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’, performance,

installation, photography, and new media posed a

challenge not only to existing art practices, but also existing

methods of interpretation. To this we should note also,

that artistic trends, common to the west, have been drawn

upon without a necessary adherence to them. In fact, it is

possible to account for the development of contemporary

Chinese art without recourse to international movements.

Nevertheless, many of the artists in the exhibition draw

upon some of the principles underlying conceptual art

practice.

LEGACY:

From the very beginning, conceptual art practices in China

developed in relative independence from that of the western

modernist story. Its history is well known and documented,

first appearing in the mid-1980s with the Xiamen Dada

Movement and quickly followed by a range of other such

movements across the major cities of China. By the time of

the 1989 China avant-garde art exhibition, painting was no

longer what aroused interest amidst artists nor the public.

Following the June 4th events of 1989, Chinese art suddenly

found itself adrift. Political Pop art and Cynical Realism

emerged in the early 1990s and, artists associated with these

movements appeared, predominantly in both international

museum and gallery exhibitions. At the same time, many

important artists, such as Xu Bing and Huang Yong Ping,

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new luxury commodities for those who hung onto the days

of a former China.

Weiwei’s work can be characterized by its constant

exploration of issues around the ready-made object, the

recycling of existing found objects and the concept of

representation through the copy. Through this exploration,

the work has demonstrated the potential of the object to

be constantly re-signified, embracing and transforming

their meaning, significance and value in the context of

the contemporary. By displaying the hammer alongside

the smashed porcelain bowl, the artist highlights the

performative agency of the object’s production. That is,

the treasured fragments of porcelain become evidence

of the violent mutuality of patrimonial desire and the

patricidal impulse. While the breaking of the bowls suggests

the transmutation of value within the structure of the

international art market, the significance is now pointedly

turned towards China and its policies, in which acts of

destruction and preservation seem to go hand in hand.

Even as the Chinese Government can speak of the cultural

patrimony of the nation, that is, of ’national treasures’ and

the need for their preservation, it appears oblivious to the

widespread looting, devastation and hence ongoing process

of cultural deracination3.

Ai’s work has also extended out towards more material based

work and the question of value. A Ton of Tea (2007), was

produced in 2007 and was simply a cubic ton of compressed

tea leaves that can be associated with the minimalist work of

3 See Charles Merewether, ‘Looting and Empire’, Grand Street, No.72, fall 2003, pp. 82–94.

having worked as an assistant with Ai Weiwei (1957), offers

one such link between an older and younger generation of

artists.

The work of Ai in the exhibition is his work Chicken Cup

(2015) that are a series of 25 cups based on the originals,

one of which was sold for a US $36.05 million at a Sotheby’s

auction in Hong Kong, 20141. The Ming Dynasty ‘chicken

cup’ is a tiny porcelain wine cup painted with cocks, hens

and chicks. Commissioned by Emperor Chenghua for his

wife, they were made by the famous porcelain workers at

Jingdezhen. Chicken cups are outstanding in their tactile

material, their wide range of colors, and their charming,

unmannered painting style. Very few remain existing, most

of which are in museums. Weiwei’s Chicken cup provokes

an engagement with the history of these objects and as

such exposes the question of their fate.

The issue of the commodification and commercialization

of Chinese culture and history remains an ever constant

in Ai’s work2. The changes that occurred under Deng

Xiaoping had led to a slow transformation of cities

and people’s lives entailing an overturning of the past.

Nowhere was this more evident in the second-hand

markets that had become vast trading depots for old

China being recycled and sold off as relics of the past and

1 Two years after Ai returned to Beijing from twelve years in the United-States he produced what was to become a key work entitled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, (1995-2004). Ai also produced Dao Guang Blue and White Porcelain and Hammer (1998) in a small vitrine-like frame mimicking a museographic form of presentation. As such, he offers a dramatic critique of the archival (museal) logic by which the act of historical effacement is recast as an act of preservation.2 Much of the following remarks are drawn from my ‘The Original and the Copy:Ai Wewei and the Fate of the Zodiac Heads’ in Ai Weiwei: Circle of Animals, edited by Susan Delson, (Munich: Prestel, 2011).

