Geng Dayou: When No One Is Around, Dance Gracefully

中文

Geng Dayou: When No One Is Around, Dance Gracefully
Solo Exhibition ShanghART M50, Shanghai

Date: 07.15, 2023 - 09.02, 2023

Artists: GENG Dayou 耿大有

When No One is Around, Dance Gracefully
Artists: Geng Dayou
Curator: Chen Junyao
Exhibition Period: July 15 - September 2, 2023 Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 - 18:00
Venue: ShanghART M50, Building 16, 50 Moganshan Road, Putuo District, Shanghai

Geng Dayou's artistic creations focus on the projection of individual states onto everyday objects. Drawing inspiration from the concept of “Gesamtkunstwerk”, the artist continues the core of Romanticism in his work. By intertwining personal experiences, affective connections to everyday objects, and spatial memories, he creates an enduring sense of “emptiness” and establishes a state of potentiality entangled within social contexts. The exhibition titled “When No One is Around, Dance Gracefully” emerges from the absence of a subject, reflecting the remnants of subjectivity and the loss of self. It serves as Geng Dayou's observation and feedback on the diminishing subjectivity in the face of complex social conditions, as well as the deconstruction of the sublime within popular culture, aiming to reshape order and seek spiritual transcendence in modernity. It constructs a cyclical, endless, void, and aimless overall structure. Furthermore, as a shared experience pervasive among the masses, “When No One is Around, Dance Gracefully” becomes a collective opening ceremony, a united resistance against nihilism.

Geng Dayou

Dayou Geng (1998) is an artist who currently lives and works in Shanghai. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from King's College London and a Master's degree in Contemporary Art from the Sotheby's Institute of Art in London.

Dayou Geng’s artistic practice revolves around exploring hidden emotions and collective memories within public domains. He employs various mediums such as installations, moving-images, sounds, video-games etc., to recreate multiple “situations” with a touch of absurd humor and theatricality. Through his work, he extracts and distills various paradoxes of modernity.

Chen Junyao

Chen Junyao (b.1995) is an independent curator and part-time research fellow at the Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry (ICCI), Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He currently lives and works in Shanghai. He graduated from the Department of Digital Media of Beijing Normal University in 2018 and received a master's degree in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art in 2020. His curatorial practice and research focus on spatial politics in the context of urbanization, the publicity of digital media, and the digital human landscape in the public environment.

In 2022, he was funded by the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM) Annual Academic Conference 2022. His curatorial proposal was shortlisted for the 2022 Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival Curatorial Award For Photography And Moving Image Finalist Exhibition. His thesis and research project, "Urban Regeneration with the Intervention of Industrial Transformation and Curatorial Ideas - A Case Study of Dafen Village, Shenzhen" was selected for the International Conference on Global Cultural and Creative Industries and Development (2021) and published in the interdisciplinary journal Telematics and Informatics Reports and has collaborated with several domestic and foreign art institutions and contemporary art galleries, written review articles for media and artists.