BLACKBOARD
2009-05-05 15:24

Curator: Fu Xiaodong

Opening Reception: May 23, 2009, 6-8pm
May 24th, 2009 - June 30th, 2009
Venue: ShanghART H-space, bldg 18, 50 Moganshan Rd., Shanghai
Opening Hours: 1pm-6pm

Artisits: Wang Xingwei | Xu Zhen | Yang Zhenzhong | Xiang Liqing | Liu Weijian | Lu Chunsheng | Huang Kui | Tang Maohong | Shao Yi | Yang Fudong+Ling Yun | Shi Yong | Xiao Jing Feng | Zhang Ding | Qiu ANxiong | Liu Chuang | Chu Yun | Liu Wei | Jiang Zhi | Jiang Yunke | Qiu zhijie | Chen wenbo | Kan Xuan | Zhu Yu | Wang Yuyang | He AN | Cheng Ran | Zhang Peili | Geng Jianyi | Sun Xun | Lu Lei | Chen Xiaoyun | Tong Biao | Zhao Yang | Wu Junyong | Ye Linghan | Jin Shan | Chen Wei | Chen Yufan+Chen Yujun

Before the Golden Age—when the high-tech Consumerism multimedia teaching and large acreage low-priced inkjet are popularized, blackboard was once a prevailing tool of publicity and education. As the cheapest, easiest and simplex daily entertainment among the masses, blackboard has naturally formed a style of brief and concise, with text and pictures, rough but dazzle, subtle but moving over the years. It has been quietly hanging on the backwall of classroom with spider web, the gate of industrial and mining enterprises, by the corridor of community and rural brigade. It makes those young folk art lovers fully expressed their original talents. Each active artist now was once more or less participated in early aesthetic enlightenment national art practice, with the way forced, initiative, helpless, and positive, to accomplish the task.

Blackboard, the most common, political, serious, stereotyped, vacant, popular, flourish way of art creating, solely makes those precious, lifelike, inspired, hysterical, weird, irrepressible art be displayed initially and with glory. Even if it is a tool like propaganda, so ideology, so immobilized, so fascistic and different inside out, it can’t hold those talent artists back from the sensitivity of formal languages and those earthshaking talent can also be revealed tirelessly in the aesthetic standard of 1970s or 1980s. So how should artists who have obtained fully liberation and liberty today to face a once familiar and so plain blackboard?

Using blackboards as the basis of work form, the exhibition refers to property, creation factor, form carrier, background provider, and media experiment. In such an inflexible size and material, a space of 1m×2m, and facing those cheap non-professional materials of enlightenment period, then what kind of imagination will artist have? How to defuse those long years depressed desire of creation and expression? I wish this cross medium exhibition which has never been developed by aesthetic field in art history will remind all audience those dusty memories and unexpected surprise.
by Fu Xiaodong

 

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