Before Myth Becomes Rhetoric
Group Exhibition Choi Centre · Cloud House, Beijing

Artists: Apichatpong WEERASETHAKUL 阿彼察邦·韦拉斯哈古 |  JIANG Pengyi 蒋鹏奕 | 

Contemporary society is saturated with “myths”—or rather, myth has long since dissolved into rhetoric in the course of history. As myth is stripped of grandeur, ritual, and heroism, it shifts almost imperceptibly to the micro level: family structures, emotional labor, urban legends, vernacular experience. No longer written in the name of myth, these forms persist as a way of understanding the world and the movement of history itself.

Myth has always been suspect. In this exhibition, seemingly ordinary moments are placed in the same space as grand mythic narratives. Sacred stories are lowered into everyday instants, while ordinary moments are, in turn, constructed as myth. This internal logic compels us to ask: what constitutes a historical moment of magnitude? For those in the future, what matters is no longer what happened on that day, but that from that day onward it can no longer be regarded as an ordinary one. For those who lived within it, however, it may have been nothing more than a perfectly ordinary day—except that the sunlight was unusually harsh.

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