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