Chen Ruofan, Liz with her friends, 2021
Li Tingwei, Great days green screen, 2017
The Street： A Form of Living Together
The long and narrow exhibition space，the dissociative exhibits, as entering the new space of Gene Gallery located on the Shanghai Bund, we are likely in the Scene of Hitchcock's zoom. The compression, distortion and stacking of space wrap diversified information， heading to our face, leading the audience to stay outside of time and space and dance in image space.
During the period of pandemic and urban crisis, Chen Junyao, curator of the exhibition, named the exhibition "Romantic street dance", not only presenting the cultural integration and collectivism, which was shown in the eponym works of artist Liu Jinhui and the songs of The band Beyond, but also the personal experience and visual culture of the streets. Around the concept of "street", they combine and transform into new patterns and narratives, reflecting and generating a series of imagination and discussion involving collective relations and public space.
Street drift
As Wang Minan said, the street is an urban theatre without silent night, which never ends. With the acceleration of the industrial revolution, the collapse of closed geographical space and the increasingly frequent population flow, industrial apartments, transportation junctions and streets came into being, outlining the original modern city. With the interweaving of industrial production and commercial activities, material images formed a new geographical picture: busy streets, hurrying labourers, tired minorities, shrouded in the glory of modernity. Diversity is further compressed and transformed in the information age: satellite communications, television, modern transportation, economic globalization. No matter where they come from on the planet, countless things can be quickly and seamlessly integrated into the same space. Under the variation of history, space is constantly filled with meanings.
In the integration process, the street, as the basic unit of urban space, is the arena of "struggle". Space is the means of production and productivity. "Space is used as a machine." space is regarded as the carrier or expression of political and economic struggle, whether it is the opposition between heaven and the reality in the middle Ages, the political and economic change caused by the industrial revolution, or the reconfiguration under globalization. Rulers control regions and divide classes through space, and reproduce social order to reflect in daily life. However, the resistance to standardized and abstract time and space has never stopped -- the critical thinking of a series of sociologists such as Lefebvre and David Harvey, and the rebellion of scholars such as Baudelaire and Benjamin against modern cities. This trend also appeared in the art world. The founding member of situationist international, Guy Debord, defined psychogeography in 1955, putting forward "eliminate boundaries between art and life”. The methodology is to "drift" (drift) , lost in the city, aimlessly walking in the street, like loafer drift, fully absorbing city's information, Visual images, smells, sounds, thoughts. These ideas were reflected in the happening and environment art of the 1960s, and resulted in the exhibition mentioned in the preface—The Street： A Form of Living Together.
Rather than being integrated into entirety, the dizzying images are scattered all around, giving the viewer a glimpse of the street, "like a leaf unfurling the rich world of experience of all plants". This internal logic is also reflected in the exhibition: the fragmentation of the departure, the poetic homesickness, the interpretation of subjectivity, montage led to the discussion about the street. In Han Xiuzhi's triptych, cyclists on the street always occupy the focus, their bodies are outlined in mono-tone, and their facial features are simplified. In the front and back scenes, trees, vehicles, passengers with blurred faces in buses, naked women in the shape of Grande Odalisqu，dissolved into the memory vortex. The painter paints daily scenes in low saturation colour and soft border lines，with extremely calm brushwork, but the faint emotion is emitted. Through the translation of old images, Liu Yixuan attaches a sense of anomie to academic sculptures. The peace doves with porcelain texture are suspended in the foreground, which divides the picture into multiple dimensions. The flag-waving young pioneers seem to indicate the connotation of their age. However, the painter's deliberate pursuit of artificial objects leads to the collapse of perception structure and viewing mode. The rupture of the picture and emotional connotation also appears in Bian Shaozhi's painting. The transparent gelatinous pink octopus, named by a nickname Kathy，which is commonly seen in sex workers, has twining tentacles, horizontal pupils and tightly arranged suckers, interweaving violence, cruelty and warmth, temptation and desire.
From “space” to “scene”
"Those real streets are designed by users, ordinary people." Different perspectives and intersubjectivity present diversified psychological experience, emotion and activities. Behaviour, historical and cultural evolution, and the social background turns space into "scene". However, the exhibition does not focus on this process in a panoramic view or a dissertation study but rather a series of individual experiences. Chen Ruofan pays attention to the small animals in the city park. Prospect， as well as close shot, blur the plant and surroundings, implicitly revealing the ambiguity and shyness. Her painting" Liz with her friends"describes the relationship between two dogs，adding “animism" to the rheological of urban life and nature, capturing the subtle emotions. We've become so used to short videos that we can't stop watching them. Flooding is no longer about bursts of information but increasingly muscle memory. During the epidemic, short videos provide us with a channel to escape from the present and experience the outside world. Li Tingwei inverted this relationship in her video "Great Days Green Screen": The screen remains green as you swipe your finger quickly, but the environment changes with each swipe. The converse of the stated code and reality impacts the boundary between the individual and the public, cyberspace and reality, "filling up the gap that should not be filled”.
The streets are direct representations of visual culture and secular life: Street
The eye that has countless city wind demon: the eye of the erotic dance pool, the fly-eye of the department store, the intoxicated eye of the bar, the deceitful eye of the beauty room, the intimate eye of the hotel, the hypocritical eye of the church, the cunning eye of the theatre, the sleepy eye of the restaurant…..
With serial parallelism, sentence patterns and progressive tone, Mu Shiying transferred colourful urban life and street scenes into his novel with sophisticated, expressive techniques such as consciousness and symbolism. Emotional agitation and multi-dimensional space with affluent images also appear in Yu Hang's paintings. He uses crisscross brushwork and significantly tension colour to express tight emotions. Daub, cover, recording a flash fragment, cascade changeful space.
The street visualizes abstract social relations and becomes medium to observe the world today. At the same time, as a knot on the public network, gallery space resembles the street, bringing artists of different styles, media and concepts together and becomes an ideal carrier for drawing and reorganizing urban life. As stated in the exhibition's preface, streets link individuals and collectives, bearing the history and future. When many public Spaces are forced to close due to the repeated epidemic, “Romantic street dance" embodies the vision and expectation of collective life.