Press release
We are pleased to announce the new exhibition”STUDIO” curated by Henry-Claude Cousseau who is the the president of YISHU 8 ,opening November 23rd and on view until January 15th,2014.The exhibition will showcase the daily surroundings of the artist Huang Gang who is one of the most important contemporary artists, we will literally transport the artist ‘s studio into the gallery at Yishu 8.
Huang Gang is well versed in art history, he has given his studio a very specific genre. It is, evidently, a place where personal production occurs, but it also where shows and displays are put together in a way that goes well beyond the simple usual inter-cultural confrontation exercise. The exceptional character of this studio is further marked by an unusual interrogation of the connection between heterogeneous objects. The artist puts them together with a deconstructionist strength that mixes genres and styles yet manages to keep an harmonious cohesion and a rare visual clarity.
Elements in Huang Gang’s artworks are mainly ready-made objects, ancient woodcut plates for Buddhist scriptures, gilt fragments from centuries-old Buddhist temples, Tibet leather suitcases, and ancient lacquer screens etc.. He creates his artworks with these antiquities which are regarded as treasures by Chinese people through grinding, cutting and regrouping. With his outstanding knowledge of craftsmanship and material of Chinese cultural relics and ancient artworks, Huang Gang is able to dismantle, reconstruct, and recreate those antiquities treasured as heirlooms by Chinese people deftly. He also subverts the public’s fascination for antiques, and demolished myths of many antiques and cultural relics worshiped by people.
Born in a well-known cultural and artistic family in 1961, Huang Gang grew up in a courtyard near the Forbidden City. His parents were experts on Chinese ancient arts and cultural relics. This background put the artist in an advantageous position to access Chinese classical cultural treasures in the turbulent years.
Henry-Claude Cousseau said:”In Huang Gang’s studio everything is mixed and intermingled: the source of inspiration of a piece and its end result; the presence of an object magnified by its own aura and the memories that are attached to it; or simply the object in its most literal materiality as much as the insane or refined accumulations to which the object’s rarity lends a vernacular beauty or an ethnic singularity. A clever and subtle usage of the shortcut governs his thinking: we are simultaneously in a studio and in a museum, or in other words in the before and in the after, or perhaps more precisely, we are experiencing a moment that appropriates the past, and which through a reversal of the usual dialectic illuminates this past with its own fertility. It is a universe made of sequences, of fragments that are in perpetual metamorphosis.”
This exhibition will show that the latter reveals the most sophisticated speculations on the dialogue between cultures and between time periods. Foremost, Huang Gang succeeds in questioning, in an unusual way, the rapport between the work of art and its place of genesis, as well as how the work of art changes its birthplace. At Yishu 8, which is precisely a place of exchanges between the cultures of France and China that advocates a definite singularity in matters of aesthetics, this presentation will, we hope, particularly stand out.
