West Bund Art & Design

Past
Nov 10 – Nov 13, 2022
Shanghai

Art Fair Details:

West Bund Art & Design
West Bund Art Center
Booth A129
Nov 10 – 13, 2022

Connect:

(opens in a new window) West Bund
(opens in a new window) @westbundartfair
(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Above: Yin Xiuzhen, In a Word No. 065, 2011 © Yin Xiuzhen

Pace Gallery is pleased to detail its presentation for the 2022 edition of West Bund Art & Design.

The gallery’s booth spotlight paintings, sculptures, installations, photography, and new media works by international contemporary artists across its program, with leading Chinese figures Hong Hao, Mao Yan, Qiu Xiaofei, Song Dong, Sui Jianguo, Yin Xiuzhen, and Zhang Xiaogang among them. Contemporary works by these and other artists—including Latifa Echakhch, Elmgreen & Dragset, Nina Katchadourian, Lee Ufan, Kylie Manning, Kohei Nawa, Kiki Smith, and teamLab—will be exhibited alongside sculptures by Louise Nevelson and Sol LeWitt, key 20th century figures. Underscoring its commitment to supporting artists’ advanced studio practices and boundary-pushing digital projects, the gallery will showcase the first-ever NFT projects by Loie Hollowell and Sui in its booth.

Among the highlights in Pace’s West Bund Art & Design presentation are new paintings by Latifa Echakhch, who is representing Switzerland in the 59th Venice Biennale. In her latest body of work, Echakhch employs a naive fresco method of painting to transpose images of nightlife in Lausanne, Switzerland—captured by photographer Sim Ouch, a friend of the artist—onto canvas. Featuring twisting and contorted limbs, Ouch’s high exposure photographs capture the frenetic energy of nighttime gatherings. Echakhch treats her canvases with a mix of concrete and vinyl glue, which, once set, she cuts in a labor-intensive, highly physical process that leaves cracks and fissures in the composition. These voids reveal images of fragmented bodies in the layer beneath.

Also in the way of painting, the booth will include paintings from Zhang Xiaogang, a selection of works from Hong Hao’s Reflection series, and a new canvas by Kylie Manning, known for her lyrical, atmospheric paintings that blur the boundary between abstraction and figuration. Works on paper by Lee Ufan, who recently opened an extension of his foundation in Arles, France, and Kiki Smith, who was commissioned to create large-scale mosaic murals to be permanently installed in the new Grand Central Madison terminal in New York, will also be displayed in the gallery’s West Bund Art & Design presentation.

Sculpture will figure prominently in Pace’s booth. The gallery’s presentation at the fair will include a 2021 steel and lacquer sculpture by the duo Elmgreen & Dragset, who will open a solo exhibition this fall at By Art Matter in Hangzhou, China, and an installation work by Yin Xiuzhen. A 1991 white painted aluminum sculpture by Sol LeWitt and a 1976-78 black painted wood sculpture by Louise Nevelson will reflect Pace’s long and proud history as a champion of abstractionists. These historical works will engage in lively exchanges with the contemporary works on view, including Sui Jianguo’s Planting Trace series, for which the artist uses high-definition 3D scanning and printing technologies to capture and document the contours of his hands.

New NFT projects by Loie Hollowell and Sui Jianguo will also be presented in Pace’s booth. Loie Hollowell’s Contractions NFT series, the artist’s first-ever web3 project, which was released by Art Blocks x Pace Verso as part of a long-term partnership, is based on the artist’s Spit Orb painting series and centers on her embodied experiences of childbirth. The colors of these Contractions NFTs are drawn from a wide spectrum, from grayscale—which Hollowell has never previously incorporated in her work—to a vivid neon palette. The expansive possibilities of color in the NFTs situate Hollowell’s abstractions in a new light, influencing her approach to painting and drawing. Sui’s first-ever NFT project, titled Nibiru, will focus on an imaginary extra-terrestrial body whose movements through the solar system are influenced by the invisible gravitational pulls of surrounding planets—this project is being previewed at West Bund and will be officially released by Pace Verso in 2023.

Sui Jianguo

Nibiru NFTs

Nibiru – Gravity of Mars by Sui Jianguo — Sui Jianguo, *Nibiru – Gravity of Mars*, 2022-2023, non-fungible token; Contract ID: 0x6678Af394493e7F7c62C9cC2c5a450814c2c23e1 , Token ID: 5

Sculptor Sui Jianguo—who is known for his use of diverse media and wide-ranging forms in works that examine the modern history of China—has created an NFT series derived from his highly tactile Traces series. His first NFT features an image of an imaginary celestial body, Nibiru, as it travels through the solar system and is influenced by the invisible gravitational pulls of various planets. Using their cellphones, viewers can interact with the NFT—which allows them to zoom in and out of the meteoroid’s surface—to experience the Yin-Yang topology of inner and outer space. Tilting the orientation of the cell phone also enables viewers to orient their own bodies to Earth’s magnetic field, imbuing the work with a game-like, interactive ethos.

