Chinese Windows 2010: Big Draft – Shanghai Chinese Contemporary Art from the Sigg Collection 19.11.2010 – 6.2.2011
Shanghai’s Diverse Contemporary Art
The exhibition Mahjong: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Sigg Collection took place in the Kunstmuseum Bern in 2005. Media response was overwhelming both at home and abroad. The show was an ideal introduction to Chinese contemporary art, which received little attention at the time. The Mahjong catalogue is still regarded as standard literature on the topic today. Initiated in 2006, the Chinese Windows exhibition series allows us to further collaborate with Uli and Rita Sigg, so we can give our audience the opportunity of viewing their extensive collection regularly. Chinese Windows 2010 focuses on Contemporary Art from Shanghai, a metropolis of superlatives.
The Kunstmuseum Bern is exhibiting works selected from the Sigg Collection
by thirteen artists who live and work in Shanghai as well as showing
works by two Beijing artists who explicitly engage with this megacity
and dynamic seaport in their art.
A diverse art scene
With more than 18 million inhabitants, Shanghai – or the “city over the
sea,” if we translate the Chinese characters – is among the ten largest
metropolises in the world. The incredible pressure due to the demand for innovation, triggered by China’s growing international economic
significance, finds expression in the breathtaking momentum in which
Shanghai with its millions of inhabitants is constantly changing. The
city perpetually reinvents itself anew, generating tension-filled
contrasts of traditional and modern China, of Western and Chinese
thought.
Shanghai’s progressive development, permeated with contradictions and
tension, impacts its very diverse art scene. Besides other venues,
numerous galleries provide a platform for recent Chinese art as well as
events such as the Shanghai Biennale, the Shanghai Art Fair, and this
year also the Expo 2010.
Immense creative potential
It is difficult to single out typical artistic issues, content, or
pictorial language in regard to art in Shanghai. Rather, approaches in
art stand out on account of their great diversity in content and in
formal aspects. We therefore find not only painting represented in the
exhibition but also photography and video art, sculpture and
installations. While Shi Guorui engages with outward appearances and
presents us with a futuristic view of Shanghai with his urban
silhouettes, Jin Jiangbo, in an interactive installation, zooms in on
the life of a day laborer. Zhang Qing has taxis dance in his video, and
Shi Yong evokes the anonymity of city life with small plaster-of-Paris
figures. In contrast, Ni Youyu designs geometrical experimental spaces
on canvas in which he inscribes bizarre landscapes.
The exhibition gives insight into the city’s diverse and vibrant art world, which appears to constantly be in a planning stage – continually
incomplete, always changing, never final, and thereby endlessly
promising. The selection, comprising fifteen male and female artists,
brings home to us Shanghai’s present tremendous creative potential.
The exhibition includes works by: Chen Yuyu, Chi Peng, Ji Wenyu & Zhu Weibing, Jin Feng, Jin Jiangbo, Liu Jianhua, Lu Chunsheng, Ni Youyu, Pan Xiaorong, Shi Guorui, Shi
Yong, Xu Zhen, Zhang Jian-Jun, Zhang Qing
