Liu Ding’s Store – The Utopian Future of Art, Our Reality
June 7th – November 22nd 2009
Liu Ding’s Store – the Utopian Future of Art, Our Reality is proudly launched at the China Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale at 3.30pm, June 5, 2009.
June 7th – November 22nd 2009
Sponsor: Erlenmeyer Stiftung, Switzerland
Supported by Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne
Liu Ding’s Store – The Utopian Future of Art, Our Reality is a concept that is based on the artistic ideal of unifying things of different values within a new order to create a model for a free artistic society.
The social reality that this artistic ideal is attempting to challenge is the compulsive demands that a world reliant on technology and embedded in the relation between cause and effect, has imposed on everyone.
Inside the art-world this social reality manifests itself as a never-ending pursuit. All this in order to make an artwork look more like an artwork, whilst an omnipresent hierarchical system and its related feelings of superiority are consolidated and intensified by and within it.
Liu Ding’s Store – The Utopian Future of Art, Our Reality proposes to create a platform to go beyond this reality by introducing an economic dimension to it by bringing together artworks, handicrafts, and design products under concepts invented by the artist, and selling and treating these items without any high/low cultural differentiation or classification. They are displayed, described and handled as if they were the same with no material distinctions of nature or characteristics or pricing, thus abandoning the differentiations in the definition and classification of what is an artworks and what is not. Finished products and part-finished goods (at a certain moment of their production circle, which here will also be considered as finished products), design products and everyday objects, traditional or specialized products, common objects (such as electronic devices), unique objects and unlimited editions products. In this comprehensive pot-pourri of choices, the store offers the possibility for a new order.
Up till the present, there are six theme stores in this project. Each theme is devised with a very specific point of reference, which takes on a level of abstraction when this rule is applied to consider the categories for putting the products into. Liu Ding searches for items and artworks that he considers relevant for each theme and places them in an individual cabinet to generate its own system. Everything he places in the cabinets is referred to as an item so that they can be treated equally. Liu Ding organizes and groups them based on these rules – rules that are free of any cause, functionality, motivation. They are, for instance, a specific weight, a form, etc. These items are unified under a seemingly consistent rule, thus transcending their former classifications to create a new order. This new order appears with no specific reference to any particular era, region, nationality, cultural specificity or economic model or pricing scheme. The unit price of all the items within a theme store is the equal amount of dividing the total price of each store by the number of the items. This equality of value is the manifestation of an interdependent relationship between objects and contexts: objects have gained new value by being included in a special context while the formation, meaning and significance of the context is based on the very presence of such common objects. This utopian vision of the new artistic order has been based on a reflection and examination of the artistic system and more general value systems: contexts determine value while we are both the components of the contexts and at the same time derive our value from being part of the context. Every element of a context frames each other.
Purchase online at http://www.liudingstore.com
About the artist:
Liu Ding is an independent artist based in Beijing. His practice questions the various signs and structures used to confer value and meaning onto artworks.
