Second Exhibition of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative Features Works Commissioned for Guggenheim Collection
Exhibition: Tales of Our Time
Venue: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York
Location: Tower Levels 4 and 5
Dates: Now through March 10, 2017
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Tales of Our Time, an exhibition featuring nine newly commissioned works by artists born in mainland China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. This is the second exhibition of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative, a long-term research, curatorial, and collections-building program at the Guggenheim Museum.
The exhibition’s title refers to the 1936 book Gushi xin bian (Old Tales Retold) by the influential Chinese modernist, social activist, and literary giant Lu Xun. In the book, Lu reinvents Chinese legends, as he considers these tales to be not only a literary genre, but also a strategy for critiquing social conditions and reconstructing history through storytelling.
Though diverse in subjects and strategies, the works are united by the artists’ use of storytelling to propose alternative ways of looking at place. Working in drawing, animation, video, photography, sculpture, installation, and participatory intervention, the artists in the exhibition address the concept of geography and territory in ways as specific as where they are based or as big as China itself, which they see as a concept constantly being questioned and reinvented. These artists freely cross divides to examine the tensions between past and present, myth and fact, reality and dreams, rationality and absurdity, and individuality and collectivity.
The artists represented in Tales of Our Time are Chia-En Jao, Kan Xuan, Sun Xun, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Tsang Kin-Wah, Yangjiang Group, and Zhou Tao.
Tales of Our Time is organized by Xiaoyu Weng, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art, and Hou Hanru, Consulting Curator, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative. Kyung An, Assistant Curator, Asian Art, provides curatorial support. The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative is part of the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative, directed by Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art and Senior Advisor, Global Arts. All commissioned works will enter the Guggenheim’s collection.
“Curators Xiaoyu Weng and Hou Hanru have taken a dynamic and collaborative approach, as they worked closely with the commissioned artists to explore the questions and insights that drive these art practices. We hope that these works will inform new understanding of global contemporary art through the lens of Chinese culture today,” stated Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. “The Guggenheim is grateful to The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation for its sustained commitment to this effort.”
Ted Lipman, CEO of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, congratulated the commissioned artists and noted, “Contemporary Chinese art, along with the dialogue around it, is a dynamic and increasingly important force shaping the global cultural landscape. The Chinese Art Initiative at the Guggenheim is designed to offer a fresh perspective on Chinese culture and its relationship with contemporary society. The Foundation hopes the impact of this initiative will be a lasting one.”
Chia-En Jao (b. 1976, Taichung, Taiwan). Arms no. 31, 2016. Cast aluminum, textile patchwork, display case with fabric swatches, and paper handout with text. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. © Chia-En Jao. Installation View: Tales of Our Time. Photo: David Heald
“The artists represented in Tales of Our Time vary greatly in their practices and viewpoints,” says Xiaoyu Weng. “But they share a broad perspective, one that places China’s culture, history, and social reality in the context of the wider world. And like so many artists today, they register acute discomfort with the tension between the personal experiences of regular people and the dominant narratives and conventions of power.”
Sun Xun (b. 1980, Fuxin, Liaoning Province), Mythological Time, 2016 (details). Two-channel color HD animated video, with sound, and ink, graphite and acrylic on mulberry bark paper. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. © Sun Xun
Tales of Our Time is installed on two Tower Levels of the museum. Visitors may enter Tower Level 4 through a passageway lined with fantastic visions inspired by the natural world, drawn in the classical Chinese style on traditional bark paper by Sun Xun (b. 1980). Sun’s installation Mythological Time (2016) centers on his hometown of Fuxin in northeastern China, a coal-mining town that was once the pride of modern-era Chinese industrialization, but which the artist portrays as merely a fleeting scene over many millennia. A second monumental wall-size painting by Sun Xun depicting a surreal prehistoric landscape is also on view. Two video streams are projected onto its surface, sending animated creatures cavorting next to those drawn on paper with ink and acrylics.
Chia-En Jao (b. 1976, Taichung, Taiwan), Taxi, 2016, Color UHD video, with sound. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. © Chia-En Jao
Taxi (2016), a video installation, presents conversations conducted by the artist Chia-En Jao (b. 1976) with taxi drivers in Taipei. The artist asked drivers to take him to historically contested destinations in the city, such as a branch of Chang Hwa Bank where a mass protest was suppressed by Chiang Kai-shek’s military regime in 1947, the Presidential Office Building, the Grand Hotel, or the National Taiwan Museum. Recorded documentary style, the conversations meander through difficult memories of the Japanese occupation and martial law to present-day concerns. The artist has also created a flag for the installation, a traditional coat of arms representing many aspects of Taiwanese society, including its aboriginal communities. Through this investigation into the powerful connection between history and storytelling, Jao creates a mental map of Taipei that honors individual memory and experience.