Loie Hollowell

Contractions NFTs

Loie Hollowell is recognized for her works evoking bodily landscapes, using geometric shapes to move a figure or its actions into abstraction. Originating in autobiography, her work investigates themes of sexuality, often through allusions to the human form with an emphasis on women’s bodies. Rooted in her sculptural Split Orb paintings, which she began after the birth of her second child, the artist’s new Contractions NFTs are an exploration of her experience of giving birth. This new series brings Hollowell’s bodily landscapes to the digital realm.

Made up of 11 scenes, closed orbs signify the final stage of pregnancy, just before childbirth; orbs featuring one of ten set degrees of openings at their centers, representing each of the ten centimeters of cervical dilation required to begin the second stage of labor. A line bisecting the center of the orbs symbolizes both her spine and the line of concentration it takes to give birth, while the lines radiating out signify pulsing energy. Featuring two bifurcated orbs situated one on top of the other, the top orb represents the artist’s brain and the lower orb signifies her pregnant belly and cervix. With variations in their hues, saturations, and textures, the orbs reflect, on a conceptual level, the artist’s shifting state of mind and body during childbirth, with each of the colors correlating to her emotional states. The colors present in each NFT are drawn from a wide spectrum, ranging from grayscale—which Hollowell has never previously incorporated in her work—to a vivid neon palette. The expansive possibilities of color in the NFTs situate Hollowell’s abstractions in a new light, influencing her approach to painting and drawing. The artist has noted that the programmers she worked with enabled her to find new colors, expanding her relationship with color and making her NFTs entirely unique to the digital realm.

Featured Works

Latifa Echakhch

b. 1974, El Khnansa, Morocco

Informed by how everyday objects and imagery can be transfigured into signifiers of identity, history, and mythology, Latifa Echakhch’s practice takes the form of painting, installation, sculpture, and sound. Describing her work as “a question of power and postures,” Echakhch states she has “no other goals but questioning the world around me.” Night Time (As Seen by Sim Ouch) (2022) belong to Echakhch’s new series of the same name and connects to The Concert, her presentation at the Swiss pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where she employed abstract conditions of light, form, and sound theory to provoke an experience akin to “leaving a concert,” in which a visitor’s “heartbeat [is] transformed, more calm, more intense.”

The works begin with photographs taken by Echakhch’s friend, the artist Sim Ouch. Characterized by high exposure and enigmatic compositions where bodies and limbs are entangled or twisted, the images capture the nightlife of their community of friends in Lausanne, Switzerland. Echakhch employs a naive fresco method of painting to transpose these images onto canvas, which she treats with a mix of concrete and vinyl glue. Once set, Echakhch cuts into the dense material, a violent and labor-intensive process that leaves cracks and voids in the composition, revealing fragmented bodies in motion below. The striations in the concrete speak at once to geography and the mountainous landscape surrounding her studio in Switzerland, as well as the histories of formalism and abstraction.

Elmgreen & Dragset

Michael Elmgreen | b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark
Ingar Dragset | b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway

Based in Berlin, the artists who together form the acclaimed artistic duo Elmgreen & Dragset, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset contend with local European and broader global geopolitical issues through their subtle, uniquely narrative oeuvre. Their lacquered steel sculpture The Kiss (2021) is a life-size rendering of two jerrycans cut formed into a vertical X-shape. These handheld metal vessels were first invented in Germany to store fuel, and by the 1940s had been adapted by Americans and were used widely by Allied countries in the Second World War, by then earning the moniker “jerrycans” as a reference to the slang term “Jerry” for Germans. Elmgreen & Dragset’s sculpture illustrates an American take on a Nazi German military industrial object, and further one that signifies a culturally embedded obsession with fossil fuels and new forms of oppressive governmental structures that are based around unhealthy dependence on oil. The Kiss signifies an erotic act rendered in an abstract medium, narrating a love affair between global military powerhouse countries and fossil fuels under the guise of industrial production. This title also may reference the iconic Berlin mural My God, Help Me To Survive This Deadly Love, painted by a Russian painter on the Berlin Wall in 1990 and depicting a reproduction of a photograph of Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in a socialist fraternal kiss. Elmgreen & Dragset’s The Kiss is symbolic of the entanglement of statesmanship, nonrenewable energy, and industry, and is exemplary of the artists’ engagement with topical global concerns including the contemporary climate emergency, gun violence, and navigating personhood in a post-industrial world.

Lee Ufan

b. 1936, Kyongsang-namdo, South Korea

Painted in 2012, Dialogue belongs to Lee Ufan’s ongoing series of the same name, which the artist began in 2006, deepening his longstanding investigation of painting as a conduit for meditative self-transcendence. To create these works, Lee loaded a broad brush with paint of different values, creating a color scale ranging from dark gray to white. The gradient of the paint allowed the brushstrokes to dissolve into the white canvas despite its dense, impasto nature. Lee thus creates an ambiguous painterly mark that is both material and abstract, three-dimensional yet optically flat. Gray dominates Lee’s early Dialogue works, primarily because of the color’s versatility, subtlety, and ambivalence that, to Lee, “express[es] a vague, ephemeral, and uncertain world.”

