[Press Release]
Sat. 5 July – Sat. 9 August 2014
Ota Fine Arts is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Tang Dixin (born in 1982), a Shanghai-based contemporary artist. He participated in “REVEL – Celebrating MoCA’s 8 year in Shanghai” at Moca Shanghai and “ON|OFF: China’s Young Artists in Concept and Practice” at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing last year, and will be exhibited in the upcoming Gwangju Biennale this year. He is starting to be recognized as one of the representing artists of Chinese new generation. For this exhibition, he will showcase five paintings and three video recordings of his past performance pieces, and at the opening reception on Saturday 5th July, the artist will hold a live performance.
Tang Dixin, born in the 80s, is known for works which ironically criticize the problems of Chinese art world and society through multiple media such as performance, painting and installation works. For example, in the performance which will take a place at the opening reception “Rest is the Best Way of Revolution”, viewers are coerced into allowing the artist to put a plaster cast on their limbs, becoming a part of Tang’s piece, which has been performed in MoCA Shanghai in 2013. The artist controls the spacious relationship between his own physical form and the viewer, but on the other hand he is aware that this space is temporary and theatrical, and he performs the epitome of unstable systems of the art world and society.
This exhibition also screens the video recordings of his past performances. “I Will Be Back Soon”(2008) is a piece which the audience throws things and the artist gets them to “be back soon”. Tang challenges to express the relationship with others in this modern society. Moreover, in “Reed”(2009) where Tang and a Japanese young man who have no understandings of each other’s languages, communicate with gesture and sketch and take a record while travelling around island near Shanghai, Tang eventually digs a hole and buries the Japanese young man. The performance with the use of his body is sometimes radical. Tang jumps off of a platform in the metro during Expo 2010 Shanghai China, shooting video until the train through the body in “Act of God”(2010), his best name recognized piece. This radicalism is common to “Backpack” which he sinks himself in the lake with a stone on his back.
Having graduated from the faculty of oil painting, Tang creates painting works which are rather witty in content. At first, painting seems to be a totally different way of expression from his performance, but in fact, they suggest and complement each other. For example, “Yellow Peril”(2013) despite its title, an Asian boy pulling his eyes up with mischief is being painted and the political, historical and incidental meanings are being removed from that gesture itself. This kind of paradox can also be found in “On the Lake”(2013). Although its violent scene of a man on the boat tries to sink the other, the surface of the lake has no movement and there is a mood of tranquility. As demolished and reconstructed arms and legs being intertwined in“Involved” (2014) represents the artist quotes ‘I am seeking a part of myself that my body has forgotten’ through the medium of painting.
