As PIFO Gallery’s original exhibition, ‘A+A’ Exhibition has held 7 times. ‘A+A’ exhibition was formed by artists and the gallery going dutch, now become a group exhibition, which gallery invites curators and artists to complete it. Focus on artists’ individuation, put artists’ latest exploration as exhibition’s springboard. In 2010, it begins to take Biennale Exhibition mode. In the past 9 years, there are 104 artists in total attended, and 25 of them joined more than once. Through ‘A+A’ Exhibition, people start getting to know them.

The curator BAO Dong will invite six artists for this exhibition. They are LIN Ke, LIU Yue, LIAO Fei, LU Pingyuan, XIN Yunpeng, ZHOU Siwei. He use ‘too smart to be good?’ to describe their works for the sensitive and intelligence of them. ‘Too good to be smart’ are daily words, but it contains two levels of rhetorical irony.  The original pejorative ‘too… to…’ as a compliment extent complement the rhetoric of ‘smart’, it became commendatory rhetoric sentence. ‘Too smart to be good’ are very normal words, but they have two levels of rhetorical irony as well. 

Compare to smart, sincere, justice seem to have primacy in ethic value, and in the category of artistic value, ‘smart’ seems never been the first class virtues. If you use smart to evaluate an artist’s work, which usually means you have to praise the artist’s intellectual, meanwhile, you also have your won intellectual doubt. In fact, ‘smart’ always unconsciously equated with ‘petty trick’, and in the art area, smart is only brought some small ideas. People are used to have more requirements to art, such as profound social significance, correct political stance, the real experience of the state and the ultimate sensory effects, etc., ‘smart’ is just considered as a method to achieve the goals. But what if we put ‘smart’ at the first place to survey art?

This exhibition attempts present the artist's clever side, more precisely, their self worth on the fickle world. Intellectual is no longer take as just a instrumental, it will be stripped out as a independent discussions object, from the rhetoric. If this idea can be established, the aimless ‘smart’ will be as important as ‘aesthetic’. But in fact, nimble, fast, exact, lightness, easy... which are included or involved in smart, has never been so important yet been underestimated.

Artists: Lin Ke, Liu Yue, Liao Fei, Lu Pingyuan, Xin Yunpeng, Zhou Siwei

*image (left)
© PIFO New Art Gallery