Walking On The Fade Out Lines

The Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai is proud to present the latest exhibition Walking On The Fade Out Lines from March 24 to May 27, 2018. The fruit of a fascinating collaboration and exchange with Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, one of the most renowned contemporary art institutions in Italy, the exhibition will be curated by Larys Frogier, the director of Rockbund Art Museum, and Hsieh Feng-Rong, the senior curator of Rockbund Art Museum. With 30 works from over 23 artists from all continents, spanning such various forms as paintings, interactive installations, photography, video, among others, the works are selected from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, along with additional video works from Song Tao and new commissioned works from Zhang Ruyi, with the latter two artists originating from Shanghai and thus strengthening the rich connection to local contexts.

Walking On The Fade Out Lines tackles the ways and angles of “seeing” and invites viewers to revisit history, explore unfamiliar cities and regions. Viewers can scrutinize how artists offer up dilemmas through creative questioning, examination, and analyses from the end of the 20th century to the present, as well as how the thinking of the “Alterity” of the trans-regional is proposed in a globalized context. Through a poetic elaboration, the exhibition attempts to transform the intrinsic understanding of cognitive structures that had gone along set paths, thereby offering up more open and plural interpretative perspectives.

As Larys Frogier says, “Walking On The Fade Out Lines whispers, listens, connects with the Other, and yet there is no need to see the foreigner as the Other or to travel such distances to meet with and speak on behalf of an exotic Other. Radical alterity has first to be found and cultivated into our own place, our inner self, our individual and social interaction, with all kinds of beauty, ugliness, tyranny, harmony. There is always a foreign land from where we stand.”

The exhibition Walking On The Fade Out Lines minutely sorts through the trans-regional particularities in cultural contexts. In the totality of artistic expression constituted by the works, we hope to open the dialogic space of the epistemological world and continue to spark processes in which people explore the unknown. As the curator Hsieh Feng-Rong says, “By means of the artistic statements and imagery as carried across by the works, the exhibition uses the artworks as critical reflective tools and brings viewers into an unfamiliar landscape, entering into dialogue with them, and attempting to rebuild the state of imagination in that blurred boundary between the known and the unknown.” At the same time, a series of public education events will take place over the course of the exhibition in order to further explore this issue.

List of artists: Victor Alimpiev, Massimo Bartolini, Vanessa Beecroft, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Maurizio Cattelan, Damien Hirst, Marine Hugonnier, Hassan Khan, Donghee Koo, Sarah Lucas, Mark Manders, Paul McCarthy, Gabriel Orozco, Paola Pivi, Navin Rawanchaikul, Charles Ray, Yinka Shonibare, Song Tao, Rudolf Stingel, Pae White, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Zhang Ruyi

About the collabaration between Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai) and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin)
Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai) and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin) are delighted to announce their exciting collaboration in 2018. The two institutions are united in a mutual desire to promote artistic projects and educational programs that will de-center their existing contexts in order to promote unexpected artists, practices and topics. Sharing certain artistic challenges in developing from their own localities in order to reach a global scope, the two leading international art institutions will co-produce two collective exhibitions which will unfold multiple perspectives in researching on and supporting contemporary art—beyond the usual standards and categories of art. Sharing engaged visions and missions in supporting artists and curatorial projects, the two private art organizations truly engage in cooperation. They will offer their respective audiences two different exhibitions that aim to bring up certain open questions and debates on the way to discovering artistic practices and spheres, welcoming diversity, and extending contexts for a greater contribution in the development of contemporary art.

Following the current exhibition Walking On The Fade Out Lines in RAM (Shanghai), from June to October, Fondazione Re Rebaudengo in Turin will welcome the collective exhibition Tell Me a Story: Locality and Narrative. Researching on and bringing together artists from different areas in Asia all the while unfolding exceptional narrative practices, the exhibition will be an extremely rare opportunity for audiences in Italy and Europe to discover younger generations of artists in Asia, artists who actively contribute to the diversity and dynamism of the contemporary art scenes in their own localities within Asia from international and universal perspectives.