Nine-Tiered Pagoda: Spatial and Visual Magic

 

Nine-Tiered Pagoda: Spatial and Visual Magic, as a cross-disciplinary event, represents an unprecedented direction and form of exhibition in China. Nine (groups of) artists will provide their works as the basis material for the exhibition. Besides, nine architects and nine designers will also join to form nine temporary teams, hence the cooperation among artists, architects and designers. There is no ‘priority’ or ‘center’ in the exhibition, only division of labor and collaboration, presenting nine individual exhibitions of a brand-new type.

 

As the core determinant for the exhibition, space and design are also a kind of re-creation of the exhibition and the work; They determine the content and how the audience see the exhibition, as well as the sequence and pace. Space and design, no longer in the service of the exhibition, provide an independent and autonomous experience for the audience, granting the exhibition a myriad of variables and possibilities.

 

There has always been a lack of quality cross-disciplinary exhibitions, which are neither a fast food product preached by celebrities and online influencers nor a highbrow art confined to professional barriers. The cross-disciplinary advocated by Nine-Tiered Pagoda creates a nexus joining art, architecture and design together with a new cross-discipline, which reflects the practical needs and collaboration of the three professions, while it also retains the expertise and strengths of each with a proper division of labor.

 

As an ancient Chinese architecture, ‘Pagoda’ has a special structure, with each tier telling a different story. These stories, spaces, and designs are closely intertwined with each other into a superimposed whole, formulating the external image and spiritual core of the exhibition.

 

Nine-Tiered Pagoda: Spatial and Visual Magic, launched by curator Cui Cancan and architect Liu Xiaodu in 2020, is a hands-on project that mixes ideas, methodologies and tools. It's not only a workshop for cross-disciplinary art, but also a platform for artists, architects and designers to cooperate and expand their development realms together.

 

The advent of Nine-Tiered Pagoda represents the ambition to create an entirely new field, with an aim to invent a new way of collaboration and to create a fresh exhibition concept that can reshape the perceptual experience of our times.

 

Nine-Tiered Pagoda: Spatial and Visual Magic ② Display and Replay Solo Exhibition of Li Qing

 

Spatial Design: Li Han

 

Graphic Design: Mei Shuzhi

 

Curator: Cui Cancan

 

Producer: Liu Xiaodu

 

Duration: 2020.10.24 - 2020.11.29

 

Pingshan Art Museum, 4th Floor

 

Host: Culture, Radio, Television, Tourism and Sports Bureau of Pingshan District

 

 

As the second project of Nine-Tiered Pagoda, Display and Replay indicates the joint work of art, architecture and design, which is also the core of the entire exhibition. How do we display content and vision? How do we reproduce thoughts and perceptions? The exhibition is based on the works of Li Qing, with architect Li Han creating the space and graphic designer Mei Shuzhi in charge of posters and other visual designs.

 

In 2019, Li Qing held an exhibition at Shanghai Rong Zhai, where his work Window had a distinctive dialogue with the old residence, bringing the reenacted story back to the previous glory. While his display in Hangzhou House has fed the decadent sound of colonialism and fragmented memories of warmth to the reality, generating an absurd and contradictory mix. It's hard to tell whether it's true of parodic, real or replicated. Three years ago, in Hong Kong, Li Qing's Neon Light Characters formulates a fictional interaction with the Central, Gloucester Luk Kwok, Oriental Taipan and Kowloon across the street outside his window frames. Windows are important metrics for the quality of house in Hong Kong movies. The best house should not only have windows, but the one where we can also see the distance, or even the sea through the window. ‘Windows’ are displayed in different times, with