Poems in the Mount Lu Zoo
Artist: YiXin Tong
Exhibition: Meditations in an Emergency
Duration:2020/5/21- 2020/8/30
Venue:UCCA
The world is undergoing, separately, the first global moment of the twenty-first century. Amidst a pandemic that has brought commerce and culture to a halt, and against the backdrop of renewed mortality, heightened tension, and amorphous suspension, we wonder: What is art for?
“Meditations in an Emergency” understands implicitly that it will be seen by people wearing masks, standing two meters apart from one another. People whose temperatures have just been measured and do not exceed 37.2 degrees centigrade. People whose data trails can verify that they have been in Beijing for the last fourteen days. (Have we ever been able to assume so much about our visitors?) It grows, in the wake of other plans now discarded or postponed, from the uncertainty—epidemiological, economic, organizational—that has become our shared predicament. Working from the precepts of the world we now inhabit, it unfolds in five sections and asks questions about the everyday, about mortality, about animality, about globalization, about information.
The exhibition brings together more than twenty artists from China and elsewhere, and includes works made in the past fifteen years. It takes its name from the title of an anthology by Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), the American poet better known during his short lifetime as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. “In times of crisis,” he declares in one of the featured poems, “we must all decide again and again whom we love.”
Official Link –https://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/meditations-in-an-emergency/
Poems in the Mount Lu Zoo- Flaunting Peacock
2020,
Length:2’17”
Poems in the Mount Lu Zoo- Who Killed the Deer
2020,
Length:1’47”