1918 ARTSpace is proud to present a group exhibition at the new 1918 G-SPACE, “It’s a strange, strange world!” Shanghai young artists group show featuring paintings, video and mixed media artworks by LIU Dao, LE Youxun, HUANG He, TANG Shu, Zhang Yong, ZHOU Tao, YUAN Yuan. These works evoke a mysterious dream world, with irrational use of space, medium, and strange conjunctions, unleashing human’s inner desire, frustrations, obsessions and paranoia. An Astrophysicist Arthur Eddinton once said "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine."  
 
According to Tibetan esotericists, all existence is nothing but a series of alternating transitional states. Waking, sleeping, meditating, dying, wandering in the spirit world. We are constantly living in the in-between states. All these artworks present in their own interpretative manner a slice of these transitional states, fueled with spontaneity, social primitivism, and mystical experience. YUAN Yuan painting of a park 20 years ago showed us how uncertain and ambiguous our existence are. ZHANG Yong 's self fantasy portraits, dressed in Chinese army suit performing strange acts, whether it is hanging from a tree playing violin next to plastic miniature toys or sitting in the middle of the forest with colorful mushrooms growing out of his legs are all mere accidents, fueling our mind with unexplainable ecstasy. ZHOU Tao's paintings of humans engaging in breathing game plays with the idea of suffocation and alienation from society, taking human contact out of this world. TANG Shu’s paintings show us how clueless and numb the youths are in China, spacing out in the distance. The battle between a Chinese sage and the controlling TV people in the video by LE Youxun tells a caution tale of losing our tradition and culture in the digital age where information travels from unknown sources and are mere illusions. In LIU Dao, new media works where forms become formlessness and are merely represented by the flickering of LED lights. We are preconditioned to see that two butterflies in the bamboo forests in “Liang Shan Bo Yu Zhu Ying Tai” a classic Chinese tale of a pair of lovers whose love were destined to be ill-fated. Huang He’s large scale paintings depict the struggle between life and death with monkeys riding on pigs transforming into a big rock. Through their artworks, the artists have reached self transformation, leaving their aging body, floating in the ageless spiritual world.
 
1918Artspace PROJECT, a subsidiary of 1918ArtSPACE, is a multi dimensional, multi sensory, and multi media project that seeks to waken our senses to our immediate environment. It is a collaborative project involving unusual and spontaneous efforts to reach into the realm of the unknown. The collective will be showing in G-SPACE on Huai An Lu, next to the Suzhou River, occupying a 4 floor art ex-printing building in a newly launched art district close to M50, Shanghai.  

Curator: Kartini Tanoto