randian | 燃点

Desire and the visual have forever been intertwined. You cannot desire what you already have, so the object of desire is something spatially removed from oneself – a distance that can only be bridged by our sense of vision. All other senses, touch, smell, taste and even sound require a much closer proximity than sight. […]

From his 2016 solo show “Making Good Things Go Better” at Telescope Space to “Fantastic Grounds” in 2017, Jiu Jiu has been concerned with looking at counteracting forces produced by the formation of images. But the computer interface still remains in the “othered” position of being objectified, whether it is in the artist’s artistic process or the audience’s viewing experience.

Taiwanese artist Yao Jui-chung’s practice is intimately tied to human history, whether economic decay or the vicissitudes of Cross-Strait relations, yet much of his recent work avoids depicting humans altogether.

Writing from Paris in 1991 under the pseudonym “No Beard Fei,” Fei Dawei penned a letter to fellow art critic and curator “Scraggly Beard Grandpa,” the pen name of Li Xianting in Beijing. Fei’s letter was a response to Li’s concern that “if art leaves its cultural motherland, it necessarily withers.”

Why walk in areas adjacent to the museum? Why couple the acts of walking with exhibition viewing? Even if the practice of the institution is intimately connected to the local environment, this doesn’t necessarily mean that bundling the acts of walking, discussion and exhibition viewing together is a comprehensive response to this issue.

Chen Chieh-jen’s new exhibition “A Field of Non-field” is a show that demonstrates refinement, not only in its sleek, grey visual effects, but also in the artist’s work combing through and neatly displaying the contextual relationships that exist between every single element in the exhibition—and on top of this, all of it done to the tune of his concise aesthetic temperament: solemn, neutral, calm.

Led by independent curator Biljana Ciric, throngs of spectators enter this vacant villa owned by the Ming Yuan group, its spaces wafting with the scent of ancient tombs. This site-specific performance art project is affiliated with “Proposals to Surrender,” the group exhibition Ciric curated last year.

Two of the art movement’s most important advocates can now be experienced—“seen” would not be the appropriate term—at the How Art Museum in Shanghai.