THE TALE OF ANGELS - GROUP SHOW AT THE RED MANSION FOUNDATION

Featured Artists: Gao Shiqiang, Jiang Zhi, Kwok Ying, Miao Xiaochun,
Shi Jinsong, Xiang Jing and Xiao Yu
Curated by: Jiang Jiehong
Dates: 26th February - 24th April 2009

Blades and latex: A Chinese re-imagining of a traditional Christian icon...
Angels are first described in the Bible. Created by God as a separate, higher order of creatures than humans, they possess aspects of intelligence, emotions, and free will. Today, angels are continuously imagined and represented, both in literature and visually, beyond their theological context and biblical origins; at the same time, the image of angels has been utilized for curiosity, communication or faith.

In the history of Western art, there have been numerous images representing angels, usually winged in appearance, implying their nature as God's heralds and flying creatures. In China, these spiritual beings have always been deemed as Western, yet, to many, the contemporary imaginings of angels do not necessarily derive from the original source, (their description in the Bible), but instead depend on the visual interpretations of Western art. This exhibition, The Tale of Angels, aims to set up a framework for discussion, and to encourage and invite Chinese artists to expand their boundaries, and develop new ideas for visual response. It intends to re-examine not only the theoretical notion of an angel, but also, more significantly, the ways in which angels, particularly in the context of Western culture, could be re-imagined. To the artist Shi Jinsong, the beauty of angels has an innocent quality. At an initial glance, his recent stainless steel installation of a Christmas tree has a glorious metallic shine, but it a closer look reveals some fearsome sharpened blades. This work exposes the balance between the beauty of angels and their potentially wrathful nature, and more importantly, the conflict between the amiability of 'imagination' and the injuriousness of 'realisation'. Jiang Zhi has imagined another chilling visualization; that of the flayed flesh of an angel, vulnerable in its nakedness and desolation, like a discarded skin.

Two lectures by the curator will be given during the course of the show, dates and topics tbc. Dr Jiang Jiehong is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham City University.

by rm

DOWN TOWN PRODUCTION

An Exhibition of Chinese Urban Art
Curated by Yan Lei
23rd September – 21st November 2008

Down Town Production is a dynamic group show bringing cutting-edge, urban Chinese art to the UK. Curated by one of China's leading artists, Yan Lei, the exhibition brings together eight rising stars of contemporary Chinese art whose work reflects the recent dramatic social and economic transformation of China. It is anticipated that 70% of China's 1.3 billion population will live in urban areas by 2035. At the end of 2002, records showed that China's urban population totalled 502 million, living in over 21,000 towns and cities. Down Town Production is a selection of art that reflects and explores this dramatic shift.

The artists will give us a taste of China's emerging popular culture, with works as such as ground-breaking L.A.S.E.R. graffiti by conceptual artist, DJ and rapper, MC Yan. L.A.S.E.R. tagging is the very newest form of graffiti art developed only a year ago and currently cropping up in cities all over the world. Courtesy of MC-Yan, London will experience a major laser-tagging event this autumn, as part of the exhibition.

Down Town Production is was staged by The Red Mansion Foundation, which has been working to bring China’s contemporary art scene to the UK for almost a decade, discovering new talent and establishing an exchange program between London and China for some of the biggest names in contemporary art. Many of the works in the exhibition are be for sale.

The Down Town Production show took place both inside and outside the Red Mansion Foundation's gallery space, which was completely transformed for the purpose of this exhibition. Curator, Yan Lei, distorted the traditional "white cube" concept and created a totally new environment for the show that was particularly striking in the context of the Red Mansion, a listed Robert Adam building.

The exhibition also included a one-off special performance by Brain Failure, trailblazers in China's burgeoning punk scene, who played at the ICA on 17th October. Formed in 1997, the band were the first to emerge from the People's Republic of China, embracing Western punk ideals and now enjoying commercial success at home and in the US. This was their first UK performance, and offers an insight into a youth movement that is gathering force. The bill also included Stanley Kubrick Goes Shopping, a new collaboration between Youth of Killing Joke and Dennis Morris, lead vocalist of Basement 5 and music photographer, famed for his seminal images of the Sex Pistols and Bob Marley.

