Ma Jun, Huang Min, Martin Wehmer, Cang Xin:

The Reshuffling of Space and Time

July - September, 2010

Venue: 1 ARTBANK, 4th floor of the Westin Beijing Chaoyang

Address: 7 North Dongsanhuan Road, Chaoyang district, Beijing 100027, China

Curated by: Chak Man Lei

From the month of July, 1 ARTBANK, an art-focused space at the Westin Beijing Chaoyang hotel, will present works by artists Ma Jun, Huang Min, Martin Wehmer, and Cang Xin. Their work presents unique perspectives on the confluence of the far and the near, the past and the present, of objects and styles from a wide array of cultural origins from all over the world that suggest a continuing challenge towards traditional conception of space as inert and positionable, and time as linear and progressive.

Disrupting the space-time continuum by merging the present with the past (or vise versa) has been a conceptual departure taken by Ma Jun for a number of years. From a Ming-style “Chanel” porcelain bottle, to a supersized qinghua lipstick, the pop sculptures by Ma Jun bridge and erase the geographical gap between what is traditionally conceived as characteristics coming from the “east,” or styles deriving from the “west.” The forced amalgamation of divergent cultural signifiers into one singular “prototype” brings about a disruption of space and time, thus creating an object that is hybridized and perverted.

Time, space, memory and place—four aspects that inform the basis of our understanding of the contemporary come together in the paintings by Huang Min. Her work juxtaposes the historical past with the present, thus forming an uncanny universe where the modern onlookers "tune in” with the past in touristic, indifferent, and passive modes of behavior. The vexing questions appear to be: Is this mode of complacency really far removed from the way we look at the past? If history is weaved by the convergence of different histories, of different people with different backgrounds all congeal together to form a historical event, how does one go about choosing and prioritizing one history over another? Huang Min’s paintings also make us question how we, the real speculative onlookers, confront and sort out the nonlinearity of our own histories while they often seem to be tangled and knotted in unfathomable ways. These questions “proposed” by the works of Huang Min reside at where time and space are valuated.

German artist/Beijing resident Martin Wehmer is known for his large-scale canvases that combine many cross-cultural references, from abstract painterly strokes and some occasional touches of spray paint, to brilliant colors that reminisce neon lighting and street signage. Wehmer presents a different kind of sensibility in his attempt to translocate and mismatch a Euro-American painting practice to a form of visualization that is suggestively Chinese. Do we simply look at his work as a continuation of a subgenre of Western practice that deals with an external gaze towards a subjective understanding of the Far East, or do we see it as an attempt towards presenting a troubled identity, and to a larger extent, an ill-defined and blurry conception of nationality?

Artist Cang Xin is known for his extraordinary series of photographs that capture the intimate relationship between his lingual organ—the tongue, and the multitude of common objects and places from around the world. Although the use of the body and its parts have always played an integral part in his artistic practice, another aspect that has often been overlooked in Cang Xin’s work is his deep interest in the mythical and the unexplained. This series of charred works presented by 1 ARTBANK—works made with charcoal crayons and fire—give us a rare glimpse at his reach towards a distant and untraceable past. Fanciful animals and dinosaurs; imaginary fauna; impossible futures; a head with a protruded tongue that spews out a dying tree—these surreal scenarios and pseudo theories of evolution are compacted in Cang’s practice, and they cut right through our static and unchanging beliefs of space and time in conceptual ways.

The works by Ma Jun, Huang Min, Martin Wehmer, and Cang Xin offer us a glimpse into realities that were never meant to take place. Precisely because of their inabilities to become actual realities (but made possible through the realization as works of art), these artists demonstrate how an act of “miracle” can take place through our imaginative reshuffling of time and space in nonlinear ways.

For inquires, please contact 1 ARTBANK at + 86 10 5922 8888 ext. 8724, or email: info@artbank-china.com