BAD NEW DAYS AHEAD

 
 

2017.12.30 - 2018.2.10
Opening  2017.12.30 16:00Curators  Han Xinyi, Li Beike, Li Boyan Artists   Fan Xi, Gao Yu, Hu Qingtai, Jiang Zhuyun, Lao Jiahui, Li Tingwei, Mao Tao, Sun Cunming, Ye Su. 

Red No. 1-B2, Caochangdi, Cuigezhuang, Chaoyang District Beijing, CHINA


 
The winter solstice has just passed. For people living in the northern hemisphere, the longest night of the year has come to an end. However, the regional conflicts and even wars, unpredictable natural disasters, disquieting public crisis and affairs are still continuing, making it quite hard to simply welcome the future with peace and ease. The turns of day and night, the cycle of four seasons, the changes of time...all these seemingly stable and basic rules have been overwhelmed by the noise of a kind of endless acceleration and irregular variation. We are faced with a future filled with uncertainty. This future could no longer offer a promise of progressivism nor inherit the legacy of optimism. At this risky moment, all the imagination and experience we have seem to fall into a state of anxiety. On one hand, it is a sign to show that our body and mind are going through more thorough and intense exploitation and depletion. On the other hand, the expanding field and the intensity itself are also opening up the gate of new perception manners, historical consciousness, sensitivity and aesthetics – behind which a new kind of subjectivity is becoming alive. Therefore, as the theme of this exhibition, the title “Bad New Days Ahead” actually indicates the arrival of a certain critical state by presenting a blurred yet strong vision through the alternating between darkness and light of our era. 
If considering the system of art production– presentation (taking the form of exhibitions as an example) as a game that goes on in a specific space under specific rules and restricted by its inner motivation, then the exhibition “Bad New Days Ahead” is a case trying to experiment with the border, even though under realistic interventions and the limitation of the external conditions, via the collaboration and negotiation among individuals. The future could no longer take granted from the past. The expectation for tomorrow could no longer be the basis for taking actions together. A new aesthetic- political plan is still on its way. Why, then, not including everything – the three curators, the artists, the artworks of each artist created under their own condition, the temporary connections formed during the working process, and the institutional space holding all these relations – as the important experimental subjects of this exhibition? By constructing a temporary, imaginary, experimental “institution”, both the curators and the artists can have the chance to redefine their own position and potential. They attempt to get rid of their ordinary way of creation, turning towards the present and the future to make an impromptu response or imagination, to take a flight to run away, to declare the suspension of a conclusion. On this point, “Bad New Days Ahead” is never a doomsday prophecy. Quite the opposite, by presenting all kinds of introspective artworks and art practice, it is a revealing of our common depletion, repetition and tiredness, yet a hint to the loneliness, anxiety as well as the momentary happiness of being a human. 
“Bad New Days Ahead”, right where we all live together. 
   









 As a Blue Sign


LI Yilong, LIU Fujie, FAN Xi, Nimuë, NA Buqi


Curator：WEI Kunjie



Opening: 3pm, 23th December 
 
2017.12.23 - 2018.3.23
 
Qi Mu Space, Zhongba, 69 Art Zone, Xiao Pu, Songzhuang Tongzhou Dst, Beijing 



 


 
 
 
Chen Wei, Chen Xiaofeng, Fan Xi, Lisa Chang Lee, Jiang Zhi, Kobie Nel, Qi Yafei, Wenxin Zhang
 
 
 
Curator: Li Beike
 
Producer: Tian Kai
 
Exhibition director: Zhao Mengyuan
 
Public relations: Wang Jing
 
 
 
Opening: 4.30-8pm, 28th October 
 
2017.10.28 - 2017.12.10
 
Hongkun Museum of Fine Art, No.42 West Dawang Rd. 
 
Chaoyang District, Beijing 
 


 


 
In his Landscape and Power, W.J.T Mitchell considered “landscape” in painting as a verb, not simply as an object to be seen but as the evolution of social identities. When photography replaces landscape with scenes, both indoor and outdoor, both real and virtual, artists took “staging” as a way to structure space, which adds to the subjective dimension of staging. Ever since photography became more than an on-the-spot report, artists have been empowered as a film director when dealing with photos, enjoying lots of freedom to make adaptations of the original story or create new reality.   
 
 
 
Contemporary video art is the marriage of staging and photography making, and a combination of human ingenuity and technology. After dismissing grand narrative, artists began to break the limitation of time and space at will, manipulating in the world of video both the micro and the macro, the pastand the present. When cities became over-exploited and was turned into a place  of artifacts, people began to load it with illusions and imaginations about their living space. The playful way of life seems to offer us the answer to the question whether there is poetic dwelling in our reality built by photos and videos. Living in a world flooded with images and man-made landscape, we find ourselves in a very big club.   
 
