The Branches of Time -Photography Solo Exhibition of Fu Bailin By Xiang LiPing “Time keeps branching into countless futures.” - Jorge Luis Borges Heidegger used to say: “‘the life of man’ is a ‘dwelling for the poetic’”, “poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling”, “But where is the space and time left for poetry in today’s dwelling?” The pursuit of fame, fortune, power, and influence fundamentally deviates from the nature of dwelling. From his perspective, what we called convenient and beautiful modern life is nothing but being alive; Sadly, we have no awareness of living in such poverty and darkness. Fortunately, we have artists. They are keenly aware of the poverty of the human spirit, the distance from the divinity, and the gloom of the world. Their creative work can bridge the rift between the poor era and the poetic dwelling. The Existence of Authenticity The living condition of Fu Bailin is like the authentic existence that Heidegger admired:“Once we choose our career, our life will be both in the present and in the future, and connected with the past at the same time. Everything is the present, and our life will blossom in this career with the surging passion of being alive...” Bailin followed his heart and nature, gave up the convenience of digital technology, returned to film photography, and explored in depth the mystery and magnificence of nature. He always treats his life and photography creation with such...
The Day is at Hand Danqing Chen It must be extra enjoyable to compose a poem to draw a picture, or draw a picture to compose a poem. I can't be a painter, or a poet who only writes, if I don't have the chance to enjoy. Although I am familiar with the joy of painting, looking at Daozi's subsequent paintings, I was infected with a strange pleasure. Is that the pleasure between poetry and painting? "Book Burning", "Sacrifice of the Sea", "Darkness at Noon", "the Blind Angel Weaving the Lightning into the looted Head"... I don't believe that he drafted these verses in advance. When he starts painting, he is no longer a poet—the entanglement and carnival of pen and paper belong to another dimension—when the painting is finished, the poet wakes up, jumps up, and intervenes, so there is "Elegy of the Righteous", "Skull of the Prophet", and "Ocean of the World", "Do not Go Gentle Into that Good Night." What does that mean? I don't guess the title of the painting, nor do I guess his painting. Even if he hides in painting because of despair, painting is still an extremely pleasant thing, and may not be equalized with emotions, thoughts, concepts, and even poetry: painting is close to a game. (Perhaps poetry is the same, but I don’t know.) Daozi is not the "amateur" painter we usually meet. Seeing his affirmation, recklessness, and changeability in his...
M Art Center is honored to hold the third solo exhibition for French photographer, Guillaume Hebert. The exhibition presents two series of works, "Updated Landscape" in 2017 and "Beyond The Ordinary" in 2019. In this period of time, Hebert's unique perspective and advanced discernment can hopefully arouse people's reflection and resonance. “Updated Landscape” - Cultural Gaze in Glimmering “Updated Landscape” is mainly about the environmental issues since Hebert’s six years residency in Asia in 2012. The imageries are from Taipei, Shanghai and other cities in China. “Beyond the Ordinary” is created by Hebert when he moved back to Europe in 2018. Facing the impact and sadness of rapid environmental change and cultural collapse, these series took a year to complete in Berlin and Paris. These two series of works created between 2017 - 2019, as the theme of the exhibition. Using the perspective of contemporary photography, “Updated Landscape” and “Beyond the Ordinary” combines the works of William Turner (1775-1851) ‘Avernue lake Aeneas and the Cumaei Sibylle’; William Marlow (1740-1813) ‘View of Matlock Bath’; and Cole Thomas (1801-1848) ‘The Course of Empire The Savage State’. Grasping painting and photography enables the audience to form a misperception at first sight. Photography is just an extension of painting. The idyllic natural landscape in the picture forms a satirical contrast with the contemporary urban landscape. The naturally integrated picture reshapes our perception and aesthetics, and poetically depicts the tragedy of ecology and culture. The...
‘Selah’ is Hebrew and appears 70 times in the recitation of the Psalm. It carries the meaning of segmentation, transposition, acoustic intensity, interlude, and extension; as intended for the theme of the exhibition. ‘Higgaion’ also conveys the idea of meditation and silence. It appears in the performance of Psalms, which represents ‘rest’. It takes a few breaks to sing to the ‘Higgaion' and in the mean time, the audience is silent and breathless; which is the deeper intention of this exhibition. In some of the works that emphasized the reproduction of past exhibitions, the intention was to reflect, pause for a moment, and slow down for the future. Henri Nouwen, the greatest priest of the 20th century, said, “Somewhere we know that without silence words lost their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.” So are people, art and exhibition.
