ART NEWS: Dec.02

The exhibition “The Art Life of Huang Rui” is one of the extensions of the 40-year commemoration of the Stars Exhibition. Huang’s exhibition presents six sequential contexts of his artistic journey over the past 40 years with a chronological and retrospective character that follows his artistic and social footsteps from the 1970s, when the Stars Exhibition (1979), known as one of the most experimental exhibitions in the history of Chinese contemporary art. Huang is a multidisciplinary artist who has developed various media including painting, sculpture, installation and performance. Until the 1980s, his early works concentrated on abstract paintings influenced by Western modernist pictorial traditions of the 20th century such as Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism. Then he continued to develop this long proximity with abstraction that began in 1978 into the thematic and stylistic practice through 15 years from 1985 to 2000 in Japan. In particular, his works in this period embraced a wide variety of pictorial spectrum, including the geometrical symmetry of ’spatial structure’ series based on the research since 1983, to the monochromatic abstraction, and the study of the eight trigrams of the Book of Change. Info: Curators: Yongwoo Lee, Bérénice Angremy and Wang Liyin, Jupiter Museum of Art, No.6 Lanhua Road, Futian District, Shenzhen, China, duration: 3/12/2021-27/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.j-m-a.org

Who’s Afraid of Public Space?” is a multifaceted project of exhibitions and programs exploring the role of public culture, the contested nature of public space, and the character and composition of public life. The exhibition continues ACCA’s Big Picture series, which explores contemporary art’s relation to wider social, cultural and political contexts. The exhibition engages contemporary art and cultural practices to consider critical ideas as to what constitutes public culture and to ask who is public space for? The exhibition is inspired by and seeks to animate recent global debates related to the incursion of private interests in the public sphere, the politics of land and place, and patterns of urban transformation, gentrification and technological change. also, the exhibition explores the ways in which public institutions, capital and technology impact and transform our understanding of public space, culture and values. As an extension of this, questions and ideas of community, collectivity and the commons also underpin this exhibition. Info: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), 111 Sturt Street, Southbank, Melbourne, Australia, Duration: 4/12/2021-20/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-17:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://acca.melbourne

Ju Ting presents her large scale site-specific installation “Winter is Coming”. The first impression of Ju Ting’s artworks is akin to the sensation of the first few steps upon arriving at a rocky desert. One is welcomed by an endless monotonous plain, empty, out of time. Ju’s technique of layering acrylic paint draws a landscape that neither invites nor repulses but just is. As a Chinese philosophical idea says, it is only when the heart moves that one may see movement: what we see reflects our own inner state. The same thought can be applied to Ju’s oeuvre: it gives you back what you give to it. Your gaze may follow the lazy dust in the wind, dancing with dry leaves and sticks In the distance appears a fragile shimmer, warm air ascending in the sun. Almost like a wave in the sea, the slow hills roll across this panorama. A sudden edge reveals a spectrum of colors: layers of stone and rocks, layered on top of each other by millennia of wind, rain and movement. Info: Galerie Urs Meile, D10, 798 East Street, 798 Art District, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China, Duration: 4/12/2021-27/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.galerieursmeile.com

The group exhibition “Sex Ecologies” explores gender, sex, and sexuality in the context of ecology. The exhibition is founded in the belief that environmental and social justice go hand in hand. Through a transdisciplinary approach, the exhibition critiques understandings of nature, gender, sexuality, and race that attempt to objectify and naturalize them. For example, “laws against nature” used to criminalize queer sexuality, and in many places still do. These norms are justified through evolutionary narratives exclusively permitting heterosexual reproduction. Everything that does not fit this norm is considered unhealthy, polluted, or “degenerate.” These norms have proven detrimental to humans and to the thing we call nature alike. The nine artists participated in regular online meetings to workshop their artworks with the exhibition curators and with each other. The process was accompanied by an advisory board for cross-pollination composed of researchers from disciplines like gender studies, environmental humanities, communications, and Indigenous studies. This methodology is unusual for group exhibitions, where artists mostly work alone and do not meet until the opening. Info: Curatorial Team: Stefanie Hessler, Prerna Bishnoi, Carl Martin Faurby, Katrine Elise Pedersen and Kaja Waagen, Kunsthall Trondheim, Kongens gate 2, Trondheim, Norway, Duration: 9/12/2021-6/3/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-sun 13:00-17:00, https://kunsthalltrondheim.no