Zhou Tao (b. 1976, Changsha, Hunan Province), Land of the Throat, 2016 Installation with two-channel color HD video, with sound. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. © Zhou Tao
Nearby Taxi on Tower Level 4 is a futuristic, pod-like video installation by Zhou Tao (b. 1976). Land of the Throat (2016) evokes a phenomenon characteristic of China’s urbanization today: the construction of the new and the consequential transformation of the land. Two synchronized videos composed of footage recorded in Guangdong, China and Arizona are projected onto opposite sides of an enclosed structure in the gallery space. A cow chained to an abandoned industrial washing machine moos in an otherwise silent, desolate landscape; workers pour out of construction sites; children play aimlessly; dogs and rats roam near fishing holes; and rescue workers in Shenzhen care for survivors injured in the city’s 2015 landslide.
Zhou Tao (b. 1976, Changsha, Hunan Province), Land of the Throat, 2016 Installation with two-channel color HD video, with sound. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. © Zhou Tao
Kan Xuan (b. 1972) is an artist who splits her time between Beijing and Amsterdam. She traveled for more than five months to far-flung parts of China to photograph and research the remains of 110 ancient cities to create the multi-media installation Kū Lüè Er (2016), on view on Tower Level 4. On one gallery wall, eleven flat-screen monitors rhythmically loop videos of various lengths, each featuring hundreds of the thousands of mobile-phone images Kan took while traveling. The artist manipulated the color of the images and edited them in a stop-motion style. A lone video monitor is stationed on the floor, leaning over a floor projection of simple, notational maps created by the artist from her memories of site locations. The floor monitor sends out smacking, splashing sounds from balls of clay being thrown in a children’s game. A few stone sculptures hang nearby, their knotted forms echoing the fences that guarded these lost cities. Instead of providing historical knowledge or factual statistics, Kan Xuan engages China’s vast history of dynasties and evolution of territories through her intimate personal emotions and experience as a reminder of our collective memory and oblivion.
Yangjiang Group (est. 2002, Yangjiang, Guangdong Province). Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken, 2016. Plants, pond, wooden bridge, wooden tables and stools, teaware and accessories, and tea gathering performance; blood pressure monitor and record chart; acrylic latex paint; and acrylic on foam. © Yangjiang Group Installation View: Tales of Our Time, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, November 4, 2016–March 10, 2017. Photo: David Heald
Yangjiang Group, whose founding artists are Zheng Guogu (b. 1970), Chen Zaiyan (b. 1971), and Sun Qinglin (b. 1974), conjure a small utopia in Tales of Our Time. Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken (2016) is installed along a Frank Lloyd Wright–designed circular area overlooking Central Park. Here Chinese tea is to be shared on simple plywood furniture set amid calligraphic works and a temporary Chinese garden, which is visible on the outside balcony and contains bamboo, shrubs, a miniature bridge, and a pond. As part of the participatory installation, visitors are encouraged to measure their blood pressure and heart rate before and after they enter this area—a humorous means designed to calculate the purported relaxing effects of a tea gathering in an art exhibition. A green and white calligraphic mural is suspended several stories from the ceiling to the ground floor of the museum’s Thannhauser Gallery. Since 2002 this art collaborative has been inviting neighbors in Yangjiang, its small hometown on the southern coast, to drink tea, play soccer, practice calligraphy, and enjoy communal dinners. In symbolically transporting their small plot of land to New York, the Yangijiang Group has neither left behind its humor nor its desire to create a borderless, anarchist zone of citizenship and belonging.
