Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the opening of Five Monologic Spatial Dialogues, a group exhibition by the most important five artists in China: Liu Qinghe, Sui Jianguo, Su Xinping, Xu Bing, and Zhan Wang. Curated by Yin Ji’nan, the exhibition will open in the gallery's second space in Beijing, on January 4, 2020, in the Beijing gallery’s second space.
The human context has been globalized; although the trade dispute is not a substitute for a cold war, it has occupied our minds to a certain extent. We know that nationalism cannot replace internationalism, and realism cannot replace idealism. Of course, these pressing, real subjects cannot necessarily become perfect artistic subjects.
Spring Festival is coming close on the heels of the New Year, and between the international New Year and Chinese New Year, we have added this exhibition, placing five very distinctive artists in one space and creating dialogues in monologues and monologues in dialogues. Proposing an artistic idea that they can all agree upon is very difficult, but they have similar backgrounds and international cultural contexts, and they were all born in the 1950s and 1960s. They were witnesses to Reform and Opening and social transformation in China, and they were participants in Chinese contemporary art movements. They provided their own ideas and art forms.
The earliest thought behind this exhibition came from a book I edited, entitled How Do We Make Art Today? (Shandong Fine Arts Publishing House). It contained written statements from five artists, including Mao Xuhui from Yunnan and Chao Ge from Beijing. These statements were essentially monologues, and the ideals behind monologues hope to achieve understanding through dialogue. I hope that they can use tangible works of art, not words, to present monologues and dialogues in the same space. Their dialogue with one another, their collective dialogue with the changing world, and their living dialogue with their souls provide an art form for spiritual and intellectual monologues.
Yin Ji’nan
Curator
Yin Ji’nan is a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is a noted art historian and contemporary art critic, and he is the editor-in-chief for the Joint Publishing book series Open Art History. He is currently the director of the Institute for the Advanced Studies of Images and History and the dean of the School of Art and Humanities, both at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.