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Robert Smithson, insofar as it evokes the notion of entropy,

fundamentally underlying all matter and substance, the

heart of matter if you will. He then used the black-ink like

substance that came from the residue of the boiled down

Coca-Cola liquid to make ‘Song Dynasty style’ paintings.

Other work show equally the conceptual bases of his

engagement in large issues, such as 1500g Gold, 62g

Protein (2013-2014). Here, we see the artist’s interest in

inverting the value system as he shows a solid gold egg

carton containing one ordinary egg. The work questions the

process by which value is assigned to objects, and in which

art excels, imbuing objects and materials with meaning.

Hu Xiaoyuan works with the concept of time but, in a radical

distinct manner from that of the others mentioned. Wood Color (2011) is a work composed of four pieces of wood

leaning upright against the wall. Part of a series, begun in

2009, single pieces of wood are whitewashed, over which

silk is stretched, that is made taut and then nailed to the

wood. This is then painted on, as she reproduces the natural

grain of the wood. In one sense, this labor intensive practice

appears as trompe l'œil but, it is more and less than that. It

is a form of meditation on the original.

Wang Sishun produced Uncertain Capital No.11 (2009) out

of 1.22 tons of coins. He melted down the metal coins into an

ingot, which he then sold, converting the profit into coins of

equivalent value; these he melted down again, sold, and so

on and so forth. This process broke down the coins’ identity

as defined by monetary value. By converting the earnings

back into currency of an equivalent amount to the original

melted capital, the artist reflects on ideas of monetary value.

From this, he originated another ingot, repeating the process

North American artists such as Richard Serra, Robert Morris

and Carl Andre4. Yet, this is a minimalism with a conceptual

turn, such work, invoking Chinese cultural history.

There is a continuity then with a younger generation of

artists, in particular as shown in the two exhibited works

by Zhou Zhou in "Constellation". His work characterizes a

younger generation whose work is essentially conceptual in

its formation, embedding social issues within the process

of its material elaboration. With Fragment (2015), Zhou

Zhou presents a broken mirror, the reflection and cracks

constituting the ‘image’ of the work. This corresponds to

a painting Constellation No.15 (2015) in which he paints

surface of cracked glass in the window of a car. Painting is

reconstituted by Zhao Zhao as essentially performative in its

origin rather than contemplative.

Alongside these two artists are four artists: He Xiangyu

(1986 Liaoning), Hu Xiaoyuan (1977 Harbin), Wang Sishun

(1979 Hubei) and Zhang Zhenyu (1974 Hunan). Like Ai Weiwei

and Zhao Zhao, their work is principally conceptual in its

presentation, that in different ways is based on the common

subject of materiality and time.

He Xiangyu presents Cola Project – Extraction (2008-2015)

that is the result of boiling some 127 tons of Coca-Cola

liquid over one year reducing it to a syrupy sludge to

crystalline residue. At White Cube Bermondsey Gallery,

the residue was presented as heaped mounds placed

inside museum display cases. It has been compared to

4 There is a certain continuity with the work of the group Xiamen Dada had incorporated performative acts of destroying the products of their practice, and had thereby corresponded to some of the more radical dimensions of Berlin Dada after World War One.

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characteristics that could also be locally situated. Not only

had conceptual art been an integral part of Euro-American

paradigm of avant-garde art, but it has been free also of an

established visual tradition.

The work of these artists suggests correspondences with

both modern traditions and contemporary work inside

and outside of China. Conceptual art’s insistence on

oppositional stances and self-reflexive critique has helped

and now helps legitimize Chinese art as both global and

contemporary in domestic and international discourses.

Chinese artists have embraced conceptual strategies

and influences consciously or unconsciously as a way to

understand their own individual contexts as much as the

social geometry of Chinese history. Together these artists are

central to a vitality of contemporary art practices in China

today.

of melting-selling-converting-melting over and over again.

Three years later, in 2012, Wang Sishun exhibited a

granite block, entitled 2:30 am (Edition: 1/6, 2012, Granite

210 x 90 x 34.5 in). Economy and production are essential to

his practice, transforming something already existent, a form

of ready-made. The other work of the artist in the exhibition

is Car (2015), the result of a project called Truth (2014-2015),

in which the artist then kept this flame alive in a lamp, which

he transported from Beijing to Shanghai by car and released

in the wild, destroying and creating new natural and social

landscapes.

