Testimony for the Future

Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art is honored to announce the upcoming duo exhibition Testimony for the Future curated by Zhu Zhu. This exhibition features key works and new commissions by the artists Gao Lei and Li Nu. With paintings, sculptures, installations and video works, the exhibition presents that the two artists’ contemplations of the present and the future, individual existence and the current state of the times.

The concept of the exhibition is inspired by the difference between the space of Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art and that of the “White Box”. As an artistic space transformed from an air-raid shelter, the art museum retains the previous structural characteristics and sense of historical relics as well as its geographic environment that is inseparable from the Jilongshan Mountain. The space of the “air-raid shelter” is treated as a place where Gao Lei and Li Nu store and exchange their works. One day, far in the future, upon looking back, the door of the “shelter” would be opened, displaying testimony for the collective memory and reflection of the two intersecting individual lives as well as of the present era.

In the specific structural arrangement of the exhibition, works of the two artists are organically grouped together to form direct thematic dialogues, superimposed visual tensions, or understandable interconnections, weaving the two independent forms of individual creations into a bare thread in the tunnel of time and space. In terms of their respective methodologies, Gao Lei’s expression has the constant appearance of rational thinking, while Li Nu constantly shifts between lightness and heaviness, silence and explosion. Their works are both witnesses to reality and metaphysical inquiries. Compared with the local conceptual artists of the previous generation, Gao Lei and Li Nu avoid excessively-symbolic production and respond to the common circumstances by focusing more on art itself.

The exhibition, for the first time, will be presented in both the main gallery and the tunnel sub-space of Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art. The duo exhibition will be unveiled on March 30, 2024, and closed on June 30, 2024.