Gallery statement:
AIKE-DELLARCO is pleased to announce the upcoming solo show of Beijing based artist Colin Siyuan Chinnery “It Might Also Be”, curated by Wang Jianwei.
“It Might Also Be” is one integrated project taking place across two different venues in Shanghai, opening at Art-Ba-Ba Mobile Space on 4 September, and at AIKE-DELLARCO on 5 September.
This exhibition project has one core factor uniting both venues; Chinnery has collected “failed paintings” by well-known artists in Beijing and Shanghai, and has used them as the material for his work. These failed paintings are works that artists are not satisfied with and were never intended to be shown, but instead represent the intense struggle between each artist and the canvas in front of them. It is this struggle that Chinnery is exploring in this project, using distinct concepts of articulation for each venue.
For his show at Art-Ba-Ba Mobile Space, Chinnery has perverted the concept behind the legendary “Salon des Refusés” exhibition of 1863 in Paris, where the works of artists such as Édouard Manet who were rejected by the official Paris Salon were exhibited to critical scorn. In contrast, the works to be shown here have been rejected by the artists themselves, and have been selected by the “curator” for a special exhibition. However, this is not an exhibition but an artwork, and consequently these rejected paintings are not artworks but readymade objects to be used in an installation. Chinnery is creating a subtle distinction between artwork and exhibition related to his own double identity as artist and curator.
At AIKE-DELLARCO, Chinnery is using the physical properties of each failed painting to create new hybrid objects. Paintings are cut up, leaving only the canvas covering the stretcher frame underneath, transforming these two-dimensional images into physical structures. The cut out canvas fragments have been combined with waste materials collected from artists’ studio floors, playing with the images on the original canvases to make new narratives. The formal rigour of this show deliberately erases the traces of the original artists in order to find Chinnery’s own visual ideas. In contrast to the show at Art-Ba-Ba Mobile Space, the commercial framework of the gallery confirms the identity of the artist and artworks.
Colin Siyuan Chinnery is an artist and curator based in Beijing. He was Director in 2009 and 2010 of ShContemporary Art Fair in Shanghai, and before that he was Chief Curator / Deputy Director at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing. As an artist, Chinnery co-founded the Complete Art Experience Project (2005-6), an artists’ collective whose works were presented in several important exhibitions in China and United States, including the 2005 Guangzhou Triennial. This fall, apart from this “It Might Also Be”, Chinnery’s work shall also be on view at ShanghART’s show EDIT: Image Fetish and Phobia, and the 4th edition of Guangzhou Triennale.