Zhang Zhenyu with Dust (2011-) again picks up on the idea

of materiality but, more directly implicated in the social and

everyday life of China. Zhang collects dust which he then

puts on the canvas layer after layer, fixed by adhesive. The

works continue his ongoing exploration of the quotidian as in

Reading (2007-) that showed the front page of the People’s

Daily that had been methodically scratched out with a needle

and Copying (…), composed of old newspapers made back

into paper pulp, which he dried into sheets and etched the

words and headlines from the original newspaper’s front

page. Moreover, as with Dust, the fact of being painting

reflects a significant shift in its conception, away from the

kind of painting that had dominated the gallery scene since

the nineties. In this regards, it correlates with and reinforces

the idea of a conceptual turn in contemporary art in China.

Conceptual art’s lack of attachment to specific artistic styles

and schools served as a possible way out of the dominant

Center-Periphery paradigm. This was premised on the

belief that conceptual art’s emphases on enacting critique

and deconstructing assumptions were universally relevant

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A r T I S T S

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A I w E I w E I

Ai Weiwei was born in 1957 and is one of the most important Chinese contemporary artists, now part of the diaspora. For his artworks, Ai Weiwei often uses objects such as Chinese antiquities or artefacts that he successively alters. Ai Weiwei generates new acquaintances and through his works deliberately questions how old and new can cohabit, how tradition can look in a new context, how China constructs its self-narration.

C h E N w E I

Chen Wei was born in 1980 and is now based in Beijing. Night Paris marks Wei’s lens to transform an urban space into a painting-like photo. Indeed, his main medium is photography, but the adjunction of light on the subject adds a new artistic language to the mere sense of photography. He plays with the medium of photography and produces a new composition where the association of light, color and social imaginaries creates a poetic scene. Simultaneously strange and fascinating, Chen Wei wants to say something about reality, by transforming it through imagination. The spectator feels as in a fantasy, while sensing a certain point-of-view on politics and societal matters. The obscurity and mystery of the image provide a dramatic sensitivity that makes us perceive the subject in a cinematographic way, capturing stories and outcomes.

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C h E N g r A N

Cheng Ran (born 1981) grasps sequences from other works and media to capture paradigmatic moments of the urban and natural life. Cinema is a major field used in Cheng Ran’s works. He connects film references and visual culture to produce fictional worlds and entities. The presence of cinema in his work also crosses different cultures and identities, and opens access to contemporary creations.In his work Scenario Hypothesis, a photography light box, he uses rushes of the same landscape differently colorgraded, makes a collage and displaces the process from one medium to another. He keeps the different light boxes of the images and plays with different shades of light, attempting to create movement from one source to another.

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h U X I A O y U A N

Hu Xiaoyuan, born in 1977, graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts inBeijing.Xiaoyuan’s minimal yet highly poetic style finds expression in a wide range of forms. She explores the essence of objects and daily life experience through an artistic vocabulary centered on natural materials such as hair, used fabric, ink, wood, and raw silk.Bug's Writing is not typical from what Hu Xiaoyuan usually focuses on, here the artist uses insects to paint, instead of a traditional brush.

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L i S h u r u i

Li Shurui was born in 1981 in Chongqing, China. She graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, China, in 2004. Best known for her ‘Light’ series that she started in 2005, Li plays with the spectrum of light and is fascinated by the illusions LED lights produce. Often in large formats, her paintings are powerful by their impressive scale, their immersive atmosphere and their ability to arouse one’s imagination.The Rorschach Test reflects a construction of the brain, an image provoking hypnotic effects. It is pure abstraction, an optical illusion where everyone grasps something different.

L I U w E I

Liu Wei was born in 1972 and currently resides in Beijing, China. He was trained as a painter at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou in 1996. He belongs to the generation that was influenced by Marcel Duchamp. Exotic Lands No.6 proposes original perspectives on city maps. Our perception on urban environments is here disrupted. It pushes back the boundaries of megapoles. Purple Air G questions urbanity in vertical, systematically patterned paintings. Liu Wei interrogates his urban environment and city organization in a linear and mathematical practice.

