ENSEMBLE URBAN

The city binds the works of the past, the contemporary, and the future. It’s more a system that operates the lives of the urbanites, but a collective work of many generations; it’s not a written book, but one that’s being re-read and re-written. The new urban dwellers who have just arrived are inventing new features and forms of the city and transforming it into their works.

Every city is a work of art created by generations of people living there, while the new city has also been “on exhibit” in each generation’s works.

Contemporary art has afforded the city a compound structure to encompass time, space, bodies, and desires. It can transform a product of space into an artwork about space, transforming urban dwellers from product consumers to creators of their own artworks. Contemporary art supports new urbanites:

· To realize one’s experience in the city over a period of time into a work of art;

· To present one’s artwork in one’s city;

· To transform the city into one’s artwork;

· To present the city in one’s artwork.

Contemporary art integrates the spaces of everyday living, architecture, design, the fashion of a city into the “gesamtkunstwerk” of art and discovers new capacities for surviving the Anthropocenic city of a new festival of commonality.

In an era where new works are being created, APSMUSEUM aims to unite artists, architects, designers, and all talents in the creative disciplines to stimulate new desires and wisdom in the city and show the public other possible tracks of life beyond work and leisure. We will engage in urban practice through integrated interdisciplinary art exhibitions, public programs, art shops and an art flash shop in collaboration with Xinhua Bookstore, a subsidiary of Shanghai Xinhua Media Group. In doing so, we aim to foster a pollinating economy that would bring together contemporary art, architecture, design, and fashion beyond the art institutions and social practice and engendering the ethic of stems in the new urban society, where its components, intrigue, share, contribute, empower and reciprocate with one another.

As the anthropologist and sociologist, Georges Bataille has put it, an art space is the lungs of the metropolis, and the masses that poured in are the blood that stimulates the city. By amplifying, fermenting, cataloging works of art and their relationships with their viewers, an art space in the city introduces fresh oxygen and provides a profound grammar for urban space planning and the development for organizing urban life.

XU ZHEN®’s practice is committed to probe issues around the pretension of human condition, looking to upset and challenge the assumptions of established order. Experience – Venus de Milo presents an elaborated outline of the classic “Venus without arms”. Based on their own cultural experience, viewers can still clearly identify the source of the image. The work fuses digital media and cultural genes to create a new perspective on aesthetics and angle on media representation, as well as stimulate viewers’ visual memory through cultural experience.