On the spring days of revival, G Museum at Nanjing announced to introduce its first exhibition of the year, “Looking at the Stars” to the museum’s vibrant community on February 24, 2023. Curated by researcher and scholar Sun Dongdong, a figure representative of mid-generation Chinese curators, the exhibition brings together works from 15 artists whose pieces run across different generations, mediums, and artistic concepts, aiming to rewire the narrative of Chinese contemporary art with an innovative theme and interactive presentation. The participating artists include Chen Fei, Chen Zhe, Hao Liang, He Xiangyu, Hu Xiaoyuan, Liu Yue, Liu Yu, Qiu Xiaofei, Sydney Shen, Tong Wenmin, Wang Guangle, Wang Yuyang, Wang Ziquan, Xu Lei and Xu Qu.
“The title Looking at the Stars alludes to Liu Cixin’s short science fiction piece, ‘Zhao Wen Dao,’ which explores the human quest for knowledge and the ultimate question of the universe from prehistorical times untill now. This serves as the inspiration for the exhibition’s theme,” says curator Sun Dongdong. In the story, the moment when “our ancestors first looked up at the stars 350,000 years ago” marks the beginning of a journey in pursuit of knowledge (epistemology), from natural phenomena to the nature of the world and from astronomy to humanism. However, the ultimate question, to which no one has an answer, inspires the idea that “reality is still a magic for us.”
As the audience surrounds themselves with the actual space of the museum on the 52nd floor of the building, the landscape outside the glass walls visually extends the temporal-spatial dimension in which the viewer finds themselves bewildered and venturing. And this dimension forms an interesting intertext with the works on display. The exhibition, as Sun Dongdong puts it, opens up “this spiritual field created by the mind and heart, in which we see different themes, concepts, symbols, and images forming a constellation altogether, retracing and remaking the common phase of human life in retrospection, from ancient times onwards.”
The exhibition’s narrative unfolds with Wang Yuyang’s Plato’s Cube, located in the front gallery. The work that opens up a complex dialogue from multiple perspectives within a discourse of eternity and movement. When entering the main gallery, visitors will encounter Xu Qu’s commissioned work, Touch, a large-scale installation that displays images of modern planets on a pair of mechanical arms. The title Touch metaphorically evokes the mythical moment when God’s creation of Adam sparked humanity’s fascination with the universe, inspiring an enlightening expedition. Touch also reflects the outward gaze back to the subject of observation in Xu’s painting Dust, which provides a retrospective look at Earth from space.
Correspondingly, Xu Lei’s installation painting The World’s Double Screen takes the conceptual form of a double screen, traversing the cultural landscapes of different civilisations and reflecting on our current global relations from a worldly perspective. This thread of thinking based on spatial imagery is also presented in the video works displayed in the exhibition. For example, Tong Wenmin’s video performance installation Temperature recalls the inner flow of the human body, whilst Liu YU’s If Narrative Were a Flood delves into the mythological narrative model that underlies human civilization as a whole.
As curator Sun Dongdong puts it, “even the most subtle individuals tell the story of the universe.” He Xiangyu’s sculpture Mia draws the exhibition’s narrative into a temporal discussion about encounters of times and meanings of life. Hu Xiaoyuan’s installation Stone Doubt | Goodbye, Eternity IV, and Qiu Xiaofei’s painting Dome capture the individual feelings of time through appropriation and assemblage of symbols pertaining to different human civilizations during the flow of time. Also, as an example of pictorializing ‘introspective space,’ Hao Liang’s Set of Numbers – Autumn Thoughts – Morning and Evening recontextualizes Yuan opera and finds echoes in all things and their shared feelings (gan ying), in terms of bringing the past and present in unison. The emotions stored up in this era are released in Wang Guangle’s Red Phosphorus , where the scratches on the phosphorus skin and the flame lit by a match cross the “inner sky” like meteors in the participation and interaction with the audience. The everyday situations composed of hope and worries turn into another dramatic reality of magic in Chen Fei’s paintings Supernatural and Small Weekend.
In a sense, Liu Yue’s Origins explores rewinding time back to the scale of the universe as suggested by physics theories. Chen Zhe’s site-specific installation, Last Ride in the Night Sky, departs from a handscroll to locate and connect the universal experience of life on a time scale outside of anthropocentric perspective. In Syndey Shen’s The Onion Master, life is presented as a futile self-entertainment. As a counterweight to this idea, Wang Ziquan’s new commission work Ephemera, Memory for Breathing, transforms bygone desires for life into a futuristic imagination driven by technology, thus embarking on a time-space travel with an installation orbiting the gallery.
The exhibition is an epitome of contemporary art, which inclusively shares different values, ideas, and identities with equal merit. In “Looking at the Stars,” the audience is expected to encounter an untold world in which the artworks still speak and resonate with each other.
Based on this field of art stretching upon the sky and the earth, “Looking at the Stars” hopes to break established conventions and regulations of art narratives in order to reconstruct the narrative space. Moreover, it ultimately brings new possibilities to a more diverse audience of contemporary art.