Exit Strategy at Project: Artspace and Tales of Our Time at the GuggenheimL

Leslie Kerby's recent curatorial venture, Exit Strategy at Project: Artspace , featuring works by Bob Seng, Maud Bryt and  Anna Luppi. Here, Seng and Bryt. Gallery Link

Luppi and Bryt.

From press release: "By slicing, cutting and scratching commercial EXIT signs, Bob Seng destroys the path leading to the exit. He then creates a new place, by organizing the strips according to their color and letter characteristics—collaging them back together to paint a new landscape. The spaces he discovers beyond the sign are often urban landscapes: shattered, overheated and sliding into the sea. Throughout this process he asks, “Are we witnessing apocalypse, or just matter renewing itself?"

From Press Release: "Influenced by her travels to Greece over the past few years, Anna Luppi has photographed and drawn the landscape evocatively portraying an individual running along the rocks of the coastline. The photographs taken with her iPhone, enlarged and printed onto aluminum and her drawings from the photographs of the landscapes, all reflect upon the process of experiencing life once removed—yearning for it more than experiencing it—and upon the migration of people into and throughout Europe as economies and governments are disrupted."

From Press Release: "Maud Bryt’s monotype prints evoke the body and spirit of the human presence—using our common facial features—cheek, forehead, chin, nose and crown of the head—and yet by making additive and subtractive movements on the plate, an individual human presence emerges showing the strength of individual identity. Upon completing the series Bryt came upon this poem by Ezra Pound, 1913.

“In a Station of the Metro”:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
The Crowns, first made in plaster and then cast into bronze, evoke the weight and rough beauty of human responsibility—their presence evocative of a prehistoric or medieval time instead of the standard bearers of rubies and velvet."

The exhibition Exit Strategy ran from October 18 - November 18th with a panel discussion. What a beautiful show, and so timely. I only regret not having more time to absorb it after the opening. Thanks to Leslie Kerby and the artists.

Exit Strategy reminds me of another show now on at the Guggenheim,  Tales of Our Time. Museum Link
The Museum's website describes the exhibition: "The artists in this exhibition challenge the conventional understanding of place. By portraying often-overlooked cultural and historical narratives, Chia-En Jao, Kan Xuan, Sun Xun, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Tsang Kin-Wah, Yangjiang Group, and Zhou Tao explore concepts of geography and nation-state. Their artworks address specific locations, such as their hometowns, remote borderlands, or a group of uninhabited islands, as well as abstract ideas, such as territory, boundaries, or even utopia. China, too, is presented here, not only as a country but also as a notion that is open for questioning and reinvention."

The exhibition has been previewed and reviewed by Barbara Pollack: Pollack NYT Review  and Jason FaragoFarago NYT Review 12/01/16

Here and preceding, Sun Xun's Mythological Time, 2016
(surrounding wall painting for two-channel animated video)

Chia-En Jao's flag, which Farago describes as "whose coat of arms incorporates Chinese, Japanese and indigenous Taiwanese fabrics,"  shown in tandem with his film about cab drivers.

Sculptural barbed wire knots that accompany video about place, below.

Pollack: "Ms. Kan, 44, another artist from Beijing and one of two women in the exhibition, also completed a long-term project, based on extensive travels throughout China to 110 ruins of ancient cities. Her multimedia installation “Ku Lue Er” plays videos on 11 screens compiled from the thousands of images she shot on her mobile phone during her journey. Mr. Hou and Ms. Weng recall their visit to her studio as one of their favorites; in contrast to the luscious images they were seeing, Ms. Kan’s cramped apartment, which served as her studio, was in a rundown building, unlike the vast spaces that many successful Chinese artists inhabit. They reviewed work and listened for more than five hours as her ideas poured forth."

From the Guggenheim's website: "

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

1:30–5:45 pm 

Since 2002 Yangjiang Group has been inviting neighbors in Yangjiang, its small hometown on the southern coast of China, to drink tea, play soccer, practice calligraphy, and enjoy communal dinners. As part of Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken, their newly commissioned work for Tales of Our Time, visitors are invited to converse and contemplate calligraphy over a cup of tea prepared and served by local tea brewers. This participatory installation is set inside, and a Chinese bamboo garden with a miniature pond is visible on an outside balcony overlooking Central Park. Visitors are also encouraged to measure their blood pressure and heart rate before and after experiencing this installation—a humorous ploy designed to calculate the purported relaxing effects of a tea gathering."

"The Yangjiang Group — Zheng Guogu, 46; Chen Zaiyan, 45; and Sun Qinglin, 44 — is creating an interactive tea garden for the circular gallery overlooking Central Park, with a blood pressure station for visitors to measure the calming effect the installation has on their senses." (Pollack)

Farago: "Mr. Zhou’s disquieting two-channel video “Land of the Throat,” by contrast, is shot in the south of China: specifically, the Pearl River Delta, the first region of the country oriented to hypercapitalist production in the era of Deng Xiaoping. “Land of the Throat” roams abandoned or sullied sites around Guangzhou and Shenzhen, avoiding character and plot in favor of wordless, melancholy shots that cohere into a lurid dreamscape. A barefoot man trudges across acres of mud; a turtle bobs up out of brackish water. A parched brown landscape is bisected with red-and-white caution tape, and hills have been eroded so badly they appear like wrinkled skin. Mr. Zhou’s Pearl River Delta is a sci-fi dystopia with no need of special effects, an update of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville” for a century of ecological crisis."

Text, winding throughout the hallways, floors and stairwells of the museum, like the depiction of wind in a Chinese scroll

And a showstopper video about the Sino-Japaese dispute over the Diaou Islands in the East China Sea~

That eventually floods out into the viewing space - truly incredible.

Worth a deep look in tandem with the Agnes Martin show.