As a member of the first generation of artists who came to the fore after Korea’s independence, Kwon Young-Woo was involved in the vital artistic debates that characterized the newly liberated country, where artists argued for and against breaking away from what had been the official Japanese style, and the development of a new ‘national’ art. The exhibition with works by Kwon Young-Woo, a leading artist of the Dansaekhwa movement, not only showcases works from the Paris period (1978-1989) defined by Kwon’s iconic work with white hanji (Korean paper), but will also feature for the first time, colored hanji works made upon his return to Korea in 1989. Newer works from the 2000s that incorporate geometric shapes by overlapping hanji on wooden panels also are be shown. The comprehensive span of these distinctive bodies of work allows the exhibition to provide an authoritative overview of Kwon Young-Woo’s practice and the development of his formative language that uses traditional Asian materials in a modern way. It provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the artist’s seminal practice, commitment to traditional aesthetic philosophies, as well as lifelong experimentation and innovation. Info: Kukje Gallery, 54 Samcheong-ro, Sogyeok-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea, Duration: 9/12/2021-30/1/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 10:00-17:00, www.kukjegallery.com

The exhibition “A Balloon Home” centers on A.J. Lode  Janssens’ prolific yet understudied architectural attitude centers on his “Balloon” (Humbeek, 1969–86), a temporary pneumatic home experiment, an uncompromising ephemeral attempt at de-architecturalization and harmonizing with nature. An experiment with and through life itself. The exhibition showcases a ¼ scale model of the structure as its centerpiece, allowing the public to fully grasp the architect’s experiment. Together with original and hitherto unexhibited archival material, the exhibition highlights Janssens’ trial-and-error spatial research practice. Additionally, the exhibition features an installation by Marc Godts which acts as an atmospheric approach to A.J. Lode Janssens’ experiment. The SLIDEMONSTER is a cluster of 6 heavy-duty projectors and media-players mounted on a made-to-measure support-structure, projecting a selection of the original slides of the balloon. Within the framework of the exhibition, a masterstudio with students of the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture encouraged students to delve into physical and psychological aspects of the balloon home experiment. Info: Curators:  Peter Swinnen and Nikolaus Hirsch, CIVA, Rue de l’Ermitage 55 Kluisstraat, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 10/12/2021-27/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-sun 10:30-18:00, www.civa.brussels

Arturo Kameya’s solo exhibition “En esa pulga se mezcla nuestra sangre. In that flea, our blood” mixes includes new works that expand beyond the narratives explored in the artist’s multimedia presentations till now. Kameya’s work examines the plasticity of history, revisiting events and narratives through perspectives that are at times contradictory, and through the lens of the personal memories of his upbringing in Lima, Peru. The works in the exhibition reflect upon the ever-fluctuating margins within Lima’s urban middle class community: its aspirations and disappointments, debts and misfortunes, religions and superstitions, farewells and resignations. The title of the exhibition is inspired by the poem “The Flea” by the 17th century poet John Donne. The exhibition includes works that depict memories of the artist’s childhood home that are recreated with superstitious undercurrents, taking inspiration from diverse sources of his personal archive: family photos, press images, e-commerce sites and more. Various paintings include domestic rituals that feature a Youtube tutorial of a cleansing practice, a tabletop set-up to assist the dead in “crossing over,” and reinterpretations of his family’s furniture topped with offerings of alcohol, souvenirs, medicine and flowers. Info: GRIMM Gallery, 2022 54 White Street, New York, NY, USA, Days & Hours: 10/12/2021-15/1/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://grimmgallery.com

large group exhibition “Domestic Drama” is an attempt to trace and conjure up the ​“souls” that Dichter described, which are allegedly resting in our everyday objects. The scene of this search is a place that is highly formed by emotions: the home. In hardly any other place than our own four walls, otherwise hardly tangible but nonetheless essential categories are revealed — such as our social, economic, ethnic, and gender affiliations. Living somewhere can very directly shape our social belonging and participation, and in particular precisely whenever this basic need is not fulfilled or is precarious. The exhibition represents an attempt to understand everyday objects not as tools and objects for use, but as representatives of all of these conflicts, and of wishes and desires that shape our identities. In contrast to a purely educational and analytic approach to the theme, this exhibition intends to use direct and diverse aesthetic and conceptual strategies to create a physical and psychological space in which the processes and mechanisms described above can be experienced. Info: Curator: Mathrin Mayer, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Burgring 2, Graz, Austria, Duration: 14/12/2021-20/2/222, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://halle-fuer-kunst.at

A group exhibition with works by George Lazogas, George Lappas and Afroditi Liti is on show in Thessaloniki. Giorgos Lazogas’s paintings in various dimensions, present to us his personal perception of the freedom or the rigor with which he organizes his spatial compulsions. The sculptural compositions of George Lappas, objects, constructions or installations, from metals, plaster, fabric, leather,…, provide us with types of approach to symbolic formations, regarding the human condition, the random, even the ecumenical ethics and the importance of mythological thought. The sculptural objects of Aphrodite Liti compose a wonderful sculptural universe “garden”, where the naturalistic performance in magnification, which often reaches the monumental scale, confirms the sculptor’s perception of the structures of the world, as jewelry. Info: Lola Nikolaou Gallery, Tsimiski 52, Thessaloniki Greece, Duration: 14/12/2021-15/1/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-20:00, Sat 12:00-15:00, http://lolanikolaougallery.blogspot.com