Klein Sun Gallery is pleased to present Shi Jinsong ‘s Art Fair - Free Download a solo exhibition of new sculpture, painting, and digital work on view from January 15th through February 28th, 2015.
Shi Jinsong’s Art Fair- Free Download boldly parodies art consumption at the massive supermarket-like art fairs held annually in dozens of cities internationally. Through interactive bronze and wooden mobiles, free digital downloads, sculptural furniture and tools, paintings, hand crafted color pigments, and extravagant Chinese knock-offs of Harley Davidson motorcycles, Shi Jinsong extends the boundaries of artistic creation while mocking and reflecting the current state of art collection. The exhibition is held in conjunction with Shi Jinsong’s Art Fair, a project that began earlier this year, in which the artist has organized several exhibitions of his work in the fashion of an art fair.
The interactive mobile, Suspension Strategy, is suspended throughout the length of the gallery and created from tree branches found in New York and Connecticut, as well as cast bronze models of Chinese tree branches. The beauty of the mobile lies in the whimsical and precarious feeling conveyed by the swaying and floating objects freed from a grounded trunk. Strings hanging down from the ceiling allow viewers to manipulate the mobile themselves and create a sense of free flowing movement.
As the work is made from branches, a similar mobile can be designed by anyone following simple instructions. With this in mind, Shi Jinsong has uploaded the instructions detailing how to make a Suspension Strategy mobile online for free download. Shi Jinsong will even provide approved works with a certificate of authenticity. Through encouraging viewers to create their own Suspension Strategy mobile, Shi hopes to challenge the paradigm of collecting artwork, question long-held perceptions about intellectual property rights, and bring his creativity to a new and much larger audience.
The sculptural works belonging to The Huashan Project series are commonplace items that have been transformed into contemporary pieces engaging in a dialogue with traditional Chinese aesthetics. Copper tables and chairs, which are exhibited as if they were paintings, exaggerate and play with the simplistic and elegant lines that define Chinese visions of the world. Tools that are redesigned to be beautiful, but which are occasionally rendered useless, emphasize that Shi Jinsong’s vision is that of an artist’s imaginative recreation of our utilitarian reality. The Huashan Project series breathes new life into traditional Chinese aesthetics and highlights Shi Jinsong’s artistic vision.
Another Take on Resurrection Hill is a series of paintings made from ink which is comprised of the ashes of nine animals and a large tree that Shi Jinsong collected while he was in Australia and Tibet. The works also incorporate dust found within his studio and dirt collected within a Shanxi Buddhist monastery. Each painting is a depiction of an animal’s pelt with a dusty texture. In Shi Jinsong’s eyes, the works have freed the spirit of the deceased creatures from their physical remains, allowing them to exist in a spiritual realm without restraint.
The Phoenix Gray series consists of works which were created by over a dozen artists who used dust and ashes to produce fifteen unique gray pigments. Each pigment in the exhibition is displayed juxtaposed to a video chronicling its creation, with artists such as Shao Fan, Xiao Lu, and Zhan Wang all contributing the story of their Gray’s incarnation. The colors are the essence of stories and emotions that have evolved from the artists’ various life.
The Halong-Kellong works are communist-era farming tractors remodeled and designed to be an extravagantly-styled Chinese version of a Harley Davidson. Depicted through a music-video, the design of the machines emphasizes grandeur, strength, and lavishness, while men clad in custom-made muscle suits serve as comic versions of the perfect Chinese super hero. Ultimately, the video is a parody of the values that have developed alongside China’s rapid economic growth-including a willingness to essentially clone Western icons, like Harley Davidson motorcycles, in a Chinese light.
Born in China’s Hubei province in 1969, Shi Jinsong earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited in museums around the world including the following solo exhibitions: “Penetrate,” Today Art Museum, Beijing, China (2011) and “Jamsil,” SOMA Art Museum, Seoul, South Korea (2010). Recent group exhibitions include, “Remodernization: The 3rd Documentary Exhibition of Fine Arts,” Hubei Art Museum, Wuhan, China (2014); ”Myth/History,” Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2014); ”Original Home,” Hongkun Museum of Fine Art, Beijing, China; Jia Ping-ao Art and Culture Museum, Xian, China (2014); ”Confronting Anitya – Oriental Experience in Contemporary Art,” Yuan Art Museum, Beijing, China (2014); ”Civilization – Round 1: Lin Lu,” White Box Museum of Art, Beijing, China (2013); ”The Third Nature:Chinese Reconstruction–The 2nd Project Exhibition of the 4th Guangzhou Triennial,” Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China (2012) and “Taste of the East: Masterpieces of Chinese Contemporary Art,” Shanghai Museum of Art, Shanghai, China (2012)