Sun Yuan (b. 1972, Beijing) & Peng Yu (b. 1974, Jiamusi, Heilongjiang Province) Can’t Help Myself, 2016. Industrial robot, stainless steel and rubber, cellulose ether in colored water, lighting grid with visual-recognition sensors, and acrylic wall with aluminum frame. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. © Sun Yuan & Peng Yu. Photo: Courtesy the artists
The Tower Level 5 gallery houses Can’t Help Myself (2016), a massive robot with a mechanical arm created by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu (b. 1972 and 1974), two longtime collaborators based in Beijing. Placed behind clear acrylic walls, the machine is programmed to perform one very specific action: with its modified front arm, it guards a puddle of dark red viscous liquid. As the red substance slowly spreads on the ground, the robot frenetically shovels it back into place, leaving smudges reminiscent of contemporary surveillance warfare. Sun and Peng, who are known for using bold humor with undertones of violence to address provocative topics, neither pose nor answer the question of whether the repetitious dance of the robot in Can’t Help Myself is absurd, authoritarian, or both.
Tsang Kin-Wah (b. 1976, Shantou, Guangdong Province). In The End Is The Word, 2016 (detail). Six-channel video installation, with sound. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. © Tsang Kin-Wah
In a darkened gallery, also on Tower Level 5, an immersive projection sends images of rocks, ships, oceans, and waves washing over the viewer. Entitled In The End Is The Word (2016), this six-channel video installation by Hong Kong–based artist Tsang Kin-Wah (b. 1976) interweaves found footage, sound, and light. The work begins with a rush of seemingly banal shots of a tsunami at sea near the site of an ongoing territorial dispute between China and Japan, the Diaoyu Islands (known as Senkaku Islands in Japanese). These images then begin to morph into abstractions. Synchronized videos projected onto the walls and floor of the dimly lit room create the illusion that animated, coiling strips of words and phrases are pouring out of the video images and into the gallery. Finally, rather than simply disappear, these images accumulate into a crescendo of blindingly bright light, a state the artist likens to saṃsāra, a Sanskrit word meaning “perpetual wandering” in the sea of life’s suffering.
Tsang Kin-Wah (b. 1976, Shantou, Guangdong Province). No(thing/Fact) Outside, 2016. Vinyl. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. © Tsang Kin-Wah. Installation View: Tales of Our Time, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, November 4, 2016–March 10, 2017 Photo: David Heald
In addition to In The End Is The Word, Tsang created No(thing/Fact) Outside (2016), a vinyl text installation that extends beyond the Tower galleries–climbing walls and snaking along floors in less prominent areas in the museum, such as elevators and stairwells. Reflecting Tsang’s ruminations on the exhibition, the work spatially and conceptually links the stories told by the artists in Tales of Our Time.
A conceptual extension of the exhibition, the catalogue edited by Xiaoyu Weng and Hou Hanru blends a traditional museum publication with a fiction anthology. Featuring scholarly essays and artwork descriptions, it unconventionally examines the exhibition artists, who all challenge current views about art from China. Interwoven with these essays are seven commissioned short stories by the Chinese and American fiction writers Han Song, Hon Lai-chu, Li Juan, Ken Liu, Lo Yi-chin, Wang Bang, and Brian Kuan Wood. The exhibition and accompanying catalog offer a heterogeneous view of contemporary art and culture from China, highlighting tensions between individual narratives and mainstream history as well as showing how the gaps between the two can be transcended.
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
A series of public programs presented in conjunction with Tales of Our Time includes the following highlights:
The Second Lecture of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Lecture Series
Friday, November 4, 4 pm
Conceived as a mini-symposium presenting diverse voices, this lecture features short talks by Cosmin Costinas, David Harvey, and Ou Ning on art, urbanism, literature, and their intersections. Howard French moderates a final group conversation. Presented in conjunction with Tales of Our Time, the program concludes with a reception and exhibition viewing.
$15, $10 members, free for students with RSVP. For more information, visit guggenheim.org/calendar.
Acaw Field Meeting
Take 4: Thinking Practice, Friday, November 11, 10 am
The Guggenheim hosts the first day of Asia Contemporary Art Week’s signature program, FIELD MEETING, a major art forum with over 30 artists and arts professionals staging performances, lecture-performances, and lively discussions. Keynote figures include Shezad Dawood, Jennifer Wen Ma, Ho Tzu Nyen, Mami Kataoka, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, and Xyza Cruz Bacani, in addition to Chia-En Jao, whose newly commissioned work will be on view, and Xiaoyu Weng, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art. Concludes with a reception and exhibition viewing of Tales of Our Time.
Space is limited and advance registration is required. Interested arts professionals and students should sign up here: acaw.info. For more information, visit guggenheim.org/calendar.
