Lawrence Weiner: A PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS ASAP

From July 20 to October 20, 2024, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art presents Lawrence Weiner: A PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS ASAP, the first major presentation in China of renowned American artist Lawrence Weiner (1942–2021). Curated by Peter Eleey, UCCA Curator-at-Large, in close collaboration with the artist’s estate, A PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS ASAP brings Weiner’s groundbreaking work back to UCCA seventeen years after TO ALLOW THE LIGHT was commissioned by the museum in 2007.

Lawrence Weiner: A PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS ASAP showcases nearly fifty language-based works that span the entirety of the artist’s career, drawn from the almost 1200 that he created over more than half a century. Selected drawings, posters, and moving images provide additional context for viewers, whom Weiner called “receivers” of his work. Each piece finds expression in specific spaces of UCCA’s Great Hall, allowing subjective reflection depending on circumstances, relationships, setting, and presentation.

Often associated with the development of Conceptual Art in the United States and Europe, Weiner’s practice is notable for its simplicity and accessibility, as well as its invitation to audiences. In 1968, following a public installation that he created on a college campus, Weiner realized that he could achieve a similar result without physically constructing the sculpture. This led him to formalize a foundational philosophy, his “Declaration of Intent,” which has since become influential in the subsequent development of contemporary art.

Thereafter, Weiner has used language as a material and structure to create works that describe what he termed “the relationships of objects to objects in relations to human beings.” Despite his reliance upon words, the artist was clear that he understood himself as a sculptor. “The work that I do uses language,” he said in 2005, “but it’s all about material.”

Weiner’s work with words expands and contracts meaning. Deeply attuned to both popular and technical languages, he embraced the accessibility of familiar sayings while also employing terminology from chemistry, physics, and other natural sciences. This combination grounds his work in the folkways of vernacular, everyday communication but also in elemental materials, drawing out a deep poetry from the world and its inhabitants.

Though he insisted that “the piece need not be built,” the generous terms that he created for his art allowed it to spread across all genres: in sculpture foremost, but also drawing, music and sound, moving images, books, posters, fashion, and ephemera. While presenting his art in countless variations of font, surface application, scale, language and location, Weiner was unfailingly precise in how he conceived a work, carefully arranging the words for his intended form and effect. But he was also clear that a work should make itself available for use, which allows its expression to shift and change depending on the demands of place and audience.

Weiner designed and installed his work in a variety of ways over the years, refining it gradually through three primary fonts and a limited color palette. For this exhibition, care has been taken both with translation and design, employing Chinese fonts and graphic approaches similar to those Weiner preferred. While Chinese and English are typically juxtaposed or commingled—as the artist often did when working in multiple languages—some works are installed in only one language. Certain pieces are realized as the “material referred to” and others employ older expressions of particular works that involved hand painting or stencils, demonstrating the wide range of forms that Weiner’s art can assume.

Weiner exhibited internationally; his first work to appear in mainland China was a bilingual piece created to inaugurate UCCA in 2007, which is installed once again in the same location at the museum for this exhibition. As with any material, communication moves across borders, some more easily than others. A PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS ASAP foregrounds a selection of works that engage with themes of translation, travel, and exchange. “A translation,” Weiner explained, “is really the moving of one object to another place.”