Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation @LACMA

Jul 4, 2021–Mar 13, 2022

Resnick Pavilion, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

5905 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles. CA 90036

 

Featuring Ai Weiwei, Huang Yong Ping, Wang Guangyi, Xu Bing, Yue Minjun，Li Qing and more, Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation brings together works of Chinese contemporary art created in response to international trade, political conflict, and global artistic exchange. Pulled from the Yuz Museum’s esteemed collection of contemporary art, Legacies of Exchange spotlights encounters, exchanges, and collisions between China and the West. This exhibition is part of LACMA’s ongoing partnership with the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, China, a joint effort to create collaborative exhibitions and to provide both museums with greater access to a more diverse collection of artworks.

 

“Legacies of Exchange highlights works that relate to cross-cultural exchange, both recent and historical, between China and the West, as a part of our recent collaboration with Yuz Museum,” said Susanna Ferrell, Wynn Resorts Assistant Curator of Chinese Art at LACMA. “As the first Los Angeles–based collaboration between LACMA and Yuz, we are thrilled to present these incredible works from the collection of the Yuz Foundation to Los Angeles for the first time.”

 

The window of < Mirror Window· Mishima Yukio's Garden > comes from Chinese architecture in the last century, while the scenery outside comes from Japan in the same period, when Japan was experiencing the period of introspection after the failure of the war. The garden and classical sculpture in the work come from the famous Japanese writer, Mishima Yukio’s residence in Tokyo. Sculpture is a kind of art form with political significance. In the Renaissance, sculptures themselvs and their external architectural environment became a part of the urban landscapes. In the "aesthetic politicized" contemporary society, both the realistic street sculptures and the sculptures as an image are haunted by the "ghost" of political and cultural practice. Mishima Yukio loved the Idealistic Aesthetics in Greek classical sculpture and had a crazy obsession with pure beauty, which was also reflected in his writing. In the later period, Mishima Yukio went to militarism because he was dissatisfied with the weakness of Japanese politics, which was also related to his extreme idealism.

 

"Window" series reveals the political construction of "object image" by exploring the relationship between "object" and "vision", emphasizes the behavior of "seeing" itself, and "roughly" decomposes the image behind the window with the window pane, as if the behavior of "seeing" covers the original face of the object while making the object enter the field of vision. , in addition to window and painting, "mirror" is also used. Window is transparent, while mirror creates images. Their intertextual relationship and ideographic tension reflect the relationship and difference between Mishima Yukio's personal artistic taste and political appeal, and also metaphor the multiple examination of the other and self: whether it is Japan to the west, or China to Japan. This is a concern about the situation of culture in the historical and geographical dimensions.