Charwei Tsai, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Qiu Zhijie, Linda Fregni Nagler: Contemporary Expressions

The MAO is back with the second edition of Contemporary Expressions / Declinazioni Contemporanee. Through this programme of long-term artists’ residencies and site-specific commissions, contemporary artists explore and highlight the museum’s permanent collection, finding original connections and meanings between different times and Asian cultures.

For this second edition, we are joined by Qiu Zhijie, Charwei Tsai and Patrick Tuttofuoco, who have created three installations that will enrich the museum’s collection, and Linda Fregni Nagler, who has conceived a special performance that destabilises the relationship between object and viewer.

Charwei Tsai
As a result of more than two years in conversation with the museum, Charwei Tsai is presenting a new commission that will be displayed at the museum entrance in dialogue with the Gandhara Shakyamuni sculpture at the end of the garden area. This work involves the installation of 200 votive vases that were produced by the artist in Taipei, Paris and Turin. The vases were made using a sophisticated pottery technique and then hand painted with prayer inscriptions by the artist. Mixing the rituality embedded in the objects and artistic tradition, the work encourages the active and performative participation of the visitors, who are asked to leave small offerings in the vases.

In addition to this new commission, Charwei Tsai is presenting two additional works in dialogue with MAO’s permanent collection, specifically, objects in the Central and Southern Asian Gallery and the Himalayan Gallery. The first work, a video titled Songs of Chuchepati Camp (2017), documents the deplorable conditions in the camp for earthquake survivors in Chuchepati, Nepal. The second, a drawing from the Sky Dancers series, pays homage to Buddhism’s five wisdom dancers and represents female energy in the tantric tradition.

Patrick Tuttofuoco
This year’s most visible commission is the facade installation Ultraworld by Patrick Tuttofuoco. This 20-meter-long glass installation, produced by WonderGlass, is an extraordinary, finely crafted piece made of metal and Murano glass. Shimmering with natural light during the day, it will be illuminated at night.

“Our experience on Earth is often defined in terms of a duality between opposing forces, a situation in which the existence or identity of a thing depends on the co-existence of at least two conditions that are opposed but also dependent on one another and presuppose each other.”

With this observation as a starting point, Patrick Tuttofuoco imagined a form that could unite apparent opposites (east/west, male/female, Kali/Dionysus) in a single field, which then becomes the basis for reflecting on overcoming cultural barriers and knocking down stereotypes, labels and categories, in an attempt to refocus attention on the identity of the individual, whoever they are and wherever they came from, emphasising essence rather than appearance.

This installation is consonant with MAO’s work over the past two years to position itself as a platform for hybridity, cultural dialogue and non-oppositional cultural activities that support the museum’s aim to serve as a gateway between distant cultures united by a common Eurasian context. The work will be included in the Costellazione section of Luci d’Artista and will become part of the MAO permanent collection.

Qiu Zhijie
This new site-specific work for MAO welcomes visitors at the entrance to the permanent collection. An invented geography that redraws global, hybrid, shared cultural, philosophical and political history, this immersive wallpaper draws on the artist’s decade-long Mappamundi project. In these maps, the ink and brushwork of landscape painting are used to define a system of coordinates that condenses individuals, events, ideas, objects and situations, interweaving them together and offering the possibility of understanding them in relation to each other, independent of their cultural origins.

The work for MAO is at once a self-aware gesture, exhibition plan, political topology, work-flow diagram, cultural research programme and intellectual exchange with the permanent collection that will welcome visitors after this “passageway” at the entrance to the museum.

Linda Fregni Nagler
For the opening of Contemporary Expressions / Declinazioni Contemporanee, Linda Fregni Nagler will present Things Death Cannot Destroy, a performance that will be repeated in the Salone Mazzonis from 6.45 pm onwards on November 2. Nagler’s work invites visitors to embark upon an encyclopaedic journey into the past. The piece was choreographed for two 19th century magic lanterns operated by a projectionist, with an actor reading the original captions on the glass slides out loud. The images are organized in a sequence of unexpected formal associations.

Here, we find the great geographical conquests (of the North and South Poles, mountain peaks, the world’s most remote islands and et cetera), the idea of exoticism and otherness (themes particularly close to the Museum of Oriental Art), as well as photography as a colonial document and the transformation of the landscape (deforestation, mass agriculture, mining and intensive livestock farming). This performance is a prelude to a work by the artist that will be on view in the Japanese galleries of MAO in December 2024.

Charwei Tsai’s project was made possible through the support and collaboration of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the Taipei Representative Office in Italy. Ultraworld by Patrick Tuttofuoco was produced by WonderGlass for MAO.

Special thanks to: Mor Charpentier gallery, the studio of Qiu Zhijie and, last but not least, the Vistamare gallery, for its collaboration on Linda Fregni Nagler’s performance Things that Death Cannot Destroy.