Greetings to our audiences! This is Qiu Yun, Deputy Director and Curator of the Exhibitions Department at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. I am greatly honored to introduce the first section of this exhibition, “The Fluid Landscape.” Through twenty artworks, this section demonstrates the constantly evolving connotations of landscape, while examining “landscape” as an active medium that is charged with fluidity.

Let’s begin the tour with natural landscapes. Right across from the entrance is a row of aluminum panels leaning against the wall. As we walk towards these panels, a buoyant beam of colors subtly reveals itself. This work, entitled Rainbow, is an installation made by Hao Jingfang and Wang Lingjie. To fabricate an illusory rainbow with light, the artists specially developed a software to calculate the optimal relative positions of light, audience, and the installation. Aside from the elegance of precision, we also believe this work unveils the universal beauty of natural scenery—after all, who doesn’t relish a rainbow?

Next, let’s take a look at the urban landscape. We certainly couldn’t overlook the large-scale artworks laid out in front of us. These pieces made of carpets are from the “Wonder” series by Zhao Yao, whose interests have always revolved around shapes and forms. Along this track, the artist became fascinated by satellite photos of airports, as they display shapes that are “crafted” on the Earth’s surface through the collective and massive effort of human beings. The presentation here provides the audience with a bird’s-eye view. Such perspective in turn prompts us to contemplate the power dynamic between humans and our landscape.

Lastly, landscape does not only exist outside, but also inside of us. On the grey wall, we can find the painting named Empty Space in the Forest by Qiu Xiaofei. In this piece, an elderly figure is carrying in his arms an ambiguous object that looks somewhat like a newborn and somewhat like a skull. The figure stands firmly in a forest, which is depicted almost like a theatrical backdrop. It is filled with spiral structures of various sizes, bringing to mind the whirlpool of time. The artist weaves the natural sceneries of his hometown Harbin, his family memories, and the torrents of history into this intricate forest. Though far from his hometown, Qiu has turned this forest into a refuge for his imagination, emotion, and nostalgia.

Being in Shanghai during the spring of 2022, I was deprived of the open air, of any scenery outside. However, I believe that the perpetuating curiosity, contemplation, and art can grow an inner forest for all of us, which shall remain serene and intact despite any outer chaos. No matter where you go, may the splendid landscape be kept in your heart! Thank you.

This chapter of the exhibition takes up “Epiphany of the Individual” as its theme, focusing on the individual trajectory in the world and the affect and spirituality enmeshed in art creation. Such a choice is made here because the current era of post-industrial digital capitalism, the sudden outbreak of a global pandemic, and the ever-changing state of the world might turn our gaze inward, back to the human condition, through concrete experiences and emotions. Can art help people spiritually transcend the shackles of history?

In three display areas relatively separate from each other, the works on view spark an intuitive experience of the individual’s place in the world. Yu Hong’s oil painting The Scream is a tribute to the painter Edvard Munch. In a more grand and monumental composition, Yu Hong’s work incites the anxiety, helplessness, and uncertainty of individuals in the face of the current reality and the imminent disasters of our time.

Originating in a Ghanaian proverb, “what will come has already come,” the title of William Kentridge’s work in the exhibition points to the repetition of history. In this work, Kentridge used his signature technique of drawing and erasing on a sheet of paper and filming this process frame by frame. The resulting animation is anamorphic, the distorted images projected onto a tabletop can only be read correctly in the mirror-like surface of the steel cylinder at the center. Through the visual illusion, the artist invites reflection on the relativity of perception, including the questionable truths and distortions of the past.

In the last area, the exhibition focuses on reflections related to the body, nature, labor, and collective memory. Giuseppe Penone’s drawing links tree rings to human fingerprints, as if he could feel the forest breathing and hear the woods growing. The artist finds a specific haptic sense in all living things. He sees trees as fluid materials and breathing as a kind of automatic sculpture.

The chapter “Whose Tradition” tries to think about an unresolved question in contemporary art, in which non-Western artists are facing a structural contradiction between tradition and the contemporary. Today, more and more Western artists have also begun to engage and appreciate modes of expression and systems of thought outside of the Western tradition. In this chapter, we selected seven Chinese and Japanese artists. When you walk inside the gallery space, just by looking at the work, at once you have a sense of the topic we are trying to address here.

You can see we have ten ink on paper scrolls by the artist Sun Xun. Even though the format is traditional Chinese scroll painting, the subject matter is elephants, robots, and other things that are quite odd for such a format. On the other side, you can also see landscape, or shanshui, paintings by Shi Xinji using oil. On the far end, you can see the Japanese artist Yamaguchi Akira making paintings of the four heavenly kings, tian wang, but their faces are quite contemporary. If you are familiar with the four heavenly kings in temples, whether it’s in the painting format or in sculpture, they all have this angry, monstrous look. But here, Akira makes those heavenly kings surprisingly beautiful. To borrow a concept from Buddhism, Samsara reminds us that things of the past are never truly gone; they will return to us in new forms. Artist Hu Xiaoyuan never directly uses any visual symbols that might easily identify as Chinese, but she carefully selects a set of materials that speak for her own cultural identity, such as the combination of raw silk and wood.

This section, “Images and Forgetting,” explores the relationship between images and the thinking and expression of artists. Through simulation, alteration, appropriation, and other approaches, artists constantly process and reproduce images, forming creatively fertile connections between a chosen theme and its representation. As part of an exhibition based on research into collections, it is worth noting that many of the pieces here have already been recognized as highly valuable in the art market, which also makes them worthy of discussion from the perspective of art history. But when we reexamine them in a new context, are the meanings of the images in these artworks unchanged from when they first appeared? Might it be possible for us to decipher new meanings within them?

The first work in this section is Watching a Painting Exhibition by Hoo Mojong, who, early in her career, spent many years living in the West. It depicts a group of viewers—perhaps a family—gazing at a painting. In fact, this piece provides us with a metaphor for thinking about this section: today, the significance of art is jointly constructed by the work of art itself and its viewers.

Let’s look at another work, a digital painting by Beeple. This is piece is an NFT, or “non-fungible token.” To say the least, Beeple has grown very popular over the past few years. Setting aside some of the controversies over NFTs for the moment, we can focus on the fact that by the time a work of art enters wider society, how it is defined has already been subtly shaped by technology, finance, and other factors. This is a topic that may only become more relevant in the future.

Sometimes artists deliberately conceal their own authorial presence within the artwork. For example, both Anne Collier’s Woman Crying (Comic) #30 and Danielle Orchard’s Studio Wall both appropriate classic imagery from popular culture and art as their main subjects. In the several Yang Fudong works shown here, a certain classical humanistic spirit is intertwined with contemporary bourgeois sentimentality, blurring our understanding of what era these images originate from. Similarly, in his sculptures, Zhang Ding uses realistic techniques to express a sense of the unreal. These techniques make the artist’s perspectives “uncertain,” leaving more space for the viewer’s interpretations.

In the work of Zhang Xiaogang, the use of specific pre-existing images such as old photographs, and the subsequent fusion of these images with painting, can be seen through the lens of Benjamin’s “Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as the artists’ way of reflecting on painting and the self. Unlike the previously mentioned works in which artists hide their authorship, these artists search for identity within their paintings.

Shi Chong created the piece Stage in the 1990s, as the rise of conceptual art was beginning to impact the traditional approaches to painting taught in Chinese art academies. In this piece, the artist considers how the visual language of painting might be able express the different dimensions that installations, performances, and other new forms of art were able to access. From today’s perspective, Shi Chong’s ability to depict a level of detail that exceeds even that of photography possesses a certain postmodern value in and of itself. As the final piece in this section, Stage also brings us back to our theme: can we still relate to how the artist explored and reflected on cultural issues in the 1990s? Why does the piece still retain a certain special charm 30 years on? How do viewers, the public context, and even the changing times bestow meaning upon art? This is the proposition that this section seeks to explore with its viewers.

The fourth chapter, “Rethinking the Conceptual,” looks at the lineage of conceptual art that first emerged in America in the late 1960s. This chapter is divided into four groups of case studies exploring artistic strategies of conceptual art that formed during the 60 years after its birth, and how these strategies influenced artists coming from different generations and cultures.

From Shu Qun’s, Wang Guangyi’s, Wu Shanzhuan’s, and Inga Svala Thórsdóttir’s wall-based works, we can see how they utilized geometric shapes, grids, and lines to analyze and reinvent traditional painting practice.

From Barbara Kruger and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s works, we can clearly see one of the most important strategies coming from conceptual art, which is the interference of language. Here, Barbara Kruger uses slogan-like language to create a tension between the text and the image. And Tiravanija, through the text and the mirror, invites the audience to participate in a discussion about racial stereotypes against Asians in Western culture.

The third group is an extension of the last artworks that we just discussed. Wu Shanzhuan also substitutes text for image in his painting here, and the text forms a very interesting connection with the mirror element in Song Dong’s work next to it. Tony Oursler’s video installation speaks to audiences through an alien-like figure in a language that’s almost impossible to comprehend.

Through the last group of works, we wanted to explore how artists through different mediums can document and translate these concepts. Yang Xinguang’s piece combines a performance documented through video and a sculptural element that comes from a modified readymade object. Danh Vo’s pieces also touch upon the use of the readymade. Here, we can see how his practice utilizes readymade objects, texts, and historical images. In Hu Xiaoyuan’s video installation, the protagonists are two hands, with no indication of who the owners are. These hands play out different gestures that signify different relationships between human beings.