The "Down Town Production" artists included:

MC YAN
MC Yan is a truly urban creative; a conceptual artist, graffiti artist and rapper. Recently MC Yan has produced new work using laser projection technology, writing words and images on Beijing's skyscrapers, putting the debate about the plight of the individual in full public view. MC Yan will be tagging a prominent London landmark to demonstrate the art of laser tagging for the first time ever in London.

LIU DING
Liu Ding has exhibited extensively internationally. Liu works mainly with installation, however he also works across a variety of media including painting, performance and photography. After moving to Beijing, Liu Ding collaborated with nine artists to launch the Complete Art Experience Project, an artist-led initiative that produces group and solo exhibitions with a focus on interdisciplinary artistic experiments. He has exhibited internationally, including China Power Station at the Serpentine Gallery in 2006.

HONG HAO
Hong Hao is a major graphic artist and photographer whose intensely witty and sophisticated work celebrates the tradition of the artist's book in contemporary Western and ancient Chinese forms. Born in China in 1965, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Hong graduated from the printmaking department at Beijing's Academy of Fine Arts in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square protests. He is best know for his photographic series, My Things, which are composed of thousands of scanned images of objects from his own life and several will be included in Down Town Production. He has shown at galleries and museums in China and all over the world including the USA, Ireland, France, Czech Republic, Canada, Sweden, Australia and Japan.

MENG LUDING
Meng Luding is one of China's leading abstract painters. His work, Enlightenment of Adam and Eve in the New Age, went on record as the pioneering work for the '85 Art Movement. The Football, one of his expressionist works, is considered a masterpiece of the genre, pushing the medium of oil painting into a new realm. His recent works show a strong personal style and unique art concepts and demonstrate a new visual language and production method.

LIU ZHENCHEN
Liu Zhenchen was born in Shanghai but has lived in France for the last eight years, so that Shanghai is now only a memory to him, a compressed experience. His recent photographs and films, which are documentary and poetic hybrids, show the frantic changes taking place in Shanghai and their direct impact on its residents. Zhenchen Liu has been awarded numerous prizes. His latest video was named Best Experimental Film at France's 9th Aubagne International Film Festival and was screened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

LAO LIU
Most Chinese people know Lao Liu as a rock 'n' roll musician from the 80's. Now, he works as a photographer and lives in Beijing. In one of his more recent works, Lao Liu managed to elude border checks at the Ya Lu River, smuggling his camera into North Korea to take a series of photographs. Entitled Dance over the Border (Wu Guo San Ba Xian) they record and express the passion and romanticism of the local population. Liu has shown in the USA and China.

ZHAO SHAORUO
Zhao Shaoruo was born in China but lives and works in Espoo, Finland. Moving between Beijing, Hong Kong and Helsinki, Zhao has experienced a sense of displacement and his work explores loneliness and the absurdity of human incompetence. He reinterprets photographs for instance in Under the Name of the City, he replaces the faces of the passers-by in city scenes with his own face and places his own name on all the adverts, banners and street signs. He shows regularly in Finland and has also showed in Germany, Japan, Czech Republic, Indonesia and the V&A Museum in London. He will have four photographs in the exhibition.

WANG HUI
Whilst much of China's most visible contemporary architecture ranges from glittering towers created by international architects to the kitsch of Thames Town (a mock English suburb near Shanghai), China, naturally, has it own architects who are now building for themselves, rather than for the state. Wang Hui, a founding partner of Urbanus Architecture & Design, is one such architect. With branches in Beijing and Shenzhen, Urbanus projects include urban design, architecture, urban landscape design, interior design, exhibition design and public art installations. Urbanus is recognized as one of the avant-garde among young Chinese firms. Their concept of urbane urbanity instead of chaotic urbanism characterizes each Urbanus project and, as a firm, they aim to restore humanity back to China's vast and fast-growing metropolises. Hui will make wallpaper to dress the gallery space and an installation for Down Town Production.