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L u P i n g y u a n

Lu Pingyuan was born in 1984, Zhejiang province of China. He collects singular and odd stories from various sources. The notion of ritual in his works is fundamental to interrogate the connections between contemporary art and cultural rites.On Kawara was an American artist born in Japan, whose work was seminal in the 1960s and 1970s. He was used to declining series from press cuttings, postcards, telegrams… One day, Lu Pingyuan dreamt of On Kawara and he vowed he would continue his series. And he did. The On Kawara, Today Series is a commitment towards On Kawara. Lu paints dates on canvas like On Kawara did for many years. These creations are a marker of the past into present. Through his paintings, he claims the impossibility for people to recall the remains of the past.

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L U S h A N C h U A N

Lu Shanchuan was born in 1969. He graduated at Central Academy of Fine Art in 1997, from the department of Oil Painting, a substance he uses in most of his artworks. He handles the brushes in a thick manner so that the different layers of material are weighing the canvases. This weight reflects the sense of order and disorder on the painted scenes, often taken from the news. The spectator can observe public and societal landscapes.World Square-Mecca is a five-meter painting of a crowd around a mosque. This painting is part of a series of the same format that represents emblematic places on the planet: Red Square of the Kremlin, Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Tahrir Square in Cairo...He is inspired by this place in Mecca, the heart of Islam, where pilgrims go to make their hajj. The artist transforms this image we see in the news into a painting of great density. He transforms symbolic images into a large-scale spectacle. He gives it a pictorial experience, emphasized by a great angle. It becomes an almost abstract painting.

M A Q I U S h A

Ma Qiusha, born in 1982, graduated from Digital Media studio of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She also obtained an MFA Electronic Integrated Art at Alfred University in New York. After a difficult relationship with her mother throughout her childhood, she used video to cleanse her emotions and free herself by exploring the memory of her past in an almost psychoanalytic manner. In some of her artworks, she plays on the dichotomy between adulthood and childhood, and the formal separation society imposes between them. It becomes a game for Ma, who reflects on her own life through her work on fairy tales. She also has a series of building paintings (L). She paints buildings that became department stores, broadcasting tower, etc. She focuses on a building so that the primacy of the subject induces her bruch stroke. She detaches herself from a simple landscape architecture: behind the appearances a social and political discourse looms large.

wA N g g U A N g L E

Wang Guangle was born in 1976 in Fujian, China. The artist is known for his abstract and conceptual paintings. He develops conceptual forms of color and texture through graphic paintings. The canvas is laid on the ground and he is alternating layers of painting on the canvas according to a non-traditional practice. Moving from the edges of the canvas to the center in a methodical way, it creates a sense of depth between monochromes and colorful surfaces.Wang Guangle positions himself both in time and space, where the act of paintinginfluences the result and the concept, carrying emotions through non-sequentialart series. He is also influenced by his home region, the Songsi area in Fujian where old people follow a cultural rite where coffins are painted. Indeed, the elderly start painting their coffin, once a year, in a methodical way. The wood has to be painted evenly, in control of the material that dries during the year. Guangle faces this spiritual preparation of death in his work Coffin Paint, carrying on the tradition through a contemporary attitude.

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wA N g S I S h U N

Wang Sishun was born in Hubei, China, in 1979. He mainly focuses on the translation from one matter to another, from one form to another. His piece Uncertain Capital is a chain of conversion that melts a group of coins into one block of metal, which in turn becomes a work of art that has eventually been resold at a more expensive rate. The obtained amount has been transformed into a new, bigger block. It has been melted again, resold, converted once again into coins, melted again, etc. It is the transmutation of an arbitrary value defined by the central bank (the coin) into one block of metal where the market value of the metal has been added. The status of a work of art which the artist confers to it, and thus its value on the market of art, has also been added. Uncertain Capital symbolizes the successive, repeated and incremental passage from one value to the next, as well as the questioning that emerges in the process. 2.30 is made of the blackest granite on earth, and comes from Northern China. The artist converts what he calls “an isosceles triangle with an angle of 105 degrees, which is the angle between the hour hand and the minute hand of a clock at exactly 2.30am”. The title 2.30 is only here to signify the darkness of the night during a moonless night at 2.30am.

