Art Basel HK 2023 | MadeIn Gallery | Booth 3C18B & Film

MadeIn Gallery is pleased to present a duo exhibition “Long Now” at the “Galleries” sector of Art Basel Hong Kong 2023, featuring paintings and sculpture by artists Lu Pingyuan and Wang Jianwei. The two artists attempt to incorporate new understandings of humanity, consciousness, and the human condition in a digital age into visual representations. By reinventing the postwar painting conventions, they reconstruct the subjectivity as the true avant-garde within the global culture and utilize such subjectivity in their creative practice. This constitutes a cultural enterprise, not merely a change confined in contemporary art circles.

Lu’s latest set of reliefs “Witch’s Diary” is another testament to the wide span of media he works in and inspiration he draws from. Borrowing the perspective of the witch in the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel”, Lu creates his – simultaneously the witch’s – diaries in the form of cookie reliefs made of polymer clay. In this process, the artist congeals imagination through a process much similar to that of food making. This is an attempt to blur the boundaries between work and life, cooking and craftsmanship, cookies and reliefs, imagination and reality.

Wang Jianwei, Treading in Sludge No.19, 2023, Oil on canvas, 145.5 x 112 cm

During artist Wang Jianwei’s career spanning almost four decades, he has been pushing forward the evolution of ways of viewing with an interdisciplinary perspective and methodology, while exploring the boundaries of established knowledge in different media. Now, he expands his scope of concern from the symbiosis of humans and non-humans to an inquiry of the deep time and the Anthropocene. The title of his latest series “Treading in Sludge” works as a metaphor of seeking refuge. Cells have taken refuge in anaerobic bacteria in sludge to survive the excess of oxygen on earth. In a similar sense, human beings have been and are still living in sludge today in a psychological, social, political, and ecological sense. We need to keep surviving in it and embrace the chaos.

Informed by Lynn Margulis’ endosymbiotic theory and Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology, Wang’s painting and sculpture can be defined as an object of experimentin constant evolution within the framework of the Anthropocene, whose task is to embody, in an aesthetic form, the authenticity that cannot be reached by way of knowledge.

Curated by multi-media artist and film producer Li Zhenhua, Art Basel’s Film Program will feature eight screenings and 29 video works by artists across the globe with free public admission. Among those selected for screening are video works by MadeIn Gallery artists Shen Xin, Payne Zhu, and Zheng Yuan.

The thrust of Game is the deconstruction of presentation and observation in different media, and displayed in nonlinear narratives: from the comparison between images photographed by cameras and computer-generated images to the track of camera positions in live sports on television, and then emulation of human eyes in first-person shooter games. The work intends to, by comparing these borrowed heterogeneous images with montage, unroll the mechanism, iteration, and recurrence behind, as well as the position and corresponding perspectives of observers. 

MadeIn Gallery was established in 2014 in Shanghai by the contemporary art creation and curating platform MadeIn Company, a corporation founded by international influential artist Xu Zhen.

Representing artists: Cai Jian, Chen Ying, Ding Li, Feng Zhixuan, Fu Site, He An, Li Hanwei, Liu Chengrui, Lu Pingyuan, Miao Ying, Mo Shaolong, Payne Zhu, Shang Liang, Shen Xin, Su Yu-Xin, Wang Jianwei, Wang Sishun, Wang Ziquan, XU ZHEN®, Yang Yang, YOYO, Zheng Yuan, Zhou Zixi.