The Making of Tales of Our Time,
Wednesday, January 18, 6:30 pm
Strand Book Store, 826 Broadway, 3rd Floor
A panel discussion on the creative process behind the Tales of Our Time exhibition catalog, which includes seven commissioned short stories by Chinese and American fiction writers. Panelists: Xiaoyu Weng; Julian Myers-Szupinska, California College of the Arts; Brian Kuan Wood, e-flux; and Chris Wu, Project Projects. Moderated by the Guggenheim’s creative director of publishing and digital media, Lisa Naftolin.
$20 Strand Book Store gift card and event admission, $45 signed copy of catalogue and event admission. Registration required at strandbooks.com/events.
Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken: Tea Gatherings
Wednesdays, November 9, 2016 – March 8, 2017, 1:30–5:45 pm
Since 2002 Yangjiang Group has been inviting neighbors in Yangjiang, its small hometown on the southern coast of China, to drink tea, play soccer, practice calligraphy, and enjoy communal dinners. As part of Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken, their newly commissioned work for Tales of Our Time, visitors are invited to converse and contemplate calligraphy over a cup of tea prepared and served by local tea brewers. Visitors are also encouraged to measure their blood pressure and heart rate before and after experiencing this installation—a humorous ploy designed to calculate the purported relaxing effects of a tea gathering.
Tea gatherings are free with admission. No RSVP is required.
Tales of Our Time Tours in Mandarin
Saturdays, 12-1 pm
Join a conversational tour of Tales of Our Time in Mandarin facilitated by a specialist in art history and education. Free with museum admission. For more information, visit guggenheim.org/calendar.
Tales of Our Time Film Program
Fridays and Saturdays, January 6–February 25, 1 pm
Weekly screenings of films that explore exhibition motifs such as boundaries, territories, and migration. Screenings take place in the New Media Theater, Lower Level, and are free with admission. For the full schedule, visit guggenheim.org/filmscreenings.
Launched in 2013, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative is the most recent of the Guggenheim’s initiatives to work with artists, scholars, and curators from around the world to bring intersecting regional and global histories of modernism and contemporary practices to the fore. Made possible by a major grant from The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, this international curatorial program focuses on commissioning major works for the Guggenheim’s permanent collection by artists born in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Macao. All works created through the initiative will form The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection at the Guggenheim. Through the selection of key artists, practices, and issues arising from across Greater China, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative seeks to strengthen the Guggenheim’s collegial network among the Chinese art community, advance the study and appreciation of post-1979 Chinese art, and expand the discourse and investigation of contemporary art today. The first of the initiative’s three exhibitions, Wang Jianwei: Time Temple, was on view at the Guggenheim from October 2014 to February 2015 and featured a sculptural installation, paintings, a film, and a performance by Wang Jianwei, one of China’s leading conceptual artists.
Established in 2005, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation is a private philanthropic organization based in Hong Kong. The Foundation’s dual mission is to foster appreciation of Chinese arts and culture to advance global learning and to cultivate deeper understanding of Buddhism in the context of contemporary life. In pursuit of that mission, the Foundation engages in strategic, long-term projects in Hong Kong and around the world. It supports efforts that make Chinese arts – from ancient times to today – approachable and relevant to audience worldwide. It also supports the creation of works, exhibitions and publications that offer original perspectives and improve the quality and accessibility of Chinese arts scholarship. Guided by a belief that insights of Buddhism have a vital role to play in locating solutions to the challenges facing contemporary society, the Foundation seeks to expand understanding of Buddhist principles. It has developed a global network of Buddhist studies and supports programs that explore the connections between Buddhism and the arts, encouraging collaborations and innovation that present Buddhist art in a fresh light. To learn more about The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, please visit www.rhfamilyfoundation.org.
VISITOR INFORMATION
Admission: Adults $25, students/seniors (65+) $18, members and children under 12 free. The Guggenheim’s free app, available with admission or by download to personal devices, offers an enhanced visitor experience. The app features content on special exhibitions as well as access to more than 1,500 works in the Guggenheim’s permanent collection. Additionally, information about the museum’s landmark building is available in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Verbal Description guides for select exhibitions are also included for visitors who are blind or have low vision. The Guggenheim app is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Museum Hours: Sun–Wed, 10 am–5:45 pm; Fri, 10 am–5:45 pm; Sat, 10 am–7:45 pm; closed Thurs. On Saturdays, beginning at 5:45 pm, the museum hosts Pay What You Wish. For general information, call 1 212 423 3500 or visit the museum online at: guggenheim.org
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