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wA N g y U yA N g

Wang Yuyang, born in 1979, has an interest in technology and how machines become obsolete. The aesthetic aspect of his works reflects what is broken, what has been wasted. While using only one pictorial technique, he nevertheless refers to technology, to the digital world and robotics. He makes abstract paintings but his inspiration comes from technologies. He uses computer coding and binary language as a pretext to compose his pieces. He built a software that has been invented to transform a significant or random text into 2D or 3D expressions, which the paintings and sculptures reproduced in this catalog are all stemming from."Science is just a tool", says Yuyang in an interview with Jérôme Sans. Science, technology, but also religion can all be used as material, in the same manner as using wood, steel or copper. Whether you use the Bible or the Science as material, it is to say something about people’s beliefs and confront them to their irrational perceptions of meanings. Machines do not only operate as rational experience, but coexist with religion in a new analogy of form.

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X I E M O L I N

Xie Molin was born in 1979. The artist emerges from both traditional techniques and imagination, as there is, in the words of the artist, an “inseparable relationship between technology and art”.He has built a machine that draws new forms of painting with great precision.The machine allows the artist to explore a formal way of painting, a methodical manner to layer the acrylic paint and manage the coloration and the pigments.His tri-axial linkage painting machine is an industrial and technological medium to explore concepts of painting as well as a hand-made and home-made craft where gesture and imagination are at the center of the creation, even with the support of a machine.

X U Q U

Xu Qu was born in 1978 and studied in China and in Germany. In 2002, he studied at the Braunschweig University of Art in Berlin under Professor John Armleder and Brigit Hein. In 2008, he returned to Beijing as an installation artist. Recently his work has utilized painting and lighting to reconfigure spatial and temporal experience. Here, the mosaic construction alludes to the mythology and engages a poetic and subtle approach.

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Xu Zhen was born in Shanghai in 1977, where he still lives and works. He founded MadeIn Company in 2009, a “contemporary art creation company, focusing on the production of creativity and the research of contemporary culture’s infinite possibilities”. He has developed a whole network of artists and curators and he has led discussions on creating, exhibiting and curating, in today’s contemporary Chinese art. The engagement in the creation of new ideas and approaches is reflected in Xu Zhen’s work, referring permanently to global politics and culture. He uses the principle of patchwork, typical in immigrant cultures. The immigrant arrives in a place and starts using fragments found on site. It is typical of the American culture. Xu Zhen assembles pieces of material on a giant patchwork that are as many references to cartoons and comics. It is a means to say something on a political and economic background.

X u z h e n

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yA N X I N g

Yan Xing was born in Chongqing in 1986. He graduated from the Oil Painting department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2009. His black and white photography, Arty Super-Arty, is a stage play, a parody. We can see young, white collar men watching a projection or a film. One of them is reading a leaflet which provides explanations about what they are looking at. The title, ironic, helps us understand it is a parody, a staging of a very contemporary scene. Being young, executive workers, and above all ones who are interested in conceptual art, give an ironic and off the wall look.

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ya n g D O N g X U E

Yang Dongxue is a young artist born in 1984 who graduated from the Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. He uses objects with historical, political and social background as a practice to focus on his own aspirations. The personal commitment in his art is fundamental: the different levels of awareness in the process of making art is the central focus in Dongxue’s work.I am so young plays on the concept of the wall. Walls have always been topical. With the aim to protect, it separates people from each other. The sentence "I am so young" is made with a hot white copper wire which the electricity goes through. The heating wire works like a tattoo on a brick wall. The artist talks about the conjunction of these two elements, the wall and the fire letters and sets up a paradigm where youth is always confronted to incomprehension and the difficulties of life, like a metaphor a youth burnt alive.

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ya n g X i n g u a n g

Yang Xinguang was born in 1980 in Hunan. He refers to the movement of Arte Povera that consists in giving signification to common objects and detaching the artist from the cultural industry and mainstream practices.Mountain Forest is obviously a mountain but in fact it is a sculpture that invokes nature. It is not an illustration but a replica which is a deconstruction. He uses metal and wood in its natural state, a metal sculpture to which the artist joined a natural element: wood. As a symbiosis between natural and manmade elements, the purpose is indeed to talk about nature. The work is one that deconstructs. It brings a realistic representation onto geometrical plans, in a way that is similar to what Picasso had done.