 
 
In this exhibition photography and video build scenes that belong to different time periods and different places. A staging artist can produce modern cities, big and open space, rooms, scenes of crime, as well as our future dwellings in our mind’s eye.  
 
 
 
  A SCENE · BEING  - Fan Xi’s Solo Project
 
 
 
Opening along with the sunset as a site-and-time-specific installation, on this Sunday, 8th of October, at 5:30pm, Institute for Provocation is pleased to present Fan Xi’s solo project, A Scene · Being. For this presentation at Black Sesame Space, Fan Xi attempts to blur the boundary between artworks and display space, casting aside the pressure of ‘sense of artwork’ and the sophistication of an exhibition experience. Instead, she is dedicated to capture the constantly changing and vanishing relationship between human, temporality, space, material, and image. A ‘scene’ here refers to both a site as well as a panorama, that is associated with a variety of dynamic relations. 
 
 
 
In Fan Xi’s works, particularly the series of All Beings, the photoflash functions as an extended human organ that captures the time, and the object beyond the visible range of a naked eye. The scratch, fluidity, reflection, and solarization are a series of disturbing factors that tears apart the unknown that is hidden in darkness, seeking access to transcend the linear time and physical narrative, which would allow the viewer to access beneath the set up of an image. This is a kind of control between keenness and violence. In this exhibition, Fan Xi will continue her ‘manipulation’ of light by integrating it with the space. This methodology could be considered as an externalization of modern photography, in which light plays a crucial role of imaging and sets the conduct of the spatial experience. Therefore, it is not only the presentation of images but also a process of generating them, with the engagement of man and light. In this way, images are no longer understood as a medium for the reproduction of reality, but as a field of carrying changeabilities that requires the agency of light to liberate their vitality. 
 
 
 
Time
 
 
 
2017.10.8 - 2017.10.18
 
Opening: 8th October 5:30 PM
 
 
 
Location
 
Institute for Provocation @ Black Sesame Space
 
Heizhima Hutong 13, Dongcheng District, Beijing
  




Fan Xi - Distanciation + Paris project2 february -10 march 2017  

Fan Xi used to study sculpture. After receiving years of academic training in realism, she became bored withthe subjectivity concealed in such false "realism." Thus she devotedherself to photography, because in her opinion photography is intrinsicallyobjective and the relationship between the photographer and his or her subjectis more equal.
Fan Xi aims to create a sense ofdistance in her work, whether through a self-invented technique of filmcorrosion or with surreal scenography. In order to prevent the viewers fromgetting too emotionally involved in these illusory images, the artist changesperspectives, sets obstacles and reforms structures, thereby turning watchinginto observation and allusion into exploration. Fan Xi’s work liberates imagesfrom the restraints of viewfinders or frames, transforming our perception ofphotos into an act of engaged response rather than one of passive viewing.

Reduction of Image
Artist: Fan Xi
Opening: 2016.11.26 16:00
Duration: 2016.11.26 - 2017.02.19 
Venue: Gallery Yang, Main 2nd Street, 798 Art District，No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China

Gallery Yang will open Fan Xi's first major solo exhibition, "Reduction of Image", on November 26, 2016. Presented in this exhibition is her focus throughout her body of work on people and things and the transformations of her ways for expressing the relations between image and object—namely, how images are imagined and emerge within human consciousness and mediums. The exhibition will be on view until January 1, 2017.

As people’s lives and work are transformed by their use of computers and the internet, the most distinct change occurs in our modes of reading, communication, and expression for which a lot of energies are now invested in replacing the traditional ways of communication through language with images.  At the same time, artificial intelligence and its provisions of biophysical and technical environments have been particularly influential among the younger generation, who have become more reluctant to read texts and instead dive into the dissemination and consumption of images. This “time of image-reading” surges forward. We do not merely extract information from images or seek out the multiple realities they represent, but rather confront, judge, and manage huge amounts of images that are invaded by multiple realities. The notion of photography has become a common social behavior carried out with mobile phones and other portable digital devices that allow the user to snap and share the images anytime and anywhere. People are accustomed to snapping pictures and being photographed; this enthusiasm for aesthetics has become their portrayals of true narcissism. For this reason, the ubiquity, abundance, and consumption of photography in this “time of image-reading” together usher the general public into a fervor that terminates the “heroic era” of photographic art, leaving photographers to seek ways of crossing over and surviving the ocean of images.

