Focusing on the "around" is not a new attitude. Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Bresson were all famous urban observers, and the attention to and expression of ordinary things is an important orientation of modern art. In fact, it is not a serious study, but an attitude, learning from life, learning from spontaneous forms, which implies resistance to elitism, even if the authorship cannot be left behind in the end, it can avoid to a certain extent the frame and insipidity brought by knowledge, and let the work is revitalized.

The Art Center in the Mountain - The Gallery, photographed by Jin Qiu Ye

But in my opinion, learning from the everyday around us also means rethinking the meaning of "nature". Usually we think of natural things such as plants and trees as "natural. But in a broader sense, everything that is untamed and unthinking, including colonies, crafts and graffiti, has a certain non-linear character of nature, and the energy in improvised music, modern dance and inked landscapes seems to come from the same reason. The everyday around us is natural because of its unconsciousness, and enriched by it. In contrast, urban development areas and neighborhoods restored in the name of heritage have lost this natural vitality. To learn from one's surroundings is to learn from nature, to pay homage to individuals and individuality, especially in an age when everything is becoming homogeneous and smooth.

Li Han and Jin Qiu Ye's "The World Around Us" Exhibition Wall

At the end of last year, I curated this exhibition titled "The World Around Us" together with Li Han, the founder of Ezao Society and an architect. We brought out the relativity and universal meaning of the surrounding and the world to arouse everyone's reflection on reality. As stated in the introduction of the exhibition, "The neighborhood and the world represent the two poles of life. The side of the world is the neighborhood, it is the daily life, it is plain and uneventful, day by day, it is personal, micro and concrete; the world is the distance, it is the big event, the hot topic, it is exciting and complex, it is total, macro and abstract." The tension between the two exists not only in perception, it is also a living reality for everyone, especially under the influence of the epidemic, when people's desire to explore the world is just mobilized and forced to be put on hold, when the scope of activities is repeatedly reduced, when the invisible boundaries are tightened until they bind their hands and feet, and when the world becomes more and more out of reach. At this point, the ability to discover and transcend becomes more and more important. Rediscovering what is around us becomes the path to the world. And while the epidemic may only be a metaphor, invisible boundaries may have always existed, some imposed from the outside and some from within. Dialectically, the world is so big that it can never be exhausted and therefore has no concrete meaning. Human existence must be rooted in individual experience, which is an infinite perception born from the limited world around us. It can be said that, despite the differences in culture and language, there is a certain similarity in the everyday through the ages that makes life analogous, and that is why we are moved by the poetry of the Bible or the plays of Shakespeare. In this sense, the individual and the group, the surrounding and the world are closely linked.

Special creation of Beijing Architecture University, "Suburban Weeds", photographed by Wang Hongyue

But this is only a method, not a fact in itself, because differences are always more important than similarities, and the ability to see and imagine differences is a symptom of the width and breadth of life. Therefore, this exhibition expects to explore "around" as a path to open up a mesoscopic world that belongs to oneself and to a wider group of people. In this mesoscopic state, individuals and the world can establish a truly relevant, resonant and self-contained relationship. Based on this, this exhibition invites eight creators from different backgrounds to explore the relationship between their surroundings and the world around four paths (construction, behavior, picture, and narrative), presenting a rich and diverse "world around them". In each path, two creators form an analogous relationship through their respective works, thus presenting similarities and differences, inevitabilities and possibilities of the same path. We hope to explore a method that can be used by everyone, and at the same time, we hope to see that the same method and the same path can produce different thinking and diverse results, rather than a standard product.

Qiao Xiaodao's "Temple Bar", photo by Wang Hongyue

In the "Construction" section, we invited two artists, Qiao Xiaodou and Luo Yujie, to "build a house" in the exhibition hall. In recent years, Qiao Xiaodou has conducted a series of construction experiments in Yunnan, using old and everyday materials to build houses with an anti-academic attitude that has a unique fairy-tale atmosphere and everyday attributes. This time, his exhibit "Temple Bar" is a collage of childhood memories of the Monkey King and Erlang Shen into a small temple with wheels, and a giant scale panda crouching on it holding a cell phone, in a pop atmosphere that metaphorically represents the simplicity, wit, figuration and reality of Chinese folklore. Luo Yujie uses the work "Bird Cage" to express his observation of his surroundings. This huge bird cage is actually derived from the traditional bamboo bird cage process, which is a fusion of standardized manufacturing and hand-building, and even 3D printing and other construction solutions of different eras, becoming a "building" of ambiguous scale between birds and people. It also expresses the thinking of "nature" and "control". The bird cage is large enough for the birds to be relatively free in it, and the bird food even starts to sprout in the bottom of the cage and grows into a furry lawn.