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z h A N g D I N g

Zhang Ding was born in 1980 in Gansu, China. He plays on the senses to evoke societal reflections. There are irrational ways of depicting Chinese society in Ding’s works. Through spontaneous and emotional performances, he depicts urban-life and underground culture. He uses video, installation, live performances… These mixed media installations allow him to engage with a contemporary environment.In his work The Kind of Need, the artist is inspired by ink paintings, but this time by using non-conventional materials, like the golden leaf. It gives the idea of a landscape that is detached from the Chinese tradition while immersing itself in the modernist tradition.

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z h A N g z h E N y U

Born in 1974, Zhang Zhenyu represents this young generation of Chinese artists whoconvert simple material into conceptual art forms. His pieces are multi-layered andplay with the idea of (re)use. The dust paintings stem from the dust in the streets. The work also brings to mind a reference to a photograph taken by Man Ray of a Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture: Élevage de poussière (Dust Breeding). Duchamp wanted to stray away from painting so, instead of the pictorial material, he chose dust. Here it is dust that becomes the painting material on the canvas. In a repetitive process, as for Dust series, Zhang spent the entire year of 2008, several hours a day, scraping off the texts of the China Daily Newspaper. He scratched out headlines, paragraphs and photos of the articles. In a contemplative and subjective approach of collecting, Zhenyu had transformed information through a conspicuous annihilation of the content.

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z h A O yA O

Zhao Yao was born in 1981 in Sichuan Province. It is geometrical games, assembly games and board games that provide the starting point and the source of inspiration of Zhao Yao’s work. The trivial origin debunks the sacred aura of the status of the work of art in the style of Duchamp’s ready-made objects, which inspired Huang Yongping, a model for all this generation of artists. Taking up the model of the kaleidoscope, Spirit above all, as well as the series A Painting of Thought, compose with geometric patterns almost psychedelic construction on colors and forms. Zhao Yao took a ten-day trip with his paintings under his arm to have it blessed by the living Buddha and monks in the mountains of Tibet. This journey has been part of the artistic process in a way that even the artist could not imagine, above all because it was hard, and it changed his mood and how he viewed the experience.

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z h A O z h A O

Zhao Zhao was born in 1982 in Xinjiang, China, and graduated from theXinjiang Institute of the Arts in 2003 and attended the Beijing Film Academy.He was Ai Weiwei’s assistant before he became an influential artist of his generation.After a car accident in which his head slammed into the windshield, Zhao Zhao was amazed by the patterns of cracked glass at the point of impact. Indeed, this led to his series of hyper-realistic paintings called Constellations based on bullet impacts on shatter-proof glass panes, which reminded the artist of interstellar galaxies.His piece Officer is a limestone statue of a Chinese police officer. Questionning the role of the state and the police, Zhao Zhao represents a giant Chinese officer in pieces, broken, on the ground. The statue was made when Ai Weiwei was arrested in 2011. The badge number on the police officer corresponds to the date Ai Weiwei was arrested. Zhao Zhao, in the footsteps of his former master, became in his turn a target of the Chinese government and was put under a lot of pressure. An entire year was needed to conceive Fragment, a long process of cutting and polishing brass. Like in the series Constellations, the artist creates the diffractions as if it was an accident, something the individual has no power on and through which he regains control on the disastrous and the tragic.

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I N D E XAI wEIwEIChicken cupEdition: 200-25 (1/4)

