Shanghai colors

In response to the exhibition theme Shanghai Colors, the curator has selected artists with profound connections to the city of Shanghai: those who were born, raised, or have lived and worked in Shanghai. Spanning more than forty years, these artists were born between the 1950s and the 1990s. In terms of media, the exhibition features works across painting, photography, installation, and conceptual art, aiming to present the openness, richness, and multi-dimensional perspectives of contemporary art practice. In the mean time, it seeks to reflect the development and transformation of contemporary art in Shanghai over recent decades.

Xu Zhen’s Beverage series recombines the striking visual symbols across different contexts, extending the artist’s attempts to transform civilizational experience through contemporary concepts. In the sculptures and paintings of this series, ancient Greek columns—symbols of human civilization—are inserted into classic imagery from both Eastern and Western cultures, the latter which includes classical sculptures, blue-and-white porcelains, and scholar’s rocks, among others. As the columns themselves are reconfigured into straws, these civilizational symbols also defamiliarize and ironize the objects they penetrate, rendering them simultaneously anachronistic and contemporary. Within the everyday action of “drinking/sucking”, the artist metaphorizes the various interactions in human’s perception of civilization in the post-globalization era. For instance, finding the future in history, or extracting illusions about each other between Eastern and Western civilizations. Above all, it symbolizes the uncertainty and dynamism of reality nowadays.