ART-PRESENTATION: Land of the Lustrous

UCCA Dune presents “Land of the Lustrous”, encompassing work by ten artists both in and beyond China. Each artwork in this exhibition relates, materially or formally, to the figure of the stone, approaching this age-old object from novel perspectives. Participating artists weave their individual concerns together, drawing from, and sinking into, ancient collective memories.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: UCCA Archive

The exhibition “Land of the Lustrous” is devised to fit the unique spatial characteristics of the building and the surrounding environment. The artworks serve as explorations of a single animist belief: that rock, a piece of seemingly inert matter, is actually endowed with life and thought. Wang Sishun’s “Apocalypse 16.9.1”, for example, personifies three found stones; arrayed in a line, they stand rigidly upright in cautious dialogue. Zhao Yao, Lin Xue, and Miguel Angel Ríos, similarly, have selected stones of unassuming appearance and brought them to life by cleverly manipulating their details, positions, and postures. Zhao Yao has placed an enormous red Mani stone on the edge of the sea; Lin Xue has drawn a series of fruit pits, transforming them into heavenly bodies. Miguel Angel Ríos’ film records a cascade of tumbling stones, recalling the vigorous movements of antelope. Timur Si-qin and Su-Mei Tse strive to imagine models and rubrics that are separate from “nature itself.” Si-qin’s “Juniper”, produced in 2019, is a kind of billboard for the Anthropocene, advertising the spatial and temporal concepts attendant to this new epoch. Su-Mei Tse’s “Stone Collection” reminds viewers of the Ancient Chinese custom of collecting oddly-shaped stones as foci for our yearning for nature. Li Weiyi’s “Cairn” gives a humorous take on this absurdity: wearing VR goggles, viewers are transported into the interior of a stone. Other artists use these mysterious, self-contained images to create a spectral stage to perform their own, fantastic tales. Lu Pingyuan has taken the story of an art collective, “Meteorite Hunters,” scouring the earth for fallen meteorites and launching them back into outer space, and carved it onto three stones. Yan Xing has enacted one of his own stories of industrial design in Republican Era China, featuring the radiant exchange between a piece of jade and an indoor light fixture. Wang Xiaoqu’s paintings explore the rich middle ground between two different interpretations of a photograph—that of the photographer, and that of the artist. The exhibition also provides a series of myths related to stone, forming an interpretive framework for the artworks. These visual misreadings closely resemble the oral transmission and mutation of myths. In this exhibition, a discourse based on precedent and change links to a more capacious visual system, an interchange that depends less on precision than on inspiration. The exhibition hopes to uncover and awaken several possibilities often overlooked in the context of contemporary art. China has a long, fruitful history of worshiping stone deities; this most ordinary of objects has gained an aura of ineffability in popular consciousness. This aura suffuses the artworks, too, circumventing that anxiety plaguing Wittgenstein as he described “pictures placed in language.”

Info: Curator: Yang Zi, UCCA Dune Art Museum, Aranya Gold Coast Community, Beidaihe District, Hebei province, Duration: 23/4-8/9/19, Days & Hours: Mon-sun 10:00-19:00, http://ucca.org.cn