Autumn Exhibitions at UCCA
Won Ju Lim:
24 SECONDS OF SILENCE
Curated by UCCA Curator David Spalding
September 27 – November 26, 2008
An Xiaotong:
WHERE AND WHEN
Curated by UCCA Director Jerome Sans
September, 27- October 24, 2008
Creating a platform for dialogue between the contemporary Chinese scene and artists from around the world, UCCA presents for its Autumn Season solo exhibitions by artists Won Ju Lim and An Xiaotong, who offer their perspectives on two important contemporary phenomena: our changing urban landscapes and the transformation of individuals’ identities generated by the new media sphere, respectively.
Won Ju Lim: 24 SECONDS OF SILENCE
September 27 – November 26, 2008
Korean-born, Los Angeles-based artist Won Ju Lim (b. 1968, Korea) presents 24 Seconds of Silence, her newest installation commissioned especially for UCCA’s Middle Room, which is also her first solo exhibition in Asia.
Inspired by Beijing’s urban landscape as well as science fiction and fantasy films such as Logan’s Run (1976), Metropolis (1927) and The Wizard of Oz (1939), Won Ju Lim has created 24 Seconds of Silence, a multimedia installation of sculptures combined with still and rotating projections of processed, abstracted video footage that the artist shot throughout Beijing. 24 Seconds of Silence is a single, large-scale installation that includes 14 pieces of sculpture and is illuminated by five video projections that reflect the vitality and fragmentation of Beijing’s landscape, where several historical moments are compressed into a single city block.
“As her exhibition at UCCA will affirm, Won Ju Lim is among the most talented and challenging artists of her generation,” says exhibition curator David Spalding. “Her long-term, artistic engagement with how we imagine and experience the built environment made me certain that she would find the urban landscape of Beijing fascinating. Ultimately, 24 Seconds of Silence invites viewers to see the world around them from a new perspective.”
During the exhibition, Won Ju Lim will give an artist’s talk about the development of her work and will introduce a screening of one of the films that inspired her work Logan’s Run (1976). Subsequent film screenings will presented in the UCCA Auditorium in the following weeks, including Metropolis (1927) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Dark City (1998). The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colored catalogue.
Won Ju Lim’s work has been shown in recent solo exhibitions such as: Broken Landscape and Ruined Traces, Patrick Painter Inc., Los Angeles (2007); Won Ju Lim: In Many Things to Come, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii (2006); Idylle, DA2 Domus Artrium, Center of Contemporary Art, Salamanca, Spain (2005). In 2007, Lim was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship. In 2006, she won Korean Arts Foundation of America’s Award for Visual Arts.
Won Ju Lim is represented by Patrick Painter Inc., Los Angeles; Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin;
Pilar Parra & Romero Galería de Arte, Madrid; and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York.
An Xiaotong: WHERE AND WHEN
September, 27- October 24, 2008
For the second edition of Curated by… UCCA is pleased to present Where and When, an exhibition by An Xiaotong. ”Supporting young artists is at the core of UCCA’s mission and Curated by… gives young or emerging talents a first opportunity to showcase their work to a greater number of people,” states Jerome Sans, UCCA Director.
The work of An Xiaotong builds on a symptomatic phenomenon of our time: connections between people on the internet.
New communicating mechanisms and concepts are replacing traditional means of communication; Simplicity of communication has on the one hand brought people closer together while simultaneously creating new distances. Life evolves between the virtual and the real worlds, with the former gradually replacing the latter and the concept of communication redefined by space and time.
Using images gleaned over the net: from web sites, blogs and chat rooms, An Xiaotong sets them free from the limitation of their formats and makes them her own. By enlarging these small pictures and by employing painting, the artist goes against the multiplication of images in our society and produces a unique work. An Xiaotong thereby immortalizes and exhibits people, whose status goes from being an anonymous lost into the pool of images available on the net to a celebrity that everyone in our star-obsessed society aspires to become.
Conceived as a single body of work, Where and When is exhibited in both ”White Cube and Black box” and presents itself as a 360 degrees space crafted as a computer matrix where An Xiaotong has strategically placed her portraits of individuals.
An Xiaotong was born in Xian in 1971 and has been working as an independent artist and curator since the early 1990′s, participating in collective exhibitions abroad, especially with gallery Anne de Villepoix (Pulse, New York) in 2006 and in 2005 (FIAC, Paris; Art Basel Miami 2006) and in China, noticeably with Floating city, The first Biennial of Moca Shanghai in 2006. An Xiaotong has also had a series of solo shows including Spreading at the Biennal of Busan and Virus 2006 with Miss China in Paris in 2006. Where and When at UCCA is the first solo show of the artist in Beijing since Limits of Visions at the Galerie Passage in 2000. An Xiaotong has lived in France since 2002.
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) is a non profit, comprehensive art center founded in Beijing by collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens in November 2007. UCCA presents exhibitions of established and emerging artists and develops a trusted platform to share knowledge through education and research.
