James Cohan Gallery Shanghai is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in China by the internationally renowned British artist Richard Long. Considered one of the most influential artists of his generation (b. 1945), Long’s works have extended the possibilities of sculpture beyond traditional materials and methods. In this exhibition of new works Long will also use materials indigenous to mainland China, such as stone and clay, and will feature sculpture, fingerprinted objects, a wall work made of colored clay, photographs, and text works.

Central to the artist’s work is the activity of walking. Since the mid-1960s, Long has made countless walks throughout the world, in such places as the Sahara Desert, Australia, Iceland, and near his home in Bristol, England. Most recently, during the artist’s first trip to China, Long made works in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, one of which is the source and inspiration for the title of his exhibition. The notion of walking as a form of sculpture was considered a radical idea when the artist, at age 22, made a work, titled A Line Made by Walking (1967) and gave new meaning to an activity as old as man himself, states Nicholas Serota, director of Tate Britain in London: “nothing in the history of art quite prepared us for the originality of his actions.” Sculpture, as Long has suggested, could be about place and time as well as material and form.

The walks bring together physical endurance and principles of measurement, action, and idea. From these walks emerge ideas and materials for Long’s work. His sculptures and wall works commonly take the form of geometric shapes—circles, lines, ellipses, and spirals—using the raw materials of a place. Their simplicity and universal forms reflect the artist’s primary engagement with the landscapes of the world. Like the creative process as well as the walk, the circularity is paramount. Circles are timeless, universal; stones are common, practical, and exist almost everywhere. “I am interested in the emotional power of simple images,” Long has stated. Also for this exhibition, the artist will make a new wall-text work in Chinese, West East Line Walk. These text works are records of Long’s walks, using observations, narrative facts, and fragmentary thoughts. Like other text works by the artist they are perhaps the most conceptual, but can also become highly visceral in how they bring the simplicity of words and ideas into our minds for our imagination.

Richard Long was born in Bristol in 1945 where he continues to live and work. He studied at the West of England College of Art, before going to St Martin’s School of Art and Design, London, in 1966. Long has exhibited extensively at many major museums and institutions around the world, such as The Path is the Place is the Line, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2006), Walking and Marking, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2007) and at the Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2008). In 2009, Tate Britain held Richard Long: Heaven and Earth a major survey of Richard Long’s work. Long represented Britain in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1989. In 1990 he became a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. And he was awarded the highest international distinction for achievement in the arts, the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Sculpture in 2009. Long’s work is included in many prestigious public and private collections worldwide, including Tate, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, among many others.