Top Chinese punk band Brain Failure playing at ICA on 17th October 2008, supported by Stanley Kubrick Goes Shopping. Down Town Production curator Yan Lei has been collaborating with seminal Chinese punk band Brain Failure for many years, making paintings of them and inviting them to participate in exhibitions. The aim is to introduce another dimension to the traditional visual art exhibition and to open up possibilities for creativity and interpretation. Brain Failure is one of the leading punk bands in China. Founded by high school dropout, Xiao Rong, in 1997, Brain Failure's members are the first generation of Chinese musicians since the 1949 Communist Revolution to grow-up in relative political stability, economic prosperity and exposure to western popular culture. Brain Failure brings a power and a passion to the stage that reflects the years of playing underground gigs in Beijing. Lead singer Xiao Rong is relentless and tireless, a man possessed. Brain Failure is influenced by bands like The Clash, Ramones, Rancid, Op Ivy and Green Day. Their lyrics tend to deal with the social problems and attitudes of present day China, rather than the political issues. An almost complete lack of media interest and a general aversion to rock music in China hampered their progress at home, but they have found a warmer reception in the outside world. Their US tour in 2003 led to the release of the 2004 album American Dreamer, a reference perhaps to the fulfilment of a long-awaited dream for recognition in the music world. Further acceptance came in the form of a casting for a European Levi's Commercial and coverage across US printed press, with appearances on MTVU and MTV Chi, MTV's new Asian American channel.

Their latest EP Beijing Calling features Public Enemy's Chuck D.

Stanley Kubrick Goes Shopping: Supporting Brain Failure is a group who, in stark contast to Brain Failure, are steeped in the history of British rock 'n' roll. Recently formed, Stanley Kubrick Goes Shopping comprises legendary photographer Dennis Morris (best known for his seminal images of Bob Marley and the Sex Pistols during the 1970's); producer, Youth (ex-Killing Joke) and Phillipe (ex-Telephon). Yan Lei invited the band to be part of Down Town Production as a result of collaborative work with Dennis Morris - Lei is working with elements of Morris' iconic Sex Pistol imagery - while Youth has been working with Red Mansion artist Cang Xin on the latter's Exchanged Identity series.

ADDITIONAL EVENT: LASER TAGGING
There will be a laser-tagging event attached to the gig brought to us by Chinese rapper and graffiti artist, MC Yan, one of the Down Town Production artists. Laser tagging has been developed in the last 2 years and it is the latest trend in graffiti writing. MC Yan will be bringing to London a major interactive laser tagging event at a London landmark. MC Yan has also collaborated with Brain Failure on a track that will be released in China in October of this year.

Check out some laser tagging at: graffiti research lab

To view images of the LASER tagging event at TATE Modern on
September 27th, please CLICK HERE

by rm

PAINTING AFTER PAINTING

A solo exhibition by Yang Qian, curated by Huang Du
29th April - 4th June 2008
The Red Mansion Foundation, London, UK
Open Monday to Friday by appointment only

The Red Mansion Foundation is pleased to present its fourth exhibition of works by Yang Qian, curated by Huang Du, editor of Avant Garde Today, at its space in 46 Portland Place. Yang Qian, born in Chengdu (China) in 1959, has shown extensively on an international level, at the Today Art Museum in Beijing, the Shanghai Biennale in 2006, the National Museum of contemporary art in Seoul, and at the Taipei Art Museum, among other places.

Yang Qian became known for his gauzy and dreamlike "photorealist" paintings of women at their toilette. Although richly lit and sensuously positioned, these steamy shots of showers and bathrooms ultimately contain a certain Oriental reticence; the veils of steam that coil around the figures conceal as well as reveal their form, creating an erotic tension between subject and painter, viewer and voyeur.

