In this realm, time becomes space. – Richard Wagner, Pasifal
Man collects art, while art collects history. It’s the cultural game for thousands years. Now Hu Jieming will bring you into a special dimension consisting of fine art, where the time and space will be deconstructed.
This October, ShanghART Gallery will launch the new project of Hu Jieming, known as 100 Years in 1 Minute. This huge installation consists of 1100 1-minute-videos, which are stored and displayed in thousands of storage bags, and each piece is a deconstruction of some master piece of modern times. When audience stands before this crazy, noisy and joking animation world, they will face a unprecedent impact.
Hu Jieming compressed 100 years into 1100 artworks – as the metonym of human civilization and history in this period. Therefore, deconstruct art is to deconstruct the world we know. But these kind of devastating deconstructions do not lead to historical criticism. In artist’s opinion, they are just experiments: “like we degrade some common thing into some unknown objects in laboratory, we try to test the possibilities and consequences of combining visual culture memories of 100 years in 1 minute randomly.”
When an artwork is surrounded by time and space, or history and system, its original status will be changed slowly. Artworks are not invariable, on the contrary, they will get distorted, changeful and older. The only unchanging thing is that everything will change. Sometime the more we destroy artworks, the further we abandon violence, and we’ll find the essential of art closer.
ShanghART Gallery invites you to participate in this exhibition, then you can walk into its time-space wormhole from 1 minute to 100 years.