Galerie Urs Meile is pleased to announce its participation in the West Bund Art & Design Fair Shanghai. We will present new works from our represented artists including Shao Fan, Xie Nanxing, Yan Xing, Yang Mushi and Zhou Siwei.
The creative media focus of Cheng Ran (*1981 in Inner Mongolia) is mainly video. His parodies, distortions, and recreations of classics pull their inspirations broadly from Western culture, poetry, and films. After a three-month collaborative residency with the K11 Art Foundation and the New Museum, his solo exhibition in the United States, entitled Diary of a Madman, opened end of October at the New Museum in New York. We will present Storyboard Film (2015, HD video of a series of drawings, dolby digital 5.1, 21’59”, edition of 6 + 1 AP), the important digital boards of his well-known 9-Hour Film Project. Storyboard Film borrows the cinematic technique of storyboarding: showing planned and altered shots, combined with the sound of murmuring. Together they form an abstract film of non-existent images.
Hu Qingyan (*1982 in Weifang, Shandong) is adept at using the simplest media and materials to mold and reconstruct space. In the series of sculpture works that will be exhibited, Nothing but you can put at home (2016, steel, car paint, 45.5 x 58 x 25 cm), the artist did not stop at his usual reinvention of space, but went on further to question artistic creation and the very identity of artists. This series of works will also be exhibited at his newest solo exhibition, 空壳 Hollow Husk, which will show at Galerie Urs Meile’s Lucerne branch in November.
We will also bring a work related to memory that was produced in Jingdezhen, China by German artist Tobias Rehberger (*1966 in Esslingen, Germany). An 11-piece small ceramic bird sculpture Zippy (1 year) – Zippy (11 years) (2014, porcelain, 11 pieces, each ca. 14 x 26 x 17 cm) is spread over our gallery booth. What these small figurines depict is a birthday present the artist received for his first birthday: a pet canary. This canary accompanied Rehberger for 11 years, in this work, Rehberger lets the bird revive showing him in 11 different poses.
The newest solo exhibition from Li Gang (*1986 in Dali, Yunnan) is entitled Li Gang and will open on November 5th at Galerie Urs Meile Beijing. At the art fair, we will exhibit his newest sculpture work Gravity 2 (2016, jade bracelets, steel tube, 278 x 76 x 65 cm). This work is about seeing and capturing male-female relationships within a population of migrants. Working in jade and steel, the artist obfuscates the normal functional purposes of the materials, instead emphasized that the two materials together constitute a unique aesthetic. The work is a realization of the artist’s pursuit of a realistic means of metaphoric expression.
We will also exhibit The Divine Anti-Japanese Goose No. 3 (2016, oil on canvas, 240 x 315 cm) by Wang Xingwei (*1969 in Shenyang). This work echoes the “disgrace” element from his newest solo exhibition, Honor and Disgrace, which closes in Beijing at the end of October. The artist has chosen hyperbolic fictional ‘anti-Japanese World War II stories’ as a subject, and negative images of Japanese devils and Chinese traitors are vividly depicted and described. It is also a representative work of the artist’s quest that began in 2008, integrating and promoting shape, the feeling of motion, simplification, style, as well as the idea of the work as a part of a series.