Group Exhibition Tabula Rasa Gallery, 798, Beijing
In the age of pragmatism and information abundance, it seems that there is nothing strange anymore, and everything is familiar or can be easily decoded. However, only art still retains some kind of strange and mysterious characteristics. Just like staring at familiar geometric structures, after a while, the composition will become strange, and then only by squinting one's eyes can you get back the original image. Moreover, there are other forms of art, not originating from the aesthetic point of view but from materials and other angles such as poetics, chemistry, biology, anthropology and so on. Obviously for the understanding of these art, squinting is not enough.
It goes without saying that a work of art is in the first place a collection of things, and secondly it must contain something other than the existence of the substance itself. Therefore, the Stranger Objects exhibition is based on these two points. On the one hand the artists have their own long time favourite materials, such as He Chi's use of paint and stones, Lin Shu's crystals and molds, Yan Bing's mud and wheat, Liang Shuo's slag, Li Peng Peng's wood carvings and leather, Han Xiao Han and Zhang He's animal specimens, Lu Lei, Li Jinghu and Zhou Yilun's trash. Some of these materials are amorphous, others have peculiar shapes and colors. On the other hand, Stranger Objects are not only concerned about perculiarity. The reason why art is strange is that, from a viewer's point of view, it provides an anachronistic and ungraspable experience in a seemingly nornal setting. And from the point of view of the artist (creator), since on the onset of modernism, artists who pursue independence and freedom have to place themselves in a strange place, because the artist wants to create art only for the artist himself and this is a mysterious land with no footsteps to follow.
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