Fan Xi graduated from the Department of Sculpture, CAFA, in 2009. In 2011, she began turning her practice from sculpture to photography and video. This exhibition shows a selection of her photographic works (over 100 pieces) across 2011 to 2016. There are 4 main sections: Time Length, Tree, Reduction of Image, and All Beings. In this large context, Fan Xi and her photography’s possibilities for each other have to do with knowing and perceiving the self. In her words, “Although the light and shadow may have disappeared, the ‘I’ is still here.”

 

  



Inner Universe

2016.08.07 - 2016.09.01

Opening Reception: 2016-08-07

Venue: Gallery Yang, Main 2nd Street, 798 Art District，No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China

Artists: aaajiao Xu Wenkai, Ding Shiwei, Dong Dawei, Fan Xi, Gao Ruyun, Kong Lingnan, Li Binyuan, Lin Ke, Lu Yang, Sun Yan, Wen Ling, UFO(Wu Juehui, Rao Guangzhen, Wang Zhi’ang, Yin Zenghuizi,)+Feng Hao, Yan Bing, Zeng Hong, Zhan Chong, Zhang Xinjun, Zhang Yongji, Zheng Jiang

It originated from the infinite chains of cause and effect, and in the alternation of chaos and order it undergoes a double transformation of energy, both physically and spiritually. This "it" denotes the universe as well as ourselves. We live in space and time, and each of us is again a tiny universe. The group exhibition "Inner Universe" comprises 3 segments, which deal with "matter and universe", "life experiences", and "descriptions of the final destination", respectively. This exhibition is a transitory node in our finite explorative journey.

We May Have Met Before - Chinese Contemporary Photography

 

I. Information of the Exhibition

Topic: We May Have Met Before - Chinese Contemporary Photography

Organizers: FOAM, He Xiangning Art Museum

Co-Organizers: The Pin Projects

Artists Participated in the Exhibition: (Listed in Alphabetical Orders)

Chi Peng, Fan Xi, Feng Yan, RongRong and Inri, Wang Ningde, Zhuang Hui

Opening: November 5, 2015

Exhibition Duration: November 6, 2015 to January 17, 2016

Location: Exhibition halls at the first floor of FOAM

Curation Directors: Marcel Feil, Le Zhengwei

Curators: Feng Boyi, Liu Gang, Wang Dong

 

II. Curatorial Concepts

1. With the rise of infographics and “we media,” the era of heroic photography has ended. Photographers are no longer Prometheus and Don Quixote; they are simply swimming through a flood of images. The diversity and imbalances of social values, as well as the obscurity, heterogeneity, and complexity of the art world, continue to transcend reality outside of experience and imagination. The photographers come to realize that photography is how they face the world and how to they return to themselves. In the end, photography solves the problems of the self. Because the medium concentrates personal secrets, it touches off a chaotic reality. We have many worlds together and we have many problems together, so we can move towards the same destination in a state of mutual ignorance, pursuing answers that might make us happy, or might make us despair. The answers often exceed expectations and the questions asked provide food for thought. For this exhibition of Chinese photographers, we have selected six active photographers of different generations. They depart from tradition, providing a new vision for the Chinese cultural environment that reflects China’s current realities and issues.

 

2. Photography transforms “true” images into something that confronts the viewer. Fragmentary images seem disordered, but the chaos of contemporary society makes life uncomfortable. When hidden emotions move us, certain reactions take place and become a true reflection of the real lives of Chinese people. Reality crosses tangled paths, but photography is more than equal to that task. It looks closely at these open wounds, preserving the floating moments in life and magnifying those oft-ignored absurdities… The photographer’s lens captures the smallest details of reality. Photography reorganizes reality, and produces another visible truth. In China, images become witnesses to history, with two layers of meaning: one is confirmation, the other is falsification. When people exclaim at the power of documentary photography, they always say, “Look, how real!” However, this is not the true power of the genre; it is meaningful because opinionated people suddenly discover how far they are from reality. This exhibition combines the rich textural effects of various materials to emphasize the unique features of a region’s culture, while also highlighting new views on traditional culture through the use of materials. In these simple images, absence hints at the previous presence of objects. To a certain extent, these pictures might remold Dutch viewers’ visual experiences of China, giving them a new imaginative space. People are accustomed to obtaining information directly from photographs, even to the point that they do not think much about the content of the pictures. These photographs allow people to imagine previous paths and shapes. From this perspective, we will always understand, but we will differ in how much we understand.

 

 

Artist: Fan Xi, Nabuqi, Liu Fujie
Opening: 2014.10.25 15:00

Duration: 2014.10.25 - 2014.11.21 
Venue：Star Gallery, C5 Qikeshu Creative Park, No.55 Banjieta Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing

Artist: Fan Xi, Nabuqi, Liu Fujie

Opening: 2013.6.27 15:00

Duration: 2013.6.27 - 2013.7.25 
Venue：Star Gallery, East Street, 798 Art District，No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China