Group Exhibition Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art,Shanghai
Public · Park will be on exhibition at Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art from September 26 to December 13, 2020. Hosted by Duolun Museum, Gu Zheng as Academic Director and Shi Hantao as Curator, the exhibition invites artists including btr, CAI Dongdong, Never-mind Workshop, GAN Yingying, GU Zheng, GUO Yingguang, LU Yuanmin, Birdhead, XU Jie, XU Haifeng, XUE Baoqi, YAN Yibo, YIN Yi, ZHU Hao to display their works for the viewers.
For most people who grow up and live in the city, parks tend to carry special memories and experience. Public parks, or to be more specifically as we refer to urban parks, are different from classic Chinese gardens or large country parks - the former is built for personal enjoyment of authenticity; while the latter is often “out of town” for people’s need of “an outing”.
Urban parks, on the other hand, are located in the city, as well as in the daily life experience of each citizen as a public area. It thrives with the born of the city, and it evolves with the development of urbanization. It puts on different looks through times, which witnesses and reflects the battles among different social forces, discourses, and even civil lives and wisdom. Urban park is where the history of individuality and city cross over, hence it takes part in the process when people shape their perception of the city as well as of themselves, and also in the process when civil consciousness and identity arise.
It is because urban parks have played such a special role, and all the stories and scenes that take place in this space, that it has become a critical subject for acute artists to observe and contemplate the society, and to create artworks. In this exhibition, artists record and narrate about various aspects of urban parks, by different means, with their own language. In addition, all the parks involved in the exhibits this time are located in Shanghai, which composes a vivid profiling for this city. They not only display some particular functions and characteristics of parks in Shanghai, but also raise the reflection and discussion about the social-historical issues of this city.
As an exhibition of image, the media of displayed works include not only photography and video art, but also audio, installment, multimedia and other forms. Image here no longer gets restricted to visual, but refers to an experiential “multi-image” or “imagery.” If photography is a representative medium of modernity, with the technology development of motion picture, sound, Internet and communication, artists and ordinary people in this contemporary society are able to express how they feel and what they perceive about the world around them as well their inner world by means of multimedia, whenever and wherever. Surely not having transcended the form of narrative and mechanism of photography, this more contemporary language of multimedia is more about the enhancement and deepening of the relationships among object, medium and the narrator.
Based on the comprehension above, the exhibition displays the stories of “parks” observed and narrated by the artists, so as to take one step further to the discussion of “public” of the city behind. Together with derived events with “The Paper · City Walk”, other artist and scholars, the project is about to turn into a discussion of our own with the participation of both citizens and art workers.
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