Arario Gallery Beijing is honored to present this year’s first major group exhibition, Almost Tangible. This exhibition gathers 10 engaging international artists to present their artworks in various artistic mediums such as, oil painting, sculpture, installation, video and photography, in an attempt to reveal the common differences on experiential perspectives, creative mode and artistic language between artists in the East and West under the global context. Some of the artworks are selected from the Korean Arario Collection series that will be showcased for the first time outside of Europe.

Almost Tangible attempts to explore the encounter of the “subject” and the “other”. According to the philosopher of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, tangibility (Touch) is not a reality but a potential of life that does not exist unless it encounters with the other. Tangibility(Touch) is more fundamental than visuality, in other words, hearing, sight, taste and other senses can be restored to touch. Then, how do we allow our bodies to depart from the existing rules of contact with others among all in situ tangible contacts in order to increase the possibility (unknown) and significance with the outside world? Hereby, artistic writing and appreciation perhaps need to return to a “tangible(Touch)” mode, that emphasize senses, and its exploration on the unknown, invisible, untouchable and the enigmatic. This exhibition presented by Arario Gallery aims to guide the audience to capture traces of our senses, by using the tangible and contacts to replace our accurate intelligence and visual perception, so we would open up and break boundaries in order to take command of the ever changing tendency of the future.

About the Artists

Hans Op de Beeck

1969 - Turnhout, Belgium
Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck lives and works in Brussels, where he has developed his career through international exhibitions over the past ten years. His work consists of sculptures, installations, video work, photography, animated films, drawings, paintings and writing (short stories). It is his quest for the most effective way of presenting the concrete contents of each work that determines the medium that the artist ultimately selects. The scale can vary from the size of a small watercolour to a large, three-dimensional installation of 300m2.The artist not only uses a very wide variety of media, but also deliberately employs a diversity of aesthetic forms, ranging from an economical, minimalist visual language to overloaded, exaggerated designs, always with the aim of articulating the content of the work as precisely as possible.

Leo Villareal

1967 - Albuquerque, NM
Leo Villareal (1967, Albuquerque, New Mexico) is an American artist living and working in New York City. His work combines LED lights and encoded computer programming to create illuminated displays.Villareal received his BA from Yale University and his MPS from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Throughout his career, Villareal has sought to work with the newest developments in technology, beginning with strobe lights in 1997 and moving into the LEDs utilized in this exhibition.

Mona Hatoum

1952- Palestinian, Beirut
Mona Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952 and now lives and works in London and Berlin.Mona Hatoum’s poetic and political oeuvre is realised in a diverse and often unconventional range of media, including installations, sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. She started her career making visceral performance art in the 1980s that focused with great intensity on the body. Since the beginning of the 1990s, however, her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installations that aimed to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. In her singular sculptures, Hatoum has transformed familiar, every-day, domestic objects such as chairs, cots and kitchen utensils into things foreign, threatening and dangerous. In Feb 2011, Mona Hatoum was awarded the 2011 Joan Miró Prize.

Ugo Rondinone

1963 - Brunnen, Switzerland
Ugo Rondinone was born in Brunnen, Switzerland, in 1964.Both nationally and internationally, Ugo Rondinone (b.1964) is one of the most noted contemporary Swiss artists. He was master student under Ernst Caramelle at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst (University of Applied Arts) in Vienna from 1985 until 1990. Since the late 1990s he lives in New York He works in a variety of media and art forms – sculpture, painting, sound installation and installation art, collage, with his entire output being suffused by a sense of poetry. The exhibition ALMOST TANGIBLE brings together three of his works and the theme is the juxtaposition of the spiritual and the poetic with the banal and the everyday, revolving around a reflection on spatial aspects and the relationship to transience and time.

Sigurdur Gudjonsson

1975 - Reykjavik, Iceland
Sigurdur Gudjonsson is a visual artist from Iceland, working primarily with video and photography for his installations. He studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, and this seems to have had an effect on his imagery, which mixes the mythical landscape of his native land with the dark atmosphere of Viennese aktionism. The video narratives of Sigurdur Gudjonsson refuse linearity and work with superimposing cuts in which sound, mostly taken while filming, becomes also an important element for his broken narratives. He plays with the games of light on the Icelandic landscape and the violence of the weather. Sigurdur Gudjonsson currently lives and works in Reykjavic.

