Time Traveler
29 September–9 December 2012
Rockbund Art Museum
20 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District
Shanghai, China
Rockbund Art Museum presents a group show, Time Traveler, from September 29th to December 9th, 2012. We have invited five artists—Huang Yongping, Liu Jianhua, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, and Yan Lei—in this show, and it is curated by Ella Liao.
The Royal Asiatic Society building in Shanghai was built in the 1930s to serve as the headquarters of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (RAS). In its day one of the most important cultural organisations of the British expatriate community in Shanghai, the RAS was responsible for supporting a broad range of social and natural history scholarship and research in China. Opened officially in 1933, the Shanghai Museum*, as it was then known, was one of the first museums accessible to the public in China. The old RAS building underwent a full renovation in 2010 and was formally renamed the Rockbund Art Museum, reopening to the public as a museum of contemporary art.
Time Traveler hopes to evoke visually spatial memories of the era of the Shanghai Museum, presenting the overlap of two times and spaces—a natural history and culture museum of the 1930s and a contemporary art museum of 2012, reuniting the two spaces that stand at either end of this temporal axis. All of the artists participating in this exhibition have in the past or are currently working with classical material, dead forms, and historical incidents as their mode of expression in their art. These works of art seem to return to the narrative approach to history of the era of the Shanghai Museum, which legitimated the power to narrate history that a traditional museum gains by virtue of possessing treasures. But the contemporary artists no longer obsess with the one and only historical discourse; they help us to reconstruct our cultural identity and mode of existence by employing artificial history and geography.
About Rockbund Art Museum
Located at the famous Bund area in Shanghai and echoing its building’s historical heritage as the first modern museum in China, Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) is involved towards the construction, consolidation, influence, and sustainability of an innovative organization strongly engaged to promote high-quality projects on the international contemporary art scene. Since its inauguration in 2010, the museum has launched exhibitions of internationally acclaimed artists and curators Cai Guoqiang, Zeng Fanzhi, Paola Pivi, Hou Hanru, and Fumio Nanjo, among others. In addition, the museum has organized more than 200 educational events and projects open free to the public. By doing so, RAM seeks to build solid cultural networking with local and international partnerships, leading to innovative cooperation projects against the global era with decisive economic and cultural transformations. In the future, the museum will stick to establishing and sharing the expanded territories of art, knowledge, and creativity in China and abroad to foster the circulation of ideas, works of art and people (artists, researchers, curators, mediators), to identify, invest in, and disseminate emergent and cross-disciplinary art movements on an international level, and, finally, to think through and share art’s social implications. RAM also explores the possibility of the museum’s sustainability in today’s cultural and social context, and hopes to contribute to the establishment of the institutional structure and environment of contemporary art museums in China.
For more information on RAM, please visit www.rockbundartmuseum.org.
*Referred to here is the Museum (Shanghai Bowuyuan) built by the Royal Asiatic Society, not to be confused with the current Shanghai Museum (Shanghai Bowuguan), built by the Shanghai Government in 1952.