Yang Qian continues to play with the notion of multi-layered meaning in painting with his new work. He seeks to deconstruct the ocular-centrism of art and to liberate the act of observation and appreciation. In the "Bathroom" series, images overlap between truth and illusion as we view the subject through the film of a mirror, a sheen of water-droplets, and mist. Following the hidden realities of these reflective and reflected images, Yang Qian's new work can be categorized as "dual paintings". His technique involves painting over surfaces of already finished pieces of work, using a colourless fluorescent paint, so that the painting presents a different visual image, depending on whether they are viewed in regular or UV light. This allows for a multiplicity of images, and a new aspect of interaction to emerge.

Yang Qian states that his aim with this series of "dual paintings" was to formally disrupt and go beyond the perceived limitations of a 2 dimensional painting. His new work seeks to engage and interact with the surroundings in a way that totally contradicts the expected restraints of painting. His "dual paintings" are classic in style, but also absorb new media, thus creating a new form of art. Yang Qian's new work also involves the concept of kinetic paintings - again, these involve and interact with the viewer in a wholly unexpected manner, breaking with the traditional preconceptions of painting. This exhibition as a whole in fact illustrates how the artist seeks to subvert the normal concept, and re-define the connotation and extension of the paintings, through the idiom "Only renovation can rejuvenate painting".

To visit the China Now website CLICK HERE

by rm

THE MATERIALISTS ARE ALL ASLEEP

Lu Chunsheng, a retrospective, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
6th Feb 2008 - 20th April 2008
The Red Mansion Foundation, London, UK
Open Monday to Friday by appointment only

In February 2008 Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery curated a solo exhibition of Lu Chunsheng. Lu Chunsheng studied at China National Academy of Fine Art, and currently lives and works in Shanghai. Lu Chunsheng's brooding films and photographs up to 2003 appear preoccupied with industrial-era and communist history. However, the stories told via his films are more mystic than nostalgic, and deal more in the narrative imagination than anything that could be verified. The young men who act out the scenarios employ only basic costume and no dialogue; the sets are more chosen for their symbolic or evocative importance than their actual historical relevance.

by rm

YAN PEI-MING - GU DEXIN - YANG JIECHANG

An Exhibition Curated by Yan Pei-Ming
25 September - 23 November 2007
The Red Mansion Foundation, London, UK.
Open Monday to Friday by appointment only

The exhibition will consist of large format self-portraits by Yan Pei-Ming, animation works exploring power and eroticism created by self-taught Gu Dexin and artworks by Yang Jiechang ranging from video to porcelain and ink on silk.

Yan Pei-Ming was born in 1960 in Shanghai, and now works and lives in Dijon, France. His work is very often of large format and mainly bi-chromatic. It deals with the fundamental questions of painting such as portraiture. The pieces presented in this show belong to a specific series of self portraits that he started in early 2006, where he depicts himself in different physical stages. For the Venice Biennale in 2003, he produced a specific series of work where he is at the same time an anti-riot policeman and a hooligan. The self-portrait thus appears as a fantastic representation, showing the artist in invented roles or not yet occurred situations. Yan is participating in the current Istanbul Biennale.

Gu Dexin is one of China's leading contemporary artists. He first gained attention in the early 1980s in Beijing for his paintings and is now perhaps best known for his installation works created from a variety of mixed and often perishable media such as fruit and meat. In the eight animations presented in this exhibition Gu Dexin shows us a very different style of presentation, distinctly ironic, depicting how humans are controlled and abused by power and eroticism.

Yang Jiechang was born in 1956 in Guangdong Province and now works and lives in Paris. He is an exceptionally versatile artist: his works range from painting, collage, and sculpture to multimedia installation, site-specific works, and performance. Believing that he himself is from a marginal culture in China, Yang Jiechang has been fascinated by movement along with the communication and interactivity which can explore the unseen elements in the world and thus bringing the marginal to the centre. Yang is participating in this year's Biennale in Istanbul, curated by Hou Hanru.

by rm