Thomas Ruff

1958 - Zell am Harmersbach, Germany
Thomas Ruff was born in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany, in 1958. He studied at Staatliche Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf under Bernd Becher from 1977 to 1985. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art,New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. He has participated in international exhibitions such as the Sao Paulo Bienal in 2002. He lives and works in Dusseldorf, Germany.Ruff scrutinizes a range of photographic genres—architectural photography,newspaper images, portraiture, astronomy, pornography and nighttime imaging used by the military. He is fascinated with the processes of photography and image manipulation. Like those of many of his contemporaries, his photographsare typified by a thoughtful approach to the "non-truth" of the medium. Ruff first became known for a series of large-scale portraits that had the deadpan formatof passport photographs. His portraits and architectural photographs use similar compositional devices: a balanced, frontal pictoral structure, and an emphasis on the building or person being photographed to the exclusion of surroundingdetails. Ruff explores a wide range of genres—portrait, landscape, found image,cityscape, etc. His work.

Yin Xuzhen

1963- Beijing, China
Yin Xiuzhen was born in 1963, Beijing, China, as one of the leading female figures in Chinese contemporary art, she began her career in the early 1990s after received a B.A. in oil painting from the Fine Arts Department, Capital Normal University,in 1989. Her artworks have since been shown extensively in various international exhibitions. Most well known for her works that incorporate second-hand objects. Yin uses her artwork to explore modern issues of globalization and homogenization. By utilizing recycled materials as sculptural documents of memory, she seeks to personalize objects and allude to the lives of specific individuals, which are often neglected in the drive toward excessive urbanization, rapid modern development and the growing global economy. She also uses memory as a critical tool to examine the political, social and environmental constructs that surround her.Inspired by the quickly changing environment of her native Beijing, common themes in Yin Xiuzhen’s work include memory, the past and the present, as well as the complex relationship between individuals and the constantly shifting society they live in. Through collection and assemblage of old materials in a new context, Yin is able to weave past experiences together with the present. In this way, she embraces the notion of memory and experience in an attempt to convey aspects of individual lives in relation to global transformation.

Wang Gongxin

1960 - Beijing, China
Wang Gongxin was born in 1960, Beijing, PR.China. He graduated from Beijing Normal University in 1982 and then went to US as Visiting Scholar at SUNY at Cortland and Albany, N.Y, 1987. Wang is one of the most important artist associated with New Media Art in China, a wave initiated in mid-1990s. Drawing attention on the living condition and human survival, Wang's video work uses universal and emotional components to mediate his own visual experience. He reinterprets everyday story by feeding them through digital editing, and by doing so transforms the viewer's perception of a simple action on the screen. Wang alludes to the subconscious and imaginative component behind the everyday act. This kind of visual process examines the conflict between human idea and reality. Wang continues to develop his work in relationship to conscious existence, popular culture and power games.

Li Qing

1981-Huzhou, China
Li Qing, born in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, 1981, graduated with a master degree in oil painting at the China Academy of Fine Art in 2007. Li is currently living and working in Hangzhou. In Li Qing’s creative practice, game and contradiction are his two main trajectories. In comparison to earlier generation of Chinese artists, Li is more inclined to comment on present conditions lightheartedly through lightening his depiction with a sense of game that, perhaps indirectly reveals the burden of reality, or perhaps dissolves tension from it by gaining an intellectual satisfaction. Among some of his works, he purposefully changed the rules of the game, so common experiences were restored which became the basis for discussion. For example, the individual’s role in society, their utilitarian role, survival within the system, as well as self-consumption within new interpersonal relationships and etc are all experiences shared in Li’s work. Li Qing’s recent works focus on perception and dissection of objects within the context of a society of consumption, conjuring external poetic characteristics with its internal criticism to create a metaphor of our own fate through lamenting, by which to remind people to maintain a concern for humanity and survival under the grand spectacle of the world.

Gao Lei

1980 - Changsha, China
Gao Lei was born in 1980 Changsha, China and graduated from Digital Media Department of Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. Currently works and lives in Beijing.By creating mixed media artworks integrated with paintings, photography and installation, Gao Lei continues to approach the subjects of how individual mode of thinking is characterized and external environment of society is shaped by the power system, and the conflict issues in terms of artificial species and alienation of nature. He sets the ready-mades away from their daily properties in various ways to be concatenation with his painting, photography and installation works, and then audiences will watch the artworks by being thrown into passivity to complete his show.Gao Lei's work tells the differences and association of same original concept after being expressed through the different time and media. This differences and association constitutes a special syntax which attempts to make the visible social reality and the invisible world system destructed and undermined.