Group Exhibition Boxes Art Space, Shenzhen, Building 11 Lan Ying Fang,OCT-Harbor Shopping Centre,East 8 Baishi Road，Nanshan District
This is an exhibition of the works created by “female artists”, but it does not meanthat the audience can resort to a shortcut to read their works with the help ofarbitrary gender stereotypes. It has been almost a century since Virginia Woolftalked at Cambridge University in October 1928 about “a woman must have money,and a room of her own, if she is to write fiction”. Women can not only write fictions,they can also do almost everything they want, but in many areas, gender isstill being discussed as the most handy classification criterion. As a uniqueindividual, each woman has her own palpable features. Today it becomesparticularly significant to discuss such a contradiction in “rooms”— closed andopen space, a theater composed of “seventeen boxes(rooms)”.
“The rooms differ so completely;
they are calmor thunderous;
open on to the sea, or, on the contrary, give on to a yard;
are hung with washing; or alive with opals and silks;
are hard as horsehair or soft as feathers.”
Justlike Woolf’s stream of consciousness, the works selected by this exhibitionshowcase the participating artists’ personal observations on the world. Thesevisual expressions are embodiments of their sensitive insights andphilosophical thinking, and sophisticated records of the mystical materialworld and secret dark spiritual spaces. When gazing at and trying to talk withthese works, the effort to resolve the riddles within will fail if you rely onthe impotent key of “female”, especially when these subtle and deep feelingshave been placed in such a fashionable commercial space. They are more likeenigmas with superimposed answers, head-on, or coming to you at the transparentand surprising turnings.
“Great souls are allhermaphrodite”, so are the excellent works. They are charismatic because theyhave the artists’ incisive perceptions of the surrounding world and dailylife—the biggest theater in them, they include the reflection and questioningof personal identity, as well as the metaphysical interpretation and deduction.These stories are echoing each other, or entirely different from each other, orhumorous and bizarre, or like a sudden sharp alarm, warning us, who are deeplytrapped in the consumer society, to recall the unyielding tangles inside, andthey are playing on and on when the scenes of the rooms theater get revealed.
Chen Xiaoyang
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