Fwd: eARTS BEYOND: Shanghai International Gallery Exhibition of Media Art

eARTS BEYOND - Shanghai International Gallery Exhibition of Media Art

September 11th – September 20th, 2009

Shanghai Oriental Pearl TV Tower | Shanghai Exhibition Center (SH Contemporary)


Preview: September 10th

Artistic Director: ZHANG Ga
Producer: LI  Zhenhua


e-ARTS Beyond is a new platform and destination for adventurous minds that aims to cultivate a marketplace for media art's unique and vibrant contemporary aesthetic experience.

e-Arts Beyond is a project of eARTS Shanghai which is funded by the Shanghai Cultural Development Foundation under the joint supervision of the Shanghai World Expo 2010 Coordination Bureau and the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture, Radio, Film and TV, among other government agencies. eARTS Shanghai stages the citywide eARTS Festival celebrating electronic and digital art and culture in the form of exhibitions, performances, public events, workshops and symposia that welcome millions of local and international enthusiasts.

"base target=new" is the inaugural exhibition of eARTS Beyond, which borrows a common but often overlooked HTML tag as a metaphor, annotating a technical concept in which any hyperlink triggered by a click in a master page will produce a child window to load newly queried content. The title symbolizes new horizons of artistic propositions and formal strategies that resonate with contemporary experiences underlined by the ubiquitous presence of electronic and media technologies. On view are works spanning four decades of media art history, witnessing the trajectory of artistic experiments with electronic media from the inception of conceptual art as seen in Joseph Kosuth's 1965 seminal work Five Fives (to Donald Judd), one of the first artworks to explore neon as a visual and textual medium to Kristin Lucas's 2007 interventionist act which parrots the ubiquitous phenomena of  "refreshing a webpage" to Refresh the artist's own real world identity, succinctly critiquing the contemporary paradox of multiple realities and expanding the tradition of conceptual art. From video's early adaptation as a creative toolkit in documenting performance art as evident in Marina Abramovic's 1975 work Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful to Wolfgang Staehle's Umbria (August 30, 2006) which uses webcam latency as an inherent means of expression to evoke a transcendent moment of nature's sublime; from Takeshi Murata's expressionist abstraction of video imagery to Miao Xiaochun's complex 3D worlds; from video painting (Ben Jones) to algorithmically generated moving images (David Rokeby, George Legrady and Michael Grey), these exemplary works implicitly delineate video art's rich subject matter and evolving visual language. Among the many installation works presented in the exhibition, Nam June Paik's interactive work Enlightenment Compressed critiques media culture with a tint of tranquility and irony, while Zhang Peili's latest video installation Hard Evidence, No. 2, alternating live images taken from audience with the footage of destruction of the TV set, assaults the culture of the screen with an unmistakably visceral force. The forty-four works on display encompass classic pieces by media art pioneers such as Rebecca Horn, Anthony McCall, Bill Viola and Manfred Mohr to mid-career artists like Kevin and Jennifer McCoy, Luc Courchesne and Jim Campbell to new talents including Leandro Erlich, Evan Gruzis and exonemo, to name just a few. Chico MacMurtrie's large pneumatic sculpture installed on the plaza is a spectacle in its own right. The organic forms intuitively engage public participation with elegance and surprise as if to show new media art's amorphous capacity that can be as unpredictably intrusive as agreeably playful. The exhibition runs a wide gamut of artistic positions and critical voices giving a glimpse of the development of media art from its formative years to its current state of affairs.

Along with the exhibition, an expert panel discussion will take place at the Shanghai Exhibition Center as an integral part of the lecture series of Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair. The panel will bring together media art professionals, dealers and collectors to engage in discussions about the positioning, evaluation, collection and distribution of media art in the context of the art marketplace.

Participating galleries:
Arario Gallery | bitforms gallery | James Cohan Gallery | Boers-Li Gallery | DAC/DAS | Deitch Projects | Eastlink Gallery | Sean Kelly Gallery | Lucy Mackintosh Gallery | Groupe Molior | Pari Nadimi Gallery | Postmasters Gallery | Dam Stuhltrager Gallery | Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery

Exhibiting artists:

Marina Abramovic | Jim Campbell | collectif_fact | Luc Courchesne | Jean Dubois | Leandro Erlich | exonemo | Michael Joaquin Grey | Evan Gruzis | Rebecca Horn | Huang / Waldvogel | Jodi | Ben Jones | Joseph Kosuth | Ryota Kuwakubo | Yongbaek Lee | George Legrady | Li Fuchun | Li Ming | Kristin Lucas | Chico MacMurtrie | Nalini Malani | Anthony McCall | Jennifer and Kevin McCoy | Miao Xiaochun | Manfred Mohr | Takeshi Murata | Nam June Paik | Brose Partington | Ara Peterson | Alan Rath | Atelier Hauert Reichmuth | David Rokeby | Lincoln Schatz | Björn Schülke | Wolfgang Staehle | Olaf Val | Bill Viola | Ryan Wolfe | Zhang Liaoyuan | Zhang Peili |









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