Pace Beijing is pleased to announce the opening of "Xiao Yu: Ground." This is Pace Beijing’s first exhibition opening in 2014, and will be the first exhibition at the gallery of Xiao Yu, who recently became an artist represented by Pace Beijing.
You can expect a pure “Xiao Yu-style” performance, and until the very moment the exhibition opens, the entire piece is continuously growing. The performance can be seen as a ritual regarding labor and consumption: the workers, artists, and performers are all involved simultaneously, and their work will become nothingness by the end of the exhibition. According to Georges Bataille's theory of consumption, when a labor serves as a ritual, it draws an entirely clear line between production, accumulation and the resulting flow with social expenditure.
In the case of Xiao Yu, the continuous labor first cut off the natural relation with economics, and further faded the symbolic and lyrical functions. Building, stirring, farming and lingering here only represent actions and repeating itself, which is just a series of phenomenon in biology and physics. Xiao Yu's performance is not for the significance of proliferation, circulation and consumption, but for a complete elimination: an elimination of meanings. Xiao Yu once said, "The creation of my work lays on the premise of visual presentations. Many of the pieces were made from my own understanding and judgment of Chinese culture and the surrounding reality. I believe that such presentation works for all people, and will no longer be confined to the limited scope of Western or Eastern – it stands for a third-party point of view that ignores all the conflicts of interest, and this is the genuine essence of art. Otherwise, if you attach some additional texts to try to explain the hidden meaning of a piece in front of you today, in the next hundreds or thousands of years, others may have already forgotten or not care about the lengthy explanation of the work, which only remains a pure visual identity facing the viewers. Can your work still establish its self-existence?”
Thus, at the scene of this exhibition, audiences are not only counted in numbers, but also need to actively or passively participate in the exhibition, to feel the diffuse atmosphere, the tension of material and the agitation, the space that can be viewed differently by your movements, and all the uncertainty. This is an opportunity as well as challenge. On March 27th, Pace Beijing gathers extraordinarily creativity people, and just like the work of Xiao Yu: it is not a final version - it is only the beginning.

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Pace Beijing