HUGO BOSS ASIA ART
13 September–8 December 2013
Rockbund Art Museum
No.20 Huqiu Road
Shanghai
China
The inaugural HUGO BOSS ASIA ART, initiated by the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) and HUGO BOSS, was announced in Shanghai in June this year. Seven emerging artists from Greater China have made the cut for the finalists: BIRDHEAD, Hsu Chia Wei, Hu Xiangqian, Kwan Sheung Chi, Lee Kit, Li Liao, and Li Wei.
As the most anticipated focal point of this newly established, authoritative award, the exhibition of works by these seven shortlisted artists is held at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai from September 13 to December 8. The artists are invited to present their number of their most outstanding creations for this exhibition.
HUGO BOSS ASIA ART—Award for Emerging Chinese Artists
The HUGO BOSS ASIA ART, a new biennial award initiated by HUGO BOSS and Rockbund Art Museum, takes special focus on contemporary art in Asia to think, invent and represent the social, economical and cultural changes of Asia in a post-global era. Following the HUGO BOSS PRIZE co-founded in 1996 by HUGO BOSS and the Guggenheim Foundation, this groundbreaking biennial award for artists in Asia is conceived and administrated by the Rockbund Art Museum. The Award carries a stipend of RMB 300,000.
HUGO BOSS ASIA ART is launched in the context of China and inaugurated from the Rockbund Art Museum. The inaugural 2013 HUGO BOSS ASIA ART is devoted to emerging artists originated from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Meanwhile, HUGO BOSS ASIA ART activates an ongoing research platform remapping the contemporary art in Asia with symposia, dialogues, lectures and publications.
Seven artists with divergent perspectives
Exploring artistic creation beyond aesthetics by setting out from the everyday
Each artist is invited to conceive a strong statement related to the best of their art creation. It is thus clear that the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum has no intention to umbrella all artists under one common topic but rather to highlight and support the specificities and the qualities of each artist’s works.
BIRDHEAD, an artist duo, produces hundreds of photographs of their life in the city of Shanghai everyday, making visual montages of all the specificities, contradictions, mutations, and emotions which constitute the vertiginous contemporaneity of this Asian and global megalopolis.
Hu Xiangqian, using performance and video, is very much engaged in the institutional critique of art and society, observing his own status as an artist in the context of ongoing transformations for art communities and organizations in Asia.
Hsu Chia Wei creates videos and installations to build sensitive visual narratives about geographical, historical and cultural regions in Asia. The artist reveals how the inhabitants are radically transformed in their lives by the dense and complex layers of cultures and histories.
Kwan Sheung Chi produces art objects, installations, and videos to unveil upside-down and sometimes absurd situations from specific social contexts, questioning the contradictions and power relations in today’s society.
Li Liao’s performative work is deeply rooted in the daily and sensational experiences of his life. However, the intention of Li Liao is not to cultivate an art style based on intimacy, but rather to bring an unexpected and strong collision between daily emotions and the publicness of the space.
Lee Kit produces paintings, not only as canvases, but as full pictorial environments revisiting our uses of space, object and image, infiltrating some unexpected situations to reveal a subversive way of looking at our contemporary world.
Li Wei creates sculptures and performative installations through a deep involvement into the excavation and the obsessive question of how to keep and to constantly activate memory today and translate it into a very contemporary vision.
As Larys Frogier, the Director of the Rockbund Art Museum and Chair of the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Jury, says: “They do not only deconstruct established codes of art, but fully take the risk of offering unexpected forms, experiences and meanings into the process of making and seeing the picture.”
The inaugural HUGO BOSS ASIA ART will reveal the winner of the award on 31 October 2013.
