Daily Pursuit
2023-05-15 16:26

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Artists: Chen Xiaoyun, Lu Lei, Liu Yue, Zhang Ding, Zhao Yang
Opening: 12 May 2023  4pm
Duration: 12 May - 9 July 2023 (11am – 6pm, Mon. Closed)
Location: ShanghART Shanghai, West Bund, Bldg. 10, 2555 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District, Shanghai, China


ShanghART is delighted to announce that the theme exhibition “Daily Pursuit” opens on 12 May, and will run through 9 July. Artists Chen Xiaoyun, Lu Lei, Liu Yue, Zhang Ding, and Zhao Yang will unfold their narratives respectively in five sections, presenting their new creations in recent years. Distilling clues from the studios of the five artists, the exhibition dwells on the artist's working process from conception to creation where the audience may take a glance at the distinct qualities of the artists and their commonalities in parallel case studies.

In recent years, each of the five artists has adapted and adjusted to their unique working methods. Chen Xiaoyun did some leisurely and piecemeal creations. He cut copper and zinc panels into pocket-sized pieces so that he could carve wherever he went. In Lu Lei's work, craft-making is an instinctive habit, and his creations always grow freely from the "unplanned" jobs. Liu Yue continues deconstructing and re-examining images by researching daily objects in an almost paranoid style. Zhang Ding gradually develops his studio into an almighty working battlefield, exploring new ways to actualize spatial ideas in his graphic works. Zhao Yang developed a 9 to 5 routine, which provided him with sufficient inertia, then brand new Zhao-style characters "birth out of nothing" from his mind……



About the artist

CHEN XIAOYUN (1971) was born in Hubei province. Since his participation in the group exhibition 'Art for Sale' held in Shanghai in 1999, he started his contemporary art creation and practice in video art, and has become one of the most important experimental artists in the most recent decade. CHEN Xiaoyun's works are always both artistic and poetic in style, with introspective thinking present in the narrative structure as well as the use of individual fragments of consciousness to channel the real world in pictorial form. His works usually start with a caption, a dialogue, or a motion that is then overlapped, refined, and abstracted, to make our known world more ridiculous, hesitant, and emptier.


LIU YUE (b. 1981) was born and currently resides in Shanghai. Liu Yue's works often take objective things as the starting point, through the extreme intervention of cognitive experience, making the process of in-depth research have a strong sense of agnosticism and the unknown. Under the limiting extrapolations, cognition creates "cracks" in itself. This process of extracting and purifying "impurities" from the essence of things is exactly what Liu Yue is extremely obsessed with. Liu Yue was nominated for the Art Sanya Huayu Youth Award in 2017, and nominated for the Jimei Arles Discovery Award in 2021.


LU LEI was born in Jiangsu in 1972. He graduated from the Sculpture Department of China Academy of Art in 1998, and now works and lives in Beijing. As one of the important artists in contemporary Chinese installation art, Lu Lei's works show sensitivity and precise control of material texture. His works often exude classical mysticism and allegorical inner qualities. Lu Lei is good at creating images with a vivid imagination. In his works, social symbols, personal memories, and sensitive intuitions of material attributes are combined to form a closed system with hidden orders.


ZHANG DING (born in 1980, based in Shanghai)  For more than a decade, Zhang Ding is known for creating large-scale sculptures, installations and videos, and also for periodically curating live events that are musical and performative in nature, collaborating with artists from all fields.
Zhang Ding's large-scale installations are totalised and integrated; the meticulous structures combining the artist’s favourite motifs and formal elements assimilate various components together into an architectonic entity. From a New Brutalist gesture that locks down a museum space in Shanghai, turning it into a prison; to a conceptual and physical staircase between different project spaces in downtown Beijing; to a series of impromptu gigs over a period of fortnight at the ICA London, inviting bands and musicians to improvise one next to another, compressing and distorting sounds, images and spaces, Zhang Ding presents and deals with live processes and experiences in a thorough and novel fashion.


ZHAO YANG was born in 1970 in Siping, Jilin Province, China. He graduated from the China Academy of Art in 1995 and currently lives and works in Hangzhou. Figures in the paintings are actors, posing for the director to fulfill his requirement. All these experiences, emotions, histories, stories, and feelings are expressed smoothly with Zhao’s plain painting language.

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Related Artists: LU LEI 陆垒 ZHAO YANG 赵洋 LIU YUE 刘月 CHEN XIAOYUN 陈晓云 ZHANG DING 张鼎

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