Energy Field: Transmedia Art Exhibition

The year 2017 marks the twelfth year since the establishment and sound subsequent growth of the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai. Since the start of this new year, the museum has started to display even greater vitality than ever before with its new vision to develop its customized and distinctive “Cross and Plus” operational model and foster such innovation within China and beyond its borders. Gathering Field – A Transmedia Art Exhibition is thus MoCA Shanghai’s starting event for the year, signaling its first step in realizing this vision as well as the museum’s prospective orientation toward such a transformation.

Yang Qingqing, a professor from Shanghai Theatre Academy’s College of Creative Studies, has been invited to act as the curator forMoCA Shanghai’s opening 2017 exhibition. With a selection of works from domestically and internationally renownedparticipating artists, this seasoned transmedia researcher and practitioneris expected to use a “Gathering Field” theme to reflect the core concept of the art form. According to Samuel Kung, director of the museum, “The prominence of ‘transmedia’ for this exhibition lies in the studies of humankind’s creative thinking as well as a broad exploration into artistic practice. Such an exploration may activate our inspirations and aspirations and break through the dichotomy between traditional and contemporary art.” It is worth mentioning that “I” Fantasie – Rencontre between Debussy and Du Liniang, a refreshing work that crosses the disciplinaryfields of theatre, film, and music, is included in this event to expand upon the oft assumed concept that a fine art museum is just a mere “white cube”, showing what such a venue can truly be all about.“This will also fully open the gates of MoCA Shanghai to a series of successive pieces of ‘Cross and Plus’ repertoire,” added Mr. Kung, “pooling the entirety of cultural and artistic variety within the dynamic fields of the museum.”

Yang holds that “Transmedia” is a high-level form of “artistic entanglement”. “Trans” here signifiesthe meeting and combination of artistic thought, theaccumulation of inventive energy, and the enhanced materialization of the human sensory experiencewithin either the real or virtual world. Many unprecedented forms of art havethereby made their wayonto the stage as a result, and these include the trans-narrative, trans-reality, trans-sculpture, trans-fixation, trans-behavior, trans-incidental, and trans-language, among many, many others.

“Transmedia” is a concept, a methodology, and, before anything else, “the free interchanges of the vast range of human senses”. Joseph Beuys once said, “Art is the only power to free humankind from all repression.” From my point of view, it is no exaggeration to sayart is a science deeply rooted in freedom.

From the perspective of Hegel’s definition of aesthetics, this exhibition presents a special formation of a field which gathers jarring yet mysterious expressions of sentimentality based on the transmedia conception.