Bark Studio "Flower and Herb Tea Club", photo by Wang Hongyue

The participating artists in the "Performance" section are Hu Qianqiang and Bark Studio. Hu Qianqian's work "Shelter" expresses the invisible "emptiness" through the actors' body movements, interacting with the equipment and space in the museum. It breaks the conventional exhibition strategy of placing objects in space and makes space visible through the body. For the artist, shelter means temporary and ephemeral, and also belongs to a certain concept of space. This temporary concept of space is a kind of performance: built at will, dismantled instantly, switching in and out of dynamics, but extremely important for survival. This entanglement of time and space is most evident in "Shelter". Studio Inukai from Japan is not an architectural firm in the usual sense, their work is complex and diverse, covering a wide range of fields such as architectural design, urban research, and public space reconstruction. This time they designed "Flower and Herb Tea Club" by borrowing traditional Chinese imagery such as flowers, moon, and hexagons to consider the possibility of past life entering the real public environment. They select plants from local gardens, dry them and make them into herbal teas for drinking. The tea pavilion is made of thin, solid wood multi-layered panels with a hole larger than the window opening in traditional gardens, giving the space of the museum a different sense of scale when viewed from the outside.

In the section of "Pictures", we have invited two artists, Huang Heshan and Chen Wei. Bald Force City" is a magical realism virtual city construction project curated by digital artist Huang Heshan, which explores the dystopian poetry of Chinese cities and villages that are full of energy but cannot be seen directly. In the virtual city, the real fragments of China's urban-rural mix are deconstructed and reconstructed into a consumer social landscape where elegance and vulgarity are blended. At the exhibition, three walls simultaneously demonstrate different scenes of Baldwin City, together forming a panoramic urban area that is colorful, unbearably vulgar, yet irresistibly attractive. Chen Wei's work "Fault" is reminiscent of the glittering neon billboards in the city, which gradually break down over time, blurring and fragmenting the light and shadows, making the words illegible or ambiguous, but making the night gorgeous and confusing. The artist expresses the beauty of this "malfunction" in the exhibition hall, while the greeting "Where are you going tonight" keeps flashing on the screen, as if the audience is in a part of the city, running with longing to the next malfunctioning miracle.

Luo Yujie's "Birdcage", photographed by Jin Qiu Ye

In the "Narrative" section, we have two artists, Lu Qingyi and Wen Ling. Lu Qingyi's "Spring in Luodian" shows the changes in his hometown in a truly everyday way. In the face of enormous changes, the seemingly featureless everyday life, the people and scenes that are so commonplace become unfamiliar and begin to emerge from common knowledge to become the protagonists. Looking back from the reference frame of the city, everything in the hometown becomes vivid and clear, and existence itself becomes meaningful. The mural "Mooncake Man" created by Wen Ling comes from a group of cartoon characters in his previous works, whose faces are big and round, resembling a mooncake. Wen Ling uses his graffiti-like painting language to describe the daily life of the mooncake people, who, like us, eat, shop, and play with their cell phones, but when enlarged to the scale of giants, the daily graffiti and the monumental mural fuse together again, as if people used to do in ancient times.

The eight works in the exhibition are united under the theme of "The World Around Us" through a plausible thread. The identities and nationalities of the authors are diverse, and under the conditions of the epidemic, most of our communication with the artists is online, and the production and placement of the exhibits are digitally simulated. The pavilion was designed to coincide with the opening exhibition, and special consideration was given to the display of the large-scale installation. A single large space, 16m square and 6m high, was set aside in the pavilion to overlook the entire site through a "walkway" on the east side. As the designer of the pavilion, I hope to achieve "the interplay of art and space", hoping that "space is artwork", and that people in it can break the limits of scale, appreciate artwork from inside and outside at the same time, and feel it in movement. This pavilion, together with the opening exhibition, is a testimony to a special period of three years, which allows us to look more carefully at the smallness of our surroundings and to appreciate the magnitude of the world.

Article Source:艺术与设计

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