Vanguard Gallery is pleased to present works by Antoni Muntadas, Chu Bingchao, Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude, Jin Haofan, Xiao Jiang, Yuki Onodera at ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair 2023 from 9th to 12th November at Booth E37.
VIP PREVIEW PUBLIC DAYS
2023.11.09 11:00-18:00 2023.11.11 13:00-20:00
2023.11.10 11:00-18:00 2023.11.12 13:00-20:00
Antoni Muntadas is an internationally acclaimed pioneer of media art and conceptual art. Through his works, Muntadas addresses social, political and communication issues such as the relationship between public and private space within social frameworks, and investigates channels of information and the ways they may be used to censor or promulgate ideas. His projects are presented in different media including photography, video, publications, the Internet, installations and urban interventions.
Throughout the course of his artistic career, Chu Bingchao has consistently focused on social issues, personally placing himself within the symbiotic relationships between the individual and society, and between art and reality. To this aim, he has restored Buddha statues, and altered the shape of mountains, as an adventurer into the wild.
Gresham works against the sweeping identity that has been defined by the voice of the state. His images oscillate between figuration, abstraction and hallucination, drawing from the restless energy of the ghetto. Mbare is Harare’s and perhaps Zimbabwe’s most vibrant and notorious ghetto. Allegedly ridden with hooliganism, violence and prostitution, Mbare is said to parallel the conditions of Harare for Zimbabweans during the colonial segregation era (in respect of its hardship and quality of living space). To this day Mbare retains the character of a port city with its trade, shady deals and otherwise bustle of unremitting human traffic amid urban decay. Living on the verge between survival and demise has been somewhat of a call to poetry, at times proving brutal and at others sentimental or cynically satirical. In his works, symbolic collapsed figures, floors and chairs are everywhere. With irony, he talks about social issues such as class inequality and consumer culture in the urban environment without concealment.
Personal perception has long been the theme of Jin Haofan’s works. He gradually gave up his repetitive attempts trying to solidify every “moment” in the moment and began to find a new measurement method in his creation to observe real life and self-perception. Jin tries to present the ups and downs in the search of fragmental perceptions, and understand the game between the impermanence of reality and the pursuit of self-integrity in order to explore the invisible boundary of life, the rhythm of “normal”.
At the first glance at Xiao Jiang’s works, one would be encompassed with the sharp atmosphere. Something is left unsaid by his works, expressing the power in silence. Xiao Jiang’s works have drawn materials from episodes of movies and real life which are so familiar to people that are easily ignored. Under the artist’s unique perspective, they are cut out and recombined. Xiao takes inspiration from reality but structures them into an absolute fantasy world, leading the audience to dislocated visionary feelings.
Yuki Onodera is an artist who masters photography that takes form in contemporary art. She uses methods such as clipping newspaper, and machining the works while completing her creation using silver salts photography. She uses any possible method to realize her works, whether this means taking photographs with a marble inside her camera, or creating a story out of a legend and traveling to the ends of the earth to shoot it. Onodera’s experimental work, which does not fit within schemas of “photography” often poses two questions: what is photography, and what can be done through it?
INSTALLATION VIEW