testimony for the future
2024.3.30-2024.6.30
Artist：Gao lei, li nu
curator: zhu zhu
The concept of the exhibition is inspired by the difference between the space of Beiqiu Museum ofContemporary Art and that of the “White Box”. As an artistic space transformed from an air-raidshelter, the art museum retains the previous structural characteristics and sense of historical relicsas well as its geographic environment that is inseparable from the Jilongshan Mountain. The spaceof the "air-raid shelter" is treated as a place where Gao Lei and Li Nu store and exchange theirworks. One day, far in the future, upon looking back, the door of the “shelter” would be opened,displaying testimony for the collective memory and reflection of the two intersecting individuallives as well as of the present era.
,Li Nu, Warm/September, 2022, Nichrome wire, silica glass, electricity, 525×95×25cm, Courtesy of the artist and SPURS Gallery
Gao Lei, The Door of Perception, 2016, Bronze, stainless steel, Overall: 225×284×23cm; Durian: 30×23×20cm; Hot Water Bag: 36×19.5×9cm, Private Collection
In the specific structural arrangement of the exhibition, works of the two artists are organicallygrouped together to form direct thematic dialogues, superimposed visual tensions, or understandableinterconnections, weaving the two independent forms of individual creations into a bare thread inthe tunnel of time and space. In terms of their respective methodologies, Gao Lei's expression hasthe constant appearance of rational thinking, while Li Nu constantly shifts between lightness andheaviness, silence and explosion. Their works are both witnesses to reality and metaphysicalinquiries. Compared with the local conceptual artists of the previous generation, Gao Lei and Li Nuavoid excessively-symbolic production and respond to the common circumstances by focusing moreon art itself.
The exhibition, for the first time, will be presented in both the main gallery and the tunnel sub-spaceof Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art. The duo exhibition will be unveiled on March 30, 2024,and closed on June 30, 2024.
gao lei
Artist
Gao Lei’s art practice spans multiple media, including installation, sculpture, photography, and painting. Gao often adopts everyday objects and “standardized” industrial products as the essential component, whose works are manipulated through synthetic or abstract regulatory forms, in which the functions, properties, and meanings are tampered with or added through blurring transformation. Thus, they become a scale or model for measuring various domains such as the body, power, consumption, and religion. Through precise material testing and vectorization of graphics, Gao’s works, along with the objects they confront and the questions raised, alternate between spatial and conceptual dimensions, allowing the viewer to re-examine and remeasure our inherent boundaries with the world using a standard other than that of experience.
Gao’s works have been the subject of solo exhibitions at White Space (Beijing, China), Arario Gallery (Seoul, Korea), Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, etc. His works have also been exhibited in international art institutions including, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Minsheng Art Museum (Shanghai), Long Museum, Tank Shanghai, Hao Art Museum, Guangdong Times Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum, Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, Spain), Tinguely Museum (Basel, Switzerland), Ludwig Museum im Deutschherrenhaus (Coblence, Germany), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Korea), and others.
li nu
Artist
Li Nu, graduated with an MA in sculpture from Royal College of Art, London, Li Nu won the RBS (Royal British Society of Sculptors) Bursary Awards in 2015 and is a member of the RBS. He currently lives and works in Beijing.
Rooted in everyday life, Li Nu’s practice captures personal experiences and subjective feelings and thus reflects shared sentiments of the broader environment, individual’s mood swings, and the collective mental state in the social evolution. Drawn to the accidental, the unexpected, the present rather than techniques or forms, Li resists visual monotony as well as coherent, strategic, stylized methods pursued by many Late Modernists, and explores instead the potentialities of installation, contemporary sculpture, experimental video, events, etc. He subverts the perceived boundaries between documentary and fiction, representation and abstraction, transforming seemingly unpromising materials into metaphorical, piercing, humorous, poetic, and dramatic expressions with multiple connotations.
ZHU ZHU
Curator
Zhu Zhu, a poet, curator, and art critic, was born in September 1969. He has been awarded the Anne Kao Poetry Prize, the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for Criticism (CCAA), and the Hu Shi Poetry Prize. He has authored numerous collections of poetry, essays, and art criticism, including the French edition of poetry collection "Blue Smoke" (2004, translated by Chantal Chen—Andro), "The Grey Carnival—Contemporary Chinese Art Since 2000" (2013, published by Guangxi Normal University Press' "Ideal Country" series, 2016, Taiwan's Eslite Press), "Only One Gram" (2017, Henan University Press), and the English edition of poetry collection "Wild Great Wall" (2018, published by Phoneme Media in the United States).