Solo Exhibition ISA Gallery, Shanghai
“Words move, music movesOnly in time; but that which is only livingCan only die. Words, after speech, reachInto the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,Can words or music reachThe stillness, as a Chinese jar stillMoves perpetually in its stillness.Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,Not that only, but the co-existence,Or say that the end precedes the beginning,And the end and the beginning were always thereBefore the beginning and after the end.”
In the exhibition "Before the Beginning and After the End...", IS A Gallery is pleased to present the new video and installation works created by Han Qian in 2023. These works continue the artist's focus on her family's history and echo her solo exhibition " Video by the Sea", currently on view at the Anaya Art Centre and the Lonely Library. In the three works at the show, the artist leads the spectator through the history and transformation of a mountain range in Hebei that stretches for over a hundred miles, as well as the perception and imagination of materiality. As this journey continues, the artist returns to her hometown of Wuhan and begins to focus on the sandbar Tianxingzhou, which looks out over WISCO.
In this exhibition, IS A Gallery presents a new chapter in the artist's extended journey. Through the seemingly peaceful sandbars and rivers, lost diaries and dusty archives, and the red powder from the broken red brick walls, the invisible connections between individual experience and the natural land become visible. Perhaps mountains and rivers will disappear, cities and buildings will disappear, stories and memories will disappear, but perhaps, like things that have been carried and left behind by the forces of nature such as wind and rain, rivers and glaciers, all will reveal themselves again somewhere and someday.
The artist invites the spectators to imagine the sedimentation and reappearance of stories in different narratives, searching for a hidden presence in the traces of the past. and to explore the possible paths between the individual and nature, identity and narrative.
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