KAF(K11 Art Foundation) is very pleased to represent Hu Jieming’s solo exhibition ‘Spectacle’ at Shanghai chi K11 art space. This exhibition includes his 22 photography works series ‘Postcard’ (2002-2012) and his video installation ‘One Hundred Years in One Minute’ (2010) .

The postcards, a collection of imaginary landscapes assembled with well known landmarks from the four corners of the world, manage to be both familiar and alien at the same time. Artifical and yet with a high degree of realism, they evoke landscapes of the soul.

If the reconstructed places in the ‘Postcard’ series illustrates the somewhat absurd utopian scene which Hu Jieming has always looked for, ‘One Hundred Years in One Minute’ is more about compressing experiences and feelings into quantum sized art bits.

This installation consists of 204 one minute videos displayed in an array of transparent storage boxes. The video image is a deconstruction of modern and contemporary masterpieces, genuine gems of human civilization from the past centuries.

These devastating deconstructions however do not lead to historical criticism. In the artist’s opinion, they are just experiments: “‘One Hundred Years in One Minute’ does not have the ambition to change the present by resorting to the past. It is more like a bold experiment, to explore the possibilites of different combinations of the past centutry’s visual memory within one minute.”

In ‘One Hundred Years in One Minute’ Hu Jieming presents more possibilities in terms of time line. The extraordinary scenes brought about by random overlapping and encounters are a major motivation to create this work.

The exhibition title “Spectacle” comes from the quote by Guy Ernest Debord: "Spectacle is not a collection of images , but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” (La Societé du Spectacle, Guy Ernest Debord, 1967).

-K11 Art Foundation