Out for Art @MO

Shanghai: Nov 15 — Nov 30 2019

Wangsim Press Release

Mandarin Oriental Press Release

During the Shanghai’s art filled November, the inspiring group exhibition at Mandarin Oriental Pudong Shanghai showcases a wide range of important works of 9 most celebrated contemporary artists across the globe, pairing the Minimalistic masterpieces with the international Pop superstars.

Sparking in the late 1950s from the United States were the Pop Art and Minimalism, two primary art movements that departed from the gestural and subjective nature of the previous generation of creative minds. Pop artists blurred the boundaries between “high” and “low” culture by creating art pieces of mass culture objects, media and political figures. Minimalism notably introduced highly simplified geometric forms, reductive serial compositions, and the use of unmodified materials and fabrication methods. Record- breaking artist Yoshitomo Nara has been blending high and low by combing the saturated color and scale of postwar abstract painting with a cast of cute but demonic cartoon toddlers since 1990s. Meanwhile, German artist GüntherFörg’s life-long career was centered around Modernism and Abstraction; his late paintings have challenged the formality of Minimalism.

More importantly, the exhibition creates another extraordinary dialogue between the world-famous hotel which a great number of people call “home” and the talented artists involved, unfolding a shared narrative of the hotel contemporary design, the modern art, and the oriental philosophies. The Shanghai-born artist Hsiao Chin, is a key member of the Ton-Fan Art Group; with strong interests in the oriental aesthetics— in particular the ideas of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu —and the Western minimalistic art movements, the artist employs the vocabulary of traditional Chinese brush and the conceptual framework of American and European Modernism.

Chinese philosophical and historical texts contain sophisticated concepts of the nature and the cosmos. As the foundation of Chinese culture, we have long learned to appreciate the beauty of the natural world. We often view the nature as a complex yet elegant arrangement of elements, such as fire, wind and water, that are continuously changing and interacting. Exhibiting artists also demonstrate a strong focus on the relationship between those natural forces and their artistic practices. The German artist Thilo Heinzmann is famous for making his paintings out of media that include Styrofoam, glass, cotton, wool, and unbound pigment. The showcased pigment painting invokes a tactile response simultaneously with a pleasant visual reaction. Using powdered pigment in open space highlights the involvement of the most common natural force, the wind; it also frees the work of art from the restraint and control of formal qualities — line, shape, color, rhythm, tone, movement. Bearing extreme similarities to some of the most renowned Chinese philosophical theories, instead of controlling them by force, the artist surveys how all the forces combine and interact. Otto Piene had been working and living in Germany and America, whose artistic practices centered on fire and light. The small-sized “fire painting” by the artist retains the residual of fire, harnessing its heat for creative means, and giving the viewers pause to mediate on the force of such natural elements. It also records the movement of fire, controlled by the artist’s manual shifting of the canvas and chance.