2015 reproduction of porcelain

“chicken cup” at Sotheby’s auction

with “Beijing Fake” marketing, 2015

cups: 8.3 × 3.4 cm × 25 pics

ChEN wEINight ParisEdition: 1/6

2015 archival inkjet print

150 x 187.5 cm

ChENg rANScenario Hypothesis 2Edition: 4/6

2015 photography lightbox

66 x 171 x 5 cm

hU XIAOyUANBug's Writing2014 chinese ink and rice paper

148 x 69 cm

LI ShUrUIRorschach Test No.12011 acrylic on canvas

150 x 200 cm

LIU wEI Purple air G2008 acrylic on canvas

220 x 180 x 3 cm

Exotic Lands No.62011 door, wood, stainless steel

223 x 127 x 5 cm

LU PINgyUANOn Kawara, Today Series, 3JAN.20162016 acrylic on canvas

104.14 x 142.24 x 3.8 cm

LU ShANChUAN World Square-Mecca2012 oil on canvas

300 x 500 cm

MA QIUShAFog No.1 (“the blue paper”)2012 watercolor on paper

130 x 130 cm

L2012 watercolor and

mixed media on paper

78 x 110 cm

wANg gUANgLE 0908202009 acrylic on canvas

180 x 160 cm

0908212009 acrylic on canvas

230 x 180 cm

Coffin Paint 1512122015 acrylic on canvas

114 x 116 cm

wANg SIShUN2.30 2012 granite

533.4 x 228.6 x 87.6 cm

Truth, 20152015 150+ hours video footage

Video of the trip from Beijing to Paris

Uncertain Capital No.112013 coins

54 x 54 x 54 cm

wANg yUyANg Aboard2015 bras, copper, stainless steel,

iron, wood, FRP

190 x 210 x 220 cm

Deliberately2013 oil on canvas

210 x 161 cm

Navy2015 oil on canvas

180 x 160 cm

Offence2015 oil on canvas

180 x 167 cm

Physics2015 oil on canvas

210 x 282 cm

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XIE MOLIN Color Drill No.52014 acrylic and acrylic media

on canvas

230 x 160 cm

XU QU Eleven Meters AwayFrom the Boat 2013 – 6 2013 oil on canvas

198 x 132 x 5 cm

XU zhENNight Walk Palace2013 collage on canvas

180 x 260 x 10 cm

yAN XINg Arty, Super-Arty 2013Film Still No.3

Edition: 1/3

2013 photography (b/W),

ultra giclee

138 x 198 cm

yANg DONgXUEI am so young2010 heating wire

and isometric object

variable dimensions

yANg XINgUANgMountain Forest 2011 wood and steel

220 x 170 x 245 cm

zhANg DINg The Kind of Need – 42015 silkscreen painting,

stainless steel, 24-karat gold leaf

60 x 45 x 3 cm

The Kind of Need – 62015 silkscreen painting,

stainless steel, 24-karat gold leaf

60 x 45 x 3 cm

zhANg zhENyU Dust 1310152012 dust mixed media

100 x 100 cm

Read "China Daily"2007 news paper and mixed media

78 x 55 x 365 pieces

zhAO yAO A Painting of Thought III-4132013 acrylic on found fabric

200 x 180 cm

Spirit above all I-93A2012 acrylic on denim

200 x 247 x 8 cm

Spirit above all III-1022012 acrylic on denim

200 x 200 x 8 cm

zhAO zhAOConstellation No.12015 oil on canvas

300 x 200 cm

Constellation No.22015 oil on canvas

250 x 200 cm

Constellation No.32015 oil on canvas

250 x 200 cm

Constellation No.142015 oil on canvas

300 x 200 cm

Constellation No.152015 oil on canvas

250 x 200 cm

Fragment 2015 brass

90 x 210 cm

Officer2011 limestone

180 x 49 x 46 cm

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Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibitionConstellation – Contemporary art in today’s China

curated by Ami Barak

Tbilisi, Georgia / Baku, Azerbaijan / Astana, Kazakhstan

The exhibition brings together works from different private collections from China,Central Asia, Caucasus, Europe, and an important private collection from Kazakhstan, including:

Fabien Pacory, Jean-Frédéric Paulsen, Susana Truplova

Special thanks to

Ana RiaboshenkoAntoine Loubier

Beijing CommuneBjörn Geldhof

Château MukhraniEko Danelia

Eprem UrumashviliFrixx Caucasus Snacks

Galerie Urs MeileGeno MalazoniaGeorge Aptsiauri

Georgian National MuseumJean-Marc Decrop

Jérôme SansLong March SpaceMadeIn Company

New GalerieOlga BabluaniPace Gallery

Sandro Alexander SukhishviliShangART Gallery

Sofya TasmagambetovaTamuna Gvaberidze

Tbilisi Art CenterWhite Space Beijing

Zhao Ting Ting

Designed byCarolina Banc

Notes written byAdine Barak

Photo creditsAurelien Mole and Carl Brunn

Printed byIDEA Design & Print

Cluj-Napoca, Romaniawww.idea.ro

Published byCareOf Publishing

Paris, Francewww.careofpublishing.com

Translated by Alvin Li (Bao Dong's text)

©CareOf Publishing IDEA Design & Print Cluj RomaniaPrinted in Romania in May 2017

ISBN 979-10-96291-02-1Legal deposit June 2017

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