Blow-up by artist Li Qing is specially made for Consuming Moods, this year’s annual project of 9m2 Museum. “Blow-up” refers to a method to access the reality by amplifying details of objects. Though the truth may not exist after all, the entire process of perception is what actually matters. The project parodies a public space that is private in nature, of which the simple, clean exterior in a geometric cross-shaped structure is in contrast to the provisional, rough interior. Looking from a window of the space, visitors can see virtual views outside, which are amplified details of the advertising images collected by the artist. These narrow spaces decorated with drawings and images make themselves and other everyday spaces referred to as art (i.e. hotels, restaurants, stores and entertainment venues) be imbued with a similar sense of abruptness and absurdity. The information contained in these drawings and images remind us of the past enthusiasm and severity of Chinese contemporary art, which are as incompatible with the present time and depressing as all obsolete consumer goods. In Blow-up, through changes between time and space, art, like other consumer goods, becomes an object of desire amplified by media so excessively that their original significance has been eliminated, with nothing but a shadow of nihility left. From art to everydayness and then to nihility, the twists and turns along the way are revealed.
About Consuming Moods
9m2-Museum 2014/2015 is the second cooperation between Goethe Open Space of the Department for Culture and Education, Consulate General of Germany in Shanghai and curator Zoe ZHANG Bing. This year’s theme for 9m2-Museum is Consuming Moods, for which three young artists/artist collectives, namely Li Qing, Chen Yufan / Chen Yujun, and Li Liao will be invited to present individual projects from the end of 2014 to the spring of 2015. Consuming Moods alludes to the alternation of hope and despair as well as the cycle of happiness and emptiness. In the consumption era, commodity economy decomposes the traditional family emotion structure and social value system. Consumption is no longer a basic need but a redefinition of self-cognition and social identity. Consumption is an action aiming at gaining psychological appeals like senses of participation, belonging and existence. Consuming Moods are both about time and space. Materials made based on different relations between supply and demand are piled up to create an illusory world of reality. Emotional and spiritual attachment does not come from access to commodities; instead, temporary satisfaction is achieved through imagination of a brand new future world or poetic reminiscence of the past. Consumption becomes a never satisfied desire, a psychogenic addiction and a marketable belief. Raymond Williams pointed out in The County and The City, in the times of consumerism, we are only producers and consumers, and have no material rights in the society except abstract functions. Especially today, human beings are faced with dramatic social changes across the globe. Sociological theories that used to be deemed as the most authoritative and widespread now seem to lose their validness and are unable to serve as reference for us to judge values today. People’s life and emotional experience become a self-contained system because of the uniqueness of individual, and continuously improvises while changing and swinging between the two extremes of impotency and omnipotence. This is the absurdity in the consumption era. And it is also the pleasure and desire in the consumption era.
Zoe ZHANG Bing
Zoe ZHANG Bing is a Shanghai-based contemporary art curator and critic. She is the fellowship winner of International Visitor Leadship Program 2014 and the speaker of Chinese Contemporary Art after 2008 organized by AsiaLink and the University of Melbourne in 2013. In the same year, upon the invitation of the Department of Culture and Education Section, Consulate General of Germany in Shanghai, Ms. Zhang acted as the curator of the year of the Goethe Open Space and presented the 9m2-Museum. In 2012, She was one of ten curators of the Kuandu Biennale in Taipei and curated Shi Jinsong – Scenes from an Unpredictable Theatre at MOT/ARTS in Taipei. In 2011, she was invited to curate a new Chinese contemporary video art exhibition at the Rennes Video Art Festival in France. In 2010, she worked with DDM Warehouse for the art exhibition Double Act. In 2009, she participated in the charity art project 19 Games initiated by the United Nations Development Program and cooperated with Shanghai Creative Industry Center for the exhibition of Rebirth @ 800 Show. In 2008, Reincarnated Flesh, an exhibition she curated at Art Berlin Contemporary (ABC), was selected as Top 10 Art Exhibitions of the Week voted by media. In 2006, she participated in an international art museum director training program in New York under the support of Getty Foundation, and assumed the office of deputy director of Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art the next year. Ms. Zhang is also a regular contributor to a number of professional publications including Bazaar Art, ArtReview Asia and Hi Art Magazine.
Li Qing
Li Qing, born in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province in 1981, now works and lives in Shanghai and Hangzhou. His work is focused on the relevance among languages, images, and ordinary things and their inherent ambiguity and paradox, and intends to search gaps of rationality in similarity and contradiction. His paintings, installations and videos act on viewers’ perception through their roundabout and overlapping structures and make them recall their own identities, cognition and social experience. Through the different and parallel relationships between objective images and their complex reference, his recent work manifests the attention on culture-identity in a historical dimension.
