2022.09.02-2023.01.08
Guan Xiao | “Cloud Walkers” @ Leeum Museum of Art
Antenna Space is pleased to announce that the artist Guan Xiao participates in the exhibition Cloud Walkers at Leeum Museum of Art. The exhibition opens on September 2, 2022 and will last until January 8, 2023.
As the shape of our lives are changed by climate crisis, pandemic, and war, we find ourselves moved to a fundamental reconsideration of the value systems implemented over the past century. Today, needing both a macro point of view and a micro level of care, we are called to expand our perspectives to span countries and regions, to form new cultural solidarities and cultivate the kind of imaginative power that transforms civilizations. At the same time, we must also reexamine the role of Asian art and society as a whole in this historical moment, when Asia’s influence on the world order has grown so significantly. How might we move beyond the complex entanglements of existing geopolitical frameworks toward a more sustainable, liberated, and considered future?
The genesis of Cloud Walkers, an exhibition by Leeum Museum of Art, lives in this line of questioning. The “cloud” here speaks to climate, imagination, and hyperlinks alike; it stands as a metaphor for the new sociocultural environment of the 21st century and serves as a virtual platform for sharing across geopolitical boundaries. The works in this exhibition are by those who move freely through this cloud world — the walkers and flâneurs, workers and doers, dreamers and visionaries. Coming from a wide range of backgrounds, these artists bring new and critical perspectives to the issues faced by our contemporary — and future — society.
Striking a balance between mutual benefit and technological development, they start from a place of accountability about the state of our planet and work toward sustainable coexistence in both research and practice, freely reconstituting huge data sets as they unfurl their strange and seemingly limitless imaginations across time and space, inviting us to experience new synesthetic worlds of intersections between material and immaterial, real and virtual.
Here and now, we hope to glimpse some of the fresh possibilities and dynamism inherent in Asian art writ large, refracted through the diverse worlds depicted by these guides who walk slightly ahead, a few steps already into the future.
Installation view courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea.
Photo by Sangtae Kim
Installation Views
Artworks
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Guan Xiao, You Have to Have EYES, 2020
Rim, Ceramic
108 × 78 × 23 cm作品信息Information -
Guan Xiao, Din Din Jaarhh, 2015
Brass, rim, colored rope, resin
115 × 40 × 78 cm作品信息Information -
Guan Xiao, Five Walks through the Dusk, 2015
Brass, rim, selfie stick, tassels
47 × 75 × 245 cm作品信息Information -
Guan Xiao, Game Boy, 2020
Pigmented bronze, porcelain, motorcycle parts, dried flowers
57 (L) x 33 (W) x 163 (H) cm
Within the cracks of the giant rock lie sighs.
When the noonday sun almost erases the shadow of minaret completely from the square, sighs start to sprout from the cracks. Along the stone wall, they flow to the ground, flowing into the long and narrow channel from the inside of the stone chamber… Eventually they slowly ooze from the exit. The sandy ground surrounding the minaret quietly gets wet. Its original wheat color gradually turns darker, as if someone is drawing a shadow for the minaret in the middle of the day. At such moments, a small cyclone could be seen from the sandy ground, which would spin around the minaret. Then, the kid shows up: bare-footed, and with a string of pink beads hung on his waist. And he wears a hat made by sundried Victoria lily. It doesn’t feel quite right to call it a hat as it is too big and covers not only his head, face, but also his neck and shoulders. Shortly afterwards, the kid starts to sing with his innocent voice: To take one to smash bones, two to hang shoes, three to tether livestock, four to tear bags, five to remove guts, six to dry jars, seven to cut off shadow, eight to fill it with river water and nine to sow seeds… When west wind blows through the village three times, ring the bell.作品信息Information -
Guan Xiao, Hazel, 2020
Pigmented bronze, porcelain, motorcycle parts, dried flowers
110 (L) x 41 (W) x 150 (H) cm
It always spins like this, at a uniform and high speed and accompanied by a low humming. The sound keeps spreading and accumulating as quantity starts to push it to roll. Day after day.
Little by little, the trajectory cuts the sound off, leading to two pieces of round ground.
It rolls, to the end of the ground. There’s no peers or rivals. Day after day.
Eventually the round grounds start to spin, respectively. No longer are they a symbiont. Instead, they are three pals. One day, the ground pauses, so transiently that it’s almost undetectable. Instantly, it falls into the crack of uniform time, tumbling out of the edge which seems would roll forever. Falling, down and down.
Until one day it keeps moving on in a linear manner and the gravitation pulls (draws) out the soles.作品信息Information -
Guan Xiao, Pond, 2019
pigmented brass, elm, 3D print, mobile phone straps
183 x 140 x 60 cm作品信息Information -
Guan Xiao, Tulip Model, 2019
pigmented brass, dyeing fiberglass, colored rope, colored fiberglass
99 x 81 x 50 cm作品信息Information
