Press Release: Art39Basel
Boers-Li Gallery is pleased to announce that we will be participating in Art39Basel, one of the world's largest and most prestigious contemporary art fairs held annually in Basel, Switzerland, from 4-8 June 2008.
This year, we will be bringing two prominent young Chinese artists to the Art Premiere section of the fair, for which a limited selection of 16 newly-opened galleries has been chosen. The artists, Qiu Xiaofei and Song Kun, have produced two sets of work specifically for the fair.
Qiu Xiaofei’s piece, entitled Pagoda of the Discarded 1, takes the form of several towering piles of toilets, sinks, urinals, water bottles, and barrels, all sculpted out of fiberglass and painted over with acrylics in the artist’s trademark style. The piece is a memorial for the drifting class of laborers who spend months or years in Beijing: when they leave, they sell all of their basic possessions at secondhand markets, where these old goods pile up into statues and pagodas.
Song Kun’s pieces include three light boxes, a painting, and an installation. Collectively entitled Xi Jia and named after the recurring protagonist in many of Song Kun’s works, these works embrace images of beautiful destruction, tied to the emotional response of the viewer. The viewer is confronted with a mixture of broken glass, cotton balls, light-colored foam, cartoon-like paintings and sketches, and antique baubles. These various pieces realign notions of beauty and maturity by putting them into dialogue with memory and emotion. The installation picks up the narratives begun in the artist’s earlier works: the viewer again sees a fax machine, 1980s disco music, and train windows, all of which belong to the never-present Xi Jia.
Additionally, Qiu Anxiong will participate in the Art Unlimited section of the fair, exhibiting his large-scale installation piece Staring Into Amnesia, first shown in the Boers-Li Gallery space in 2007. The work takes the form of an old-fashioned train car; the windows have been replaced with projection screens constantly playing archival documentary footage, propaganda films, and the artist’s animations, while audio tracks ranging from folk music to sound art loop constantly. The viewer is forced to face a decidedly uncomfortable historical phantasmagoria.
Basel Media Reports
If you would like more information about our participation in Art39Basel or have any general questions, please contact us.
Tel: +86-10-6432-2620
Email: info@boersligallery.com
Web: www.boersligallery.com |
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