M Art Center is proud to present the Long Chin-San Photography Exhibition we have been preparing for many years on September 7, 2019: Yuan Su (Elements). The exhibition includes dozens of works provided by Ms. Long Yuwen, the daughter of Long Chin-San. The time frame of these works spans from 1919 to 1980, and the works include original silver photography, platinum prints and limited reproductions. This is the first time ever for an art gallery of mainland China to exhibit a collection of works provided directly by the family of Long Chin-San, apart from several museum exhibitions. The curator Liu Tian took the meaning of "Yuan Heng Li Zhen" from traditional Chinese classic Book of Changesand. "Hui Shi Hou Su" from Analects of Confucius and named the exhibition Yuan Su (Elements). Through the analysis and display of Long Chin-San's creation and visual image, the exhibition will present a brand new interpretation of the elements construction in Long Chin-San's classic "Composite Picture". And it is implicitly contrasted with the Euclid’s Elements and the "element" worldview contained in modern chemistry, in response to the long-lasting ideology of "Chinese in essence, Western in practice" behind the work of Long Chin-San which is still active today. Yuan Su (Elements) – Selected photographs of Long Chin-San "Yuan Heng Li Zhen", a term in the Book of Changes, represents four stages of life from birth to maturity; "Hui Shi Hou Su", a saying from Analects of...
The 8 young artists who participated in this exhibition all have their own unique experiences of studying abroad, from a geographical perspective we can see they all share a collective “Off-Shoreness”. But perhaps what art provides us with is not the obsession or promise of some other shore, instead, it’s the continuous venturing offshore in the artist’s processes of reflection and creation. In doing so, they explore and depict a myriad of possible and impossible “Shores”: Regarding those bewildering, painful connotations of what it means to be a human, in the boundless of abyss of ambiguity, on the threshold of truth attainable via sensibility and rationality. “It takes 10 hours and 50 minutes to fly from San Francisco to Shanghai, the whole journey stretches across a 9872-mile distance. The time difference between Shanghai and San Francisco is 15 hours.” Zhao Qian began working on the conceptual framework of the piece “A Field Guide”by dealing with the intersection where these organic bodies and abstract numbers meet. The displacement of time, space, and culture ushers in a montage of the senses causing the sequence, linguistic logic, and narrative style of that once stable image to become loose, flexible, and blurry. Like The Instruction Manual written by Julio Cortazar, in this manual, the artist does not provide any familiar paths or language, instead, through children's graffiti, models of hopscotch games, and amalgamated imagery your eyes guide you into desolate and dismal domains. A...
Looking at the unearthly poetic and spiritual touch of Guillaume Hebert’s work in such collections as Sea Etude, Suite for Shadows on the Sea, Rocks from Other Hills, and Apocalypse, and weighing and considering about the philosophical thinking and the production course behind his creations, I cannot help but think of the pioneer in German romantics-the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. It has long been noted by Hölderlin that, with the constant expansion of capitalization and industrial civilization, the human spirit has been lost, and that mechanical technology and utilitarian pragmatism have taken the human race away from the original cradle of the soul to the realms of coldness and strangeness. In the reflection of how French Revolution eventually descended to blood and fire, the poet realized that the rationality upheld in the Enlightenment was not the highest principle, and that what transcended knowledge and rationality should still be a true understanding of the origin of life and life itself, the fulfillment of life in its struggle, the unity of subject and object, and the synchronization of the son of God and the son of Man. And as far as Hölderlin is concerned, only the experience of beauty and the divine belief in love can lead us to this unity: As long as friendliness and purity dwell in our hearts, We may measure ourselves not unfavorably with the divine. Is God unknown? Is he manifest as the sky? This I tend to...
As a child, China haunted me. It was a mysterious country, a part of the world that I had discovered through watching the adventures of Tintin and how fascinated my mother was with Chinese culture. It was the first trip my parents made in the 1980s. I would spend hours looking at the photos they had taken, the flyers that had brought back and the colourful tickets that gave access to the museums and temples they visited. Throughout my childhood, I dreamt to escape to China, up until I went there for the first time 1999. I would return many times thereafter, for personal and artistic projects because China and especially Shanghai became more than just an exotic destination, it became one of my main sources of inspiration. The works presented at M Art Center are the result of days spent surveying and painting in the streets of one of the last working-class neighborhoods in central Shanghai. It is a testimony of my love for this traditional culture that has gradually submerged under the glass, concrete towers and the new temples of consumerism. My way of repopulating these old alleyways of laughter and imagination that the children of Shanghai used as playgrounds. This exhibition represents my dream of China, intimately linked to childhood and a universal need to escape in a world that is increasingly incomprehensible. -Seth
Unconsciously, my paintings have circled around the same topic for ten years. Giorgio Morandi, whose artistic life is covered by duplicate themes, fascinates me. Repetition is a powerful tool in itself as it refers to a very slow process that one has to experience, during which time, structure, reflection and emotion are all represented. The question which I have been asked most frequently over the course of the past ten years is: Why do I keep painting grass? Mark Rothko illustrates what is desperation by merely several layers in bright colors. He tells us a tragedy without any narrative element on his canvas. Similarly, my first painting of grass was created during the most painful period in my life. By contrast to Rothko, I prefer to use dark colors for the whole piece and flourish it with precise and complicated strokes, which gives the picture the beauty of vitality but also twists and loneliness. I draw more than just grass. The repeated specific topic of grass finally traces to the view of my inside world. One day, I came to understand the common destiny of all creatures on earth, including myself, through my sadness. Those helpless and inevitable pains in life become so sublime, beautiful and poignant that they cannot be summarized using words. When I look back on the rearranged pictures, I see that there were determination and energy which transcend the twists and the loneliness. That is light...
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