Boundaries Ahead – Oh Bay Art Project
Exhibition:
December 6, 2020 – March 28, 2021
Open weekdays: 10:00-21:00
Weekends and holidays: 10:00-22:00
Participating artists & architects:
Eric Chen (Taiwan, China)
Laura Boles Faw （Philadelphia, U.S.A）
Asma Kazmi (Berkeley, U.S.A)
Lan Ziyan + LLS | Labland Society (Hangzhou, China)
Masako Miki (Berkeley, U.S.A)
Yang Yong (Shenzhen, China)
Yin Xiuzhen (Beijing, China)
Zhang Xinyi (Beijing, China),
Zhuang Ziyu (Beijing, China)
Atelier Bow-Wow (Tokyo, Japan),
Pablo Laguarda (U.S.A)
David Paul Thompson (U.S.A)
In 2020, the boundaries between public and private space will be rewritten and the boundaries between cities and nature will be briefly broken, forcing us to rethink the line between nature and urban development under modern technological conditions, the interactive balance between the public environment and individual experience, reality and virtual reality, and present and future.
The Coastal Cutural Park, where the Oh Bay Art Project is located, has the open nature of a city park and is a public space that provides memories of the city’s experience. The art project revolves around the concept of “marginality”, with the corresponding exhibition area being located in the environment of ocean and continent, city and nature, and making site-specific interventions. The exhibition is composed of 13 works through which the “marginality” theme runs. With records and responses to the development and changes of the city, different technologies integrate reality and the virtual world, but also create a symbiotic environment for human beings and nature for tomorrow.
The project also rethinks the relationship between human, technological, ecological and urban spaces, exploring the alternating margins of time and space, thereby building an entrance to multiple futures.
Supervisor: Shenzhen Bao’an Municipal People’s Government
Support by: Urban Administration and Law Enforcement Bureau of Shenzhen Bao’an Municipality / OCT Alliance of Planning & Design
Organizers: OCT Shenzhen Western Group \ Hotel Group, Shenzhen OH BAY
Operator: Shangqi Art
Curator: Yang Yong
Assistant Curators: Ji Haoru, Zhang Qiaoyi
Acknowledgements: Abby Chen, Tang Contemporary Art, Tonggallery+projects, Pace Gallery
Directions
Subway: Baohua Station / Bao’an Central Station / Bao’an Station
Bus: Longguang Real Estate Building Station / Baohua MTR Station (1) Station / Xilong Bay West Station / Xilong Bay Station / Bao’an Library (1) Station
Yin Xiunzhen, “Converyor Belt”
Stroll along the city’s waterfront and discover the opening of the “Tomorrow’s Park” – Oh Bay Art Project
On December 6, 2020 the Oh Bay Art Project officially opened the Oh Bay Coastal Cultural Park, the occasion also marking the official opening of the Glow Shenzhen 2020. Oh Bay Coastal Cultural Park joins ocean and mainland, blending the environmental advantages of city and nature blend. The project includes site-specific interventions and exhibitions of works by local and international artists and is sponsored by Shenzhen OCT Western Investment Co., ltd/ OCT Hotel Development Co., ltd, Shenzhen OH BAY, with the Bao’an Municipal People’s Government as guiding authority, supported by the Urban Administration and Law Enforcement Bureau of Shenzhen Municipality, and OCT Alliance of Planning & Design, with curator Yang Yong and the curatorial team.
Attending the opening ceremony were Bao’an District Committee Deputy Secretary, District Director, Wang Lide; Shenzhen Municipal Planning and Natural Resources Bureau Deputy Director, Ding Qiang; Shenzhen Housing and Construction Bureau Deputy Director, Xue Feng; Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Culture, Radio, Television and Tourism Sports Deputy Director, Yang Yongqun; Bao’an District Deputy District Director, Cai Fan; Overseas Chinese Town Holdings Company (OCT Group) Group Party Standing Committee, Deputy General Manager, Ni Zheng; OCT Group Corporation Chief Planner, OCT Group Innovation Research Institute President, OCT Group Planning and Planning Union President, Xu Chongguang, OCT Group Assistant President Jin Yang, OCT Group Assistant President Liu Guanhua, Shenzhen OCT Western Investment Company \ OCT Hotel Development Company General Manager, Xie Tao, and other guests.
Before the opening, curator Yang Yong led guests on a guided tour of the park. The artworks are placed throughout the park, linking up park views, waterfront corridors, and commercial blocks, and leading to the city landmark “Bay Area Light” Ferris wheel, forming a dynamic art park route.
Guided tour
The special guests also customized the immersive theatrical performance of “The Back Journey” for the art project, using a variety of elements such as environmental drama, performance art, modern dance, collision and exchange with the crowd, leading the audience from east to west on the waterfront, but also opened the Oh Bay Art Project series of activities.
The performance of “The Back Journey” ignited the opening atmosphere
Bao’an District Deputy District Director, Cai Fan, said in his opening speech: “Today 2020 Bao’an International Light and Shadow Art Season Oh Bay Art Project opens, and Bao’an people joined the dream of brilliant light and shadow art, and ushered in a better artistic life. Bao’an has always represented the standard people’s yearning for a better life and the growing material and cultural needs, to create an international and modern space to inject more cultural and artistic atmosphere into urban human life.” Xie Tao, General Manager, said in her opening remarks: “The Overseas Chinese City Shenzhen West Group and Hotel Group continue to uphold the cultural and tourism genes of the Overseas Chinese City, through continuous innovation in culture, art and operation, with art in tandem with nature, to foster the cultural development of the city, and strive to make the Bay Area the new cultural benchmark.”
