An Impulse to Turn

Participating Artists: Cao Minghao, Carsick Cars, Cheng Xinhao, Dou Wei + E-Band, Junyuan Feng & Jiahui Zeng, Feng Zilai, Avita Guo, Hang Tian, Hanggai Band, Li Hao, Li Luo, Li Ran, Li Yang, Liu Maoning, Ma Haijiao, Shen Xin, Sui Taca, Bo Wang & Pan Lu, Wu Tiao Ren, Yan Jun, Yang Luzi, Zhang Keying, Boat Zhang, Zheng Yuan, Zhou Xiaopeng

Curators: Huang Wenlong, Qian Mengni, Sun Gaorui
Visiting Curators: Liu Yusi, Zhang Zhihui

The exhibition presents the repeated readings and elaborations of historical remains by a number of contemporary artists and cultural practitioners. Selecting, reappropriating, and reinventing historical narratives and materials, contemporary artists attempt to understand the present and speculate the future, in search for the unknown possibilities. 

When interpreting this phenomenon, we either carry a modernist scientific assumption, pursuing absolute, objective historical facts, or fall for the postmodernist, emphasizing contextualization and relationality. Yet, these two paradigms themselves often lose or consume certain unexpressed and unspeakable interiority. Such approaches could blind us from seeing the “turn” as an ambiguous action and the productive potential for reality that “turning” alone may entail. Artists are not historians, and their turn to history is an open-ended exploration. For them, history is not only a point of departure, but also a space of intervention. Their turn to history is first an action, not a phenomenon. 

The exhibition treats this “turn” to history as a move significant in its own right. Through highlighting this turn in contemporary practice in China and looking at the forms, aesthetics, practices, and the conditions of production that constitute it, the exhibition hopes to make explicit the productive and open-ended transformations that “turning” could bring about. It also hopes to prompt the audience to ponder on the multitude of possibilities for our current realities.

In the Old Testament, Lot’s wife disregarded the Angel’s admonition and became a pillar of salt after looking back. Such a tempting impulse is also shared by artists who turn to historical remains. Facing unclear directions, they irresistibly visit remnants of the past or the idling ghosts of modernity. Visiting history is not to seek resolutions or destinations, but it is about the gesture of visiting. Against the polarities of excess and lack of historical accounts, the works engage history through tangible, accessible materials or individuals. The unexpressed, the private, and history are creatively reconnected and reformulated into a more inclusive iteration of reality. With a reticent concern for the mutations of individual and material objects, the materiality of these remnants overwrites a linear conception of history.

Artists further seek to explore the intrinsic creative quality of historical materials through sampling, compression, editing, and collage. Archival materials in the forms of architecture, image, and sound come into contact with the mediums of the works, creating intertextual tensions.  As they explore the memory of both human individuals and materials, the works generate new connections and juxtapositions, producing another “truth” where individual meanings and historical facts intertwine.

Although where this “turn” may lead us remains unknown, the adoption of a wide range of mediums and materials, the inventive use of the past, and the diversification of narrating subjects in this exhibition nevertheless reveal that the historical turn is an act of expression and manifestation by unidentified, plural voices. This “turning” prompts us to ask: should we regard this “turn” as a response to the unexternalized memory, or a contestation of and a resistance to the vanishing historical awareness and the alienated facts? When we turn with these works, we might choose our objectives more intentionally, or turn back more consciously. Walk backwards, or run sideways. The impulse to turn is irresistible.

This exhibition is curated by Huang Wenlong, Qian Mengni, and Sun Gaorui, members of the Research and Curatorial Department, and together by Liu Yusi and Zhang Zhihui from the museum’s new Visiting Curator Program.