Out for Art @MO

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.