Gabriel Kuri, Michelle Wang Yiyi, Han Qian

Gabriel Kuri
Aranya Art Center is pleased to present the first museum exhibition in China by Gabriel Kuri, the acclaimed Mexican-born and Brussels-based artist. The exhibition assembles nearly 30 works made between 1999–2023, including three major commissions produced by Aranya Art Center, as well as a series of new works conceived for this occasion.

A sculptor at heart, Gabriel Kuri (b. 1970) is celebrated for his dexterity, precision, and wit in convincingly forging unexpected unions between diverse materials. From found objects to collected or repurposed items, Kuri consistently directs our attention to the easily neglected detritus of the everyday. Cigarette butts, receipts, doorstops, and metal sheets become emblems of capitalist and consumer society. For the artist, there are no strictly “natural” materials. Every object is imbued with information and signification. Kuri extracts from these items coded meanings and hidden values, such as risk, luck, speculation, and emergency, filtered through the lens of commerce and modern economics.

Materials are converted into forms, reminiscent of and renewing our understandings of art historical movements like Minimalism, Arte Povera, and New Generation Sculpture. Kuri’s artistic strategy employs a system of rational structures and categorization, inspired from such industrial organizational schemes as the directory board, Take-a-Number tickets, punch cards, as well as corporate charts and graphics. Through such an intellectually rigorous approach, the artist strives to comprehend and unearth the inner mechanisms and operating patterns of the real world.

In response to the context of Aranya, a seaside real estate development, a selection of old and new works about seashells, and questions of housing and shelter, has been purposefully included and produced for the exhibition.

This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, director of Aranya Art Center and curatorial assistant Wang Jiaming. Special thanks to Sadie Coles HQ.

Michelle Wang Yiyi
Aranya Art Center is pleased to present Chinese artist Michelle Wang Yiyi’s first solo exhibition, featuring her recent sculpture series Petriceps and photography series Cordyceps. The artist considers fungi to be a medium in which she establishes in-depth communication with nature. Through hyphae, fungi bio-hacks into host organisms to break down and transcribe their secrets. The message extracted from the host is then presented in the form of mushrooms, reflecting the symbiotic network and intricate system between interspecies interactions.

Michelle Wang Yiyi, born in Nanjing in 1988, lives and works in Shanghai. The exhibition is the first presentation in Gallery 0, Aranya Art Center’s newly opened independent project space.

Videos by the Sea: Han Qian
Aranya Art Center and the Lonely Library are pleased to present Chinese artist Han Qian’s solo exhibition, which includes her video Stillness Between Two Waves of The Sea (2022) and two installation works developed from the video: Resisting, Reposing I and Resisting, Reposing II (2023).

Han Qian was born in 1993 in Wuhan. This solo exhibition is the first presentation of the independent program Videos by the Sea, organized jointly by the Aranya Art Center and the Lonely Library.

Read full exhibition statements here. Media contact: Gao Liangjiao, gaoliangjiao [​at​] aranya.cc / T +86 138 1143 1757.