Reinforced by chromatic calibrations, the gestural syntax of the present work encourages perceptual doubt and introspective pause. The repetition of minimal marks acts as a record of Lee’s embodied experience of creation as well as the temporal and spatial coordinates of his process. In a ritualistic approach reminiscent of Buddhist practices, Lee syncs the application of paint to his breath—a subtle dynamism intimated with remarkable economy by his brushstrokes. For the artist, empty space within a canvas is infused with yohaku or “emptiness (resonant space),” which, unlike the Western notion of emptiness as total vacuity or nothingness, conceives of emptiness as a dynamic site hosting reverberations and tensions. The blank fields of this work and works within the larger series, consequently, enables a dialogue— as suggested by its title—to emerge between the canvas’s center and periphery, its painted and unpainted surface. Through this exchange, Lee observes, “it is possible to sense poetry, criticism, and the transcendent in the space.”

Kiki Smith

b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany

Kiki Smith is recognized for her multidisciplinary practice relating to the human condition and the natural world. Using a variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve a body of work, the artist works in sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textiles. Smith has long been interested in corporeality and womanhood, expertly investigating these ideas through form, composition, and material. Smith was inspired by Prudence Punderson’s 1783 silk needlework First, Second and Last Scene of Mortality, which illustrates the three stages of a colonial woman’s life: infancy, maturity, and death. Instead of marriage or child rearing being the culmination of a woman’s life, this work is a rare example of a depiction of a woman instead engaging in creative pursuits.

Animals in the World (2007) is an extraordinary example of Smith’s exploration of the role of women in the domestic sphere. In the present work, three young women stand squarely facing the viewer. Smith uses collage, ink, graphite, and colored pencil on an almost perfectly square piece of Nepalese paper, which ripples, creating a textured effect that draws the viewer into the paper’s delicate folds. The composition’s perspective is flat, and the figures stand in a line staring out into the exhibition space as if presenting themselves unapologetically. The young women are tattooed, adorned with jewelry, and wear modern clothing, signaling their existence within the realm of the present day.

Sui Jianguo

b. 1956, Qingdao, China

Working exclusively in sculpture, and for the first time, NFTs, Sui Jianguo’s practice navigates Western and Chinese histories of art. The artist’s recent work is characterized by a turn toward abstraction and infuses an expressionistic language with portraiture. Aligning with his effort to promote modern themes and spontaneous creation within his practice, Sui uses diverse materials, including stone, iron, cement, rubber, bronze, fiberglass, marble, and clay to explore new and enduring themes.

In his Traces series, Sui strips down modes of artmaking to the impressions his hands and fingers leave on his chosen material. These basic bodily acts allude to the substantive relationship between the creator and the material and are a faithful record of the artist’s body. On the surface of the material, the artist’s hand becomes an absolute, undeniable presence. As he affirms his own identity, he also bestows the material with a completely new meaning—and the sculpture becomes a portrait of the artist. Garden in the Cloud · Planting Trace DS (2022) is made of dark jade and reflects imprints of the artist’s hands and fingerprints. Sui’s application of new technology draws closer to the artist's aesthetic ideal—artworks generated through technology that record the properties and results of forces applied to a material with the precision of scientific experiments, approaching the objective revelation of the corporeal nature of sculpture. This openness to scientific and industrial technology is the essence of modernity in Sui Jianguo's practice.

Yin Xiuzhen

b. 1963, Beijing, China

Yin Xiuzhen’s work is invested in exploring cultural memory and the scale of change that occurred in China in the late twentieth century. Yin first began using clothing in her work in 1995, referring to this unexpected medium as a second skin. “[Clothes] have their own expressive language, and are connected with their times and therefore with history,” she writes. Yin channels each garment’s history—a gesture that recognizes that clothing contains traces of its owner. Likewise, she understands the individual styles—color, cut, fabric—to be aesthetic and functional decisions related to not only the wearer but the designer and producer. Clothing is an artifact of the aesthetic, fashion, and sociopolitical culture in which it was made, and Yin is particularly cognizant of how quickly things change, having witnessed the rapid developments in China following the Cultural Revolution. By stitching together used clothing, Yin rescues it from the waste bin and rehabilitates it. “Collected clothes are actually the condensations of people,” she writes. “Once wrapped around warm bodies, they still radiate spiritual warmth when they enter my works.”

Yin’s use of clothing contrasts with her employment of hard industrial materials, such as In a Word No. 065 (2011), which utilizes stainless steel, alluding to the widespread infrastructural development projects happening in China, especially in Beijing, rather than the personal history of the clothing. Yet these distinct materials perform two sides of a dialogue that became especially apparent around 2009, when Yin began employing clothing in a more abstract manner, reducing it to threads or scraps enmeshed in larger sculptural assemblages. “When clothes are torn into pieces, their characteristics also collapse. Equality within disparity thus exists. In spite of the fragmentary state, the clothes still reserve the owner’s temperament, as well as the spirit of invincibility. The remained temperature grows again from the cracks of wrecks, offering an exit for cold silence or even cruel reality and emitting brand new heat energy, new temperature.”