Ai Weiwei
Garcia Frankowski
He Yida
*LLND
Evan Robarts
Tao Yi
Wang Yuyang
Haegue Yang
Yang Mushi
Amy Yao
Zhou Changyong

Formalism implies an emphasis on an artwork’s form over its content. It is often associated with abstraction or minimalism – art that is devoid of language outside itself or pure art.

Daily Formalism showcases artists practicing in a tenacious yet provocative relationship with the legacy of formalism. Whether cynical, playful, political or pedantic, the works presented here employ formalism as an antidote to the age of information. These works appropriate the guise of abstraction as a way to obscure or transform the stuff of everyday life yet their content or meaning is of equal importance. In Daily Formalism quotidian materials and popular media have hijacked the purity of formal abstraction leaving a most curious conflation. In a post-everything environment with infinite creative choices why the sudden gravitation towards these formalist tropes? How have pure forms been commandeered by our hyperactive cognitive and associative powers? What is formal and what is normal? Eleven, inter-generational artists from around the world pose and ponder these questions.