New Directions opens four new programs

UCCA continues its support of promising new artists throughout Greater China with four new installments of the “New Directions” series, running from March of this year until January, 2019, in the New Gallery. “New Directions” is an ongoing series of solo exhibitions and accompanying publications focused on new voices from Greater China. Deepening a commitment to emerging practices that has been fundamental to UCCA’s mission since its founding, this series aims to elaborate, through a constellation of singular positions, the richness and complexity of new art in China today.

Chang Yun-han
March 24–May 27, 2018

Chang Yun-han makes art that comments on the cultural predicament of a world where globalization seems to be grinding to a halt. This exhibition presents two bodies of work that grow from her sojourns in two places, New York and the North Pole. The first group is inspired by the 1986 Universal Studios animated blockbuster An American Tail, especially popular among Taiwanese children of Chang’s generation. Scenes from the film, which follows a family of Russian-Jewish mice as they immigrate to America and imbibe its ideology, are drawn onto pages culled from newspapers published in the languages of present-day New York immigrant communities. The second group centers on Svalbard, Norway, located near the North Pole. The image of an iceberg, glimpsed through a porthole, poses the question: can humans afford to keep using nature as a symbol of the sublime, now that human emissions have wreaked havoc on the natural world? For this artist, New York and the North Pole, two vastly different locales, both function as “faraway places” in the modern imagination. These supposed refuges from the dullness of living under capital are, however, ultimately part of capital’s driving force. Chang created these works in collaboration with others: a graphic designer, a folklorist, and a magician. Her journal entries add to an atmosphere of openness and cooperation.

Yang Luzi
June 9–August 12, 2018

Through their citations of history, geography and poetry, Yang Luzi’s films explore the limits and secrets of perceptible language. Her work hovers in a space between sensory experience and the indescribable. From the burdens of a history from which one cannot wake, to the discovery of a jouissance unspoiled by ideology, to the communion between the human world and the world of nature, she uses this exhibition to complete a protracted journey, a movement of dialectical self-consciousness, and a political investigation subtly connected to reality.

Musquiqui Chihying
August 25–October 28, 2018

Musquiqui Chihying is apt at deploying different media including film, photography, and installation to explore the relationships formed by people and objects with public space, as well as the changes that capital has wrought on human life. In recent work he has used historical research to unearth the postcolonial and post-immigrant elements buried in Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese popular culture, using this perspective to investigate contemporary global society. His newest work starts from a group of wooden sculptures shipped from Africa to the institution now known as the National Museum of China during its reconstruction in the years leading up to 2011, combining film and installation art to examine the evolution of economic and cultural exchange between Asia and Africa as the non-aligned ideals of the 1955 Bandung Conference have yielded to a new Sinocentric order.

Yu Honglei
November 17, 2018–January 20, 2019

Yu Honglei’s art delimits an arena in which trust can be established. He attempts to infuse his sculptural language with his connection to the viewer. Then, through his control of sculptural language, he issues to his audience a tender command to look—directing their vision and movement, and even joining them in defining the object that is beheld. The sculptures themselves, however, remain in silent, almost classical repose. Only the most essential visual elements are ultimately preserved and displayed, the result of layers upon layers of evolution and refinement that leaves them full of static energy, brimming with their own historical and archival value.