Martin Boyce: Hanging Gardens / Chen Qiulin: Peppermint

LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum is proud to present two unique solo exhibitions at the same time: Peppermint by Chen Qiulin, the first museum presentation in her hometown Chengdu, and Hanging Gardens by Martin Boyce, his first institutional presentation in China.

Hanging Gardens is an extensive exhibition by Martin Boyce (*1967 Hamilton, UK), which encompasses over 30 works dating from 2004 to 2018. Boyce creates a poetic and fragmented landscape that moves between an abandoned urban park, a garden and an inner courtyard with close-by domestic quarters, instilling it with a sense of uncanny abandonment whilst also appearing familiar. The Glasgow-based artist captures the spirit of modernity, drawing on elements of architecture, design and early 20th century art as well as alluding to poetry, nature, film noir and post-punk music. By focusing on the origins of objects and forms, he explores how the basic ideas of Western modernism has transformed over time. Boyce keeps these ghosts alive, his scenes evoking a feeling of witnessing the traces of a human presence; the remnants of an imagined utopia, now deteriorated and detached from their former existence.


Peppermint by Chen Qiulin (*1975 Yichang City, China), spreading on the second floor, is about a specific memory—an intangible, unfading essence of the past. A telephone call and a photograph of her old martial art team took Chen back to the summer of 1983. Like an involuntary Proustian memory, this discovery brought back memories, which has long been overshadowed. Through her personal history, the artist appeals to our basic human experiences and asks the existential questions of who we are and how we have become what we are. For Peppermint Chen went back to the places of her childhood to visit her former teammates. Her works are not only studies of her individual past, but also of our relationship with our own past and the passage of time. The installation remains in a state between reality and virtue, expressing an uncertainty about the truth of memory and reality.

Artistic director: Sunny Sun
Curated by Christian Ganzenberg
Exhibition coordinator: Zeng Ziluo

Special thanks for the support of Hanging Gardens to Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich/New York, Esther Schipper, Berlin, and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow

Special thanks for the support of Peppermint to A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu

Press contact
Yvonne SHI, shiyaning [​at​] a4am.cn, T +86 17788661427