55 Days in Valencia: Chinese Art Meeting

Exhibition Duration: 29th, May-13th, July

Organizer: Iberia Center for Contemporary Art

Venue: Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno（IVAM）

Curator: Zuo Jing, Calor Yinghua Lu, Rafa Sierra, Consuelo Ciscar

Artist: Qiu Zhijie, Dong Wensheng, Cui Xiuwen, Zhong Biao, Sui Jianguo, Sun Jianchun, Han Lei, Hong Lei, Jiang Zhi, Li Qing, Miao Xiaochun, Wang Jinsong, Wang Qingsong, Wang Ningde, Zhang Xiaotao, Wang Yin, Wang Yabin

Address: Guillem de Castro, 118 - 46003 Valencia SPAIN

 

China is coming closer and closer to the West and, we can say with the same assurance that the West is getting closer and closer to this colossal Eastern country.

 

Both powers are interested in and curious about meeting each other outside the limits marked by their frontiers and cultural differences. China examines our territory in search of a different culture that can give it a new vision and open doors to grant it access to a philosophy other than Confucianism, to plural social policies a far cry from the hierarchical authority that formed part of its identity for so many years, to austere scenic arts, comedies, where the text is more important than the visual, colourful, gestural brilliance of the Orient, to visual arts that break away from figurative tradition, with the frames and limits of artistic structures, so that it may enter conceptualism by means of innovating techniques that contrast strongly with the classical ink and paper techniques of the traditional Chinese arts. This country is becoming accessible thanks to the fact that since three decades ago, when it implemented an opening up of social and economic policies, it has maintained this outward-looking liberalised research.

 

And the results are clear to see, not only in the good position it has recently reached in the world market, but in the way it has absorbed features of our culture and appropriated it alongside their own legendary culture. This contamination of cultures, new and inherited, is the most interesting aspect of these artistic encounters like the ones the IVAM has been holding throughout 2008, where Chinese artists are the absolute protagonists. Before that, especially in the 20th century, groups of rebellious artists studied and introduced clandestinely into the country currents of thought that existed outside their frontiers. These initial steps, at a moment of expectation and challenge, were taken in a muzzled society that resisted the passage of time in isolation, far removed from a contemporaneity that was freely enjoyed in Western lands. Globalisation and political change are stimulating this new China and arousing it from its lethargy and a recent very heavy and painful historical burden, and doing so with amazing vigour and decision. The country is slowly becoming democratic because we must not forget that it is a great empire, difficult to govern, but it wishes to wield an economic power very close to social and cultural welfare with complete freedom of speech. The poetic of Chinese arts makes them very different from those of the West because of the historic discourse that has separated both. It is a harmonious poetic, of enormous creativity, due to its vast historic memory packed with beauty and tradition; the new generations are using this past to renovate out-of-date, hackneyed themes and address new ones that stem from the global freedom that the society of information and technology generates. In this way, the symbols and archetypes most deeply rooted in the collective memory of the West disappear to give way to languages and discourses that are attractive above all in social and cultural spheres and thus shake off absurd prejudices. Little by little we can say farewell to a China steeped in its stagnant past and observe how a new way of thinking is emerging and giving birth to a new country that interrelates with all the continents in the hope of sincerely making contact with their peoples by means of repeated two-way trips. With this dialogue East and West are more closely linked than ever and, above all, willing for both cultures to fit together in a global map where civil respect should be the standard-bearer of their just aims. 55 días en Valencia.

 

Encuentro de arte Chino (55 Days in Valencia. Encounter with Chinese Art) wishes to show the public the most groundbreaking styles of the new culture born in this country and, above all, around the city of Beijing. The exhibition is divided into three different spaces, the Museo de la Ciudad, Gallery 8 and Gallery 6 of the IVAM, and organised according to techniques, from ancestral painting to installations, conceptual photography and documentary photography.