Xu Chongguang, Chief Planner of Overseas Chinese City Co., Ltd., President of overseas Chinese City Innovation Research Institute, president of the Overseas Chinese City Planning and Planning Alliance, delivered a speech: “Thank you to The Overseas Chinese City Shenzhen West Group and Hotel Group and Happy Valley Group for their full support of the Overseas Chinese City Planning and Planning Alliance Conference, and also thanks to the Oh Bay Art Plan of Shangqi Art Planning, which injected more culture and art atmosphere into the Overseas Chinese City Planning and Planning Alliance Conference. This year, the fourth conference, is not only about cross-border integration of high-end academic platforms, but also an important business platform for the innovation and development of overseas Chinese city.”
Mr. Yang Yong, Curator of the Oh Bay Art Project, said that, “The project invited ten artists and architects to do a lot of research and discussion in Oh Bay. With the city residents’ demand for professional culture and art gradually increasing, with this new coastal cultural park, I hope to bring you a higher standard of public works of art, the calling of art in life.”
At the launch ceremony, the leaders and guests pushed the lever and jointly opened the curtain on the Oh Bay Art Project. After the opening ceremony, the Oh Bay Water Show and Light and Shadow was performance, with sound, light, and water constituting a multi-dimensional scene. Curator Yang Yong also personally selected live music songs, from Bach to Gershwin, spanning more than two hundred years, to create a musical journey for the audience. The whole opening ceremony brought a different face of art and was an audio-visual feast the audience.
Water Show and Light and Shadow Show
Building a city’s “new public space”
This art project attempts to respond to the development and change of the city, so that the Coastal Cultural Park becomes a rich urban experience, the creation of urban memory of the new public space, thinking about the human, scientific and technological, ecological and urban space relationship possibilities.
For the first time, Chinese contemporary art leader Yin Xiuzhen brought her work “The Conveyor Belt” to Shenzhen, inspired by the “Bay Area Light” Ferris wheel and the airport as a transit station. Make a “circle” in the park similar to the Ferris wheel – a conveyor belt. This “conveyor belt” divides the world into “inside” and “outside”, forming new thinking possibilities in different rotations, taking on the thinking hub of the Internet of Everything, and incorporating visual art and into the thinking path.
David Paul Thompson, “Leaping Fish”
Pablo Laguarda, Partner and President of international architects, David Paul Thompson, and Executive Director of SWA Group, uses lines as inspirational and structural tools, and archetypes of living elements of land and sea, to create clouds, shells, waves, and leaping fish, for four groups of ornamental, structurally aesthetic and practical art structures, in the land and sea, blending city and nature in an urban park to forge a harmonious coexistence between human beings and nature in symbiotic beauty.
Zhang Xinyi, “The Man of the Crowd”
Artist Zhang Xinyi re-creates George Seurat’s most famous painting, “Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte” (1884-1886) (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte) showing the late 19th-century Parisian community on the park’s lawn.
Yang Yong, “Entry Plan”. Yang Yong is also founder of Shangqi Art.
Yang Yong, an artist, curator and founder of Shangqi Art, tried to reshape the everyday space with high-purity colors and minimalist cubes, stimulating the endless possibility of resetting visual language and spiritual space.
To achieve better symbable life between people, nature and city
The Oh Bay Art Project focuses on the use of elements related to new technologies and new media to explore the relationship between new ecology and new space. The intervention of art blurs the boundary between present and future, virtual and reality, balances the relationship between human activities and environmental ecology, and realizes the necessary symbiosis between human beings and nature.
Oh Bay Coastal Cultural Park has a high level of vegetation coverage of the natural landscape, helping exhibitors to create a variety of artistic spaces in the environment.
Eric Chen, “Transmutation”
Eric Chen, an architect from Taiwan, created a cascade of landscapes on the park’s grass to forge a place of co-existence of people and plants.
Zhuang Ziyu, “The Cloud Maze 4.0 – Cloud Atlas”
Architect Zhuang Ziyu’s “The Cloud Maze 4.0 – Cloud Atlas”, a group of maze-shaped works, interacts and blends with the surrounding trees. Visitors can experience their surroundings in this ever-moving space and rethink the relationship between the city and nature.
Laura Boles Faw, “The Long and the Short of Time”
Laura Boles Faw, from the United States, used 3D printing to create a transparent a resin tree stump sculptures similar in form to those in nature, and placed them in the park’s woods. Over time, these stumps will record the mark of urban development.
Asma Kazmi, “Urban Forest”
American multimedia artist Asma Kazmi uses Augmented Reality technology to bring 1700 year’s Indian mango trees to a modern Shenzhen park, combining large metal installations that allow fictional people to meet nature.
Lan Ziyan + LLS | Labland Society, “Day after Day”
Cross-media artists Lan Ziyan + LLS | Labland Society’s created “Day after Day” works, geometric vertical shapes in the imagined future form of oriental sundials. In front of this device, one can feel the fleeting moment of time and ponder its significance to humanity.
Masako Miki, “Shapershifters”
American artist Masako Miki has created a story about Shenzhen’s development, drawing on feathers, peaches, gourds and lotus patterns from traditional Chinese culture. Peaches and gourds symbolize good luck, feathers are derived from the myth and legend of the DaPeng bird, adhering to DaPeng’s moral of openness and inclusion, daring to be a free spirit. Lotus refers to Shenzhen’s achievements as the result of generations looking forward to the future and working hard.
Atelier Bow-Wow, an architect’s firm from Tokyo, Japan, will build a “Wind and Sun Music Pavilion” on the shores of Shenzhen’s Oh Bay, where music lovers can gather to share a musical feast and also be a great place to relax. The work will be presented to the public later in the exhibition.
Yin Xiuzhen, “Converyor Belt”)
