The 8th Edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing Up&Coming Sector: The Inner Side of the Wind

Taking on the form of a thematic group exhibition focused on the active dialogue and in-depth collaboration between curators and artists, Gallery Weekend Beijing 2024 Up&Coming Sector aims to promote a more authorial yet public presence for knowledge production in the art scene. Evonne Jiawei Yuan, an independent curator currently active in Shanghai and Beijing, is invited to curate the show. Centred around the annual theme “Drift to Return”, she proposes to appropriate the title of “The Inside of the Wind,” bringing together 30 artists or artist groups from home and abroad, either represented by or collaborating with the Main Sector’s participating galleries. This is a collective effort to address the idea of “Beijing Time” within the historical construction A08 Building in the 798 Art Zone.

“…(B)oth towers appeared simultaneously…glistening in the sun on one side and somehow dark and stumbling down the other. And it transpired that the cocks crowning them did not show the same time.”

“The Inner Side of the Wind” draws upon the polyphonic structure established by Serbian writer Milorad Pavić in his novel of the same title published in 1991. Learning from the dialogue between the two protagonists Hero and Leander spanning over centuries, the exhibition attempts to explore a certain kind of duality persistently emerging in the contemporary art in-and-of China.

Many artists who are active in the Sinophone/Chinese art scene today are not only defined to some extent by the framework of identity politics derived from new tribalism but may also influenced by the native awareness of the new era, and resort to discourse on selfhood and subjectivity.

As one of the cheap prophets says at the beginning of the story, “(t)he inner side of the wind is the one that remains dry when the wind blows through the rain.” Rather than speculating around the nature of existence through a grand storyline of geo-relations and its spatial gaps, what may be of greater significance is to transcend the immediately given representation of micro time driven by different perceptions and experiences for a reflective judgement, thus connecting it back to true being.

In this vein of intertextual and intercultural crossings, works ranging from painting, sculpture, installation and video by 30 artist(-duo)s in the exhibition articulate this phenomenon and construct its discursive coordinates from three aspects in concept: “the chronic derealisation” – temporal heterogeneity as (a form of) resisting; “the disjunctive unity” – global contemporary as (a tool for) criticality; “the watery agents” – narrative identity as (an effect of) trickle-up.

To echo the idea of “drift to return” embraced by this edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing, “The Inner Side of the Wind” on show at its Up&Coming Sector hereby questions the problematique of itself: How to interweave the past and the future in history (of art)? And where does the wind blow?