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At the beginning of the new year, Mao Space has been moved to its new home – a meandering lane of West Jianguo Road, Shanghai, and is now presenting its debut group exhibition: “Scenic Line Of An Alley.”

As a signature of Shanghai’s urban culture, alleys bear the profound and unique spiritual memory of this metropolitan. Compared with the vertical vision that keeps stretching upward, lanes symbolize the locality and depth of the city. Different from the physical space, the zoetrope that often sat at the entrance of a lane is now only occasionally recalled as a distant memory. In a limited space, the fragments of reality are presented in a strange way and revived into a scenic line. The once novelty also implies a shift of perspective, reminding us to think about how to bring commonality into the bellows of consciousness, and inspire enlightening artistic expressions.

The five (groups of) artists featured in this exhibition: LIU Yi, GUO Xi, LIU Guoqiang, WU Junyong, HAO Jingfang & WANG Lingjie, now serve as a new zoetrope. In unique languages, they express the retention and conversion of memory and Dasein, and how to incorporate the reality they experience and understand into a new narration system. In particular, all works at the exhibition are created in honor of the on-site space – some are selected from the personal collection of Ms. MAO Wencai over the past years, while some are site-specific creations completed by artists based on their previous works and the new environment. This double dialogue with space and with their own creations across different periods allows artists to shed light on a special scenic line in the courtyard at the end of an alley.

About Mao Space :

Since its establishment in 2014, Mao Space has been exploring the possibility of dialogue between contemporary art and Shanghai urban culture. Now its relocation to a downtown alley means that Mao Space is closer to “Shanghai” in another sense. How to more deeply tap into the cultural resources in the urban context, how to inspire the combination of such resources with contemporary art, and how to intervene in urban public spaces with contemporary art… these are the topics Mao Space is determined to probe into in the future.

The show “A Room that Releases Spores” is opening this Friday. This is my second time being a curator. It feels so great to be suported by all the artists! Location is at THE SHOUTER, 62 West Fuxing rd., Shanghai.

The mixed media exhibition A Room that Releases Spores is closely tied to nature and body. This exhibition brings together artists and labels 214, Doreen Chan, Liu Yi, Hao Jingfang & Wang Lingjie, Wang Xu, Xiao Xing, wei, E. T. and WV Sorcerer Productions, with works including painting, photography, sculpture, video, text, and music. These artworks will “occupy” the exhibition hall that once functioned as a private living room, and together, as spiritual and corporeal extensions, they fictionally depict an absent host of the space.

In an increasingly mechanized present world with pervasive cognitive divide, this exhibition attempts to discuss how to form new connections through the thread of spores. Compared to seeds, the growing stages of spores are much more primitive and independent, and therefore make them more persistent. This draws the analogy to the living state of many artists. A Room that Releases Spores doesn’t focus on any specific image of the world, rather it pays attention to the individual experiences of the artists, and the natural resonances among the works, the viewers, and this historical building, The Cloister, when they are situated in the same space.

The life of spores is a magical journey. From tiny particles clung to the surface of plants or fungi, they experience multiple transformations before eventually becoming complete and complex organisms. The same underlies the works in this exhibition. One leap, one rolling down, one eruption and one mutation, these works depict the human individuals situated within the vast social landscape. And precisely in these slight moments of happenings, the spores of consciousness are gradually collecting, and forming various new, tiny, yet continuously thriving paths. Lingering in midair, they gather every person who steps into this room.

With the advent of the digital age, people’s travel records, consumption records, and social platform life records are stored in the form of codes in a huge database, and everyone’s existence seems to be traceable.

Coexisting within the field of vision but outside the data, there are many things that exist but seldom leave traces. This exhibition invites the participation of four artists who, through their own creative methods, capture these blind spots of vision and present their “existence” in an artistic form.

If artwork is the carrier of memory, and architecture, as one of the traces left by human civilization, is an important symbol that carries the city’s memory, then the restoration and maintenance of ancient buildings by future generations is an endless artistic creation.

The exhibition “Exist – Trace” is honored to be held in such a restored ancient building, and discusses “existence” and “traces” around three parties: nature, architecture and social groups.

Curator: Yao Yao

The 2019 National Art Museum Young Curator Support Plan of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism selected project

City of art: The previous and present of Kincheng Bank. (1930-2020)

Time: October 23 —- November 22 2020

Location: Wuhan Art Museum

Exhibition hall: 1、2、3

Sponsor: Wuhan Art Museum

Support:  Tianjin Museum of Finance

Wuhan Municipal Archives

Wuhan Children’s Library

Wuhan City of Design Promotion Center

Producer: Chen Yongjin

Academic support:Yan Changyuan

Curator: Jing Fei

Art director: Gao Xiaolin

Exhibition director: Song Wenxiang

Exhibiton coordinator: Zhang Wenbo

Curator assistant: Liu Shuchang

Graphic design: Dai Kai  Chen Wenxian  Langding design

Space design: Cheng Jun Tan Jianqiao Wan Lei

Collection support: Wang Jia  Lin Guohui

Education Promotion: Lan Tian  Li Chen

Academic activities: Geng Shuang  Yang Qianqian

Media publicity: Li Xia  Yan Yutong

Exhibition organizing committee (arrange by stroke of surname):

Liu Yu  Liu Yongqian  LIu Xiong  Song Wenxiang   Zhang Wenbo  Chen Yongjing

Gao Xiaolin  Peng Yuhu  Fan Feng

For the 8th edition of the Talents Contemporains competition, a new hanging will present the works of the 7 selected winners, with the notions of ephemerality and fragments as a backdrop.

On the programme, the simulation of a rainbow composed with the help of thousands of micro glass beads by the artist duo Hao Jingfang & Wang Lingjie, (Over the Rainbow, 2016), a puddle of water imprisoned on the ground like a living installation by Capucine Vandebrouck (Puddle 3, 2017), the cyclists of photographer Wiktoria Wojciechowska caught in a Chinese deluge and covered with evanescent droplets on their wide rain capes (Short Flashes, 2013). The discovery continues with The Second World, Elina, (2015), an ephemeral planet made of salt bricks on the Uyuni Salt Flat on Bolivian soil by Guillaume Barth, narrating the fragility of the world and the power of nature. As for Eva Nielsen, she proposes a painting where optical games, illusion and mirage are at the rendezvous for her gaps in the ocean (Zode IV : the sea, horizon of possibilities 2018). It is also a question of ocean and cracks in Olivier Crouzel’s work. Since 2014, he has patiently documented and filmed the Signal in Soulac-sur-Mer, an abandoned building with a new, dilapidated life… 18 curtains (2015) is a gigantic installation-projection showing its transformations. Finally, Rachael Louise Bailey exhibits Global (2018), a large sphere that could be floating, composed of 3.5 km of inner tubes, collected among the polluting materials found in the sea. From these scattered and fragmented objects, she groups them together to give them a new function.
Coming from China, Great Britain, Poland, Denmark or France, each and every one of the artists explore the fleetingness of the elements and of what constitutes our universe. It is a question of dreams, nature, slowness, beliefs, views, places, resistance also in the face of the sometimes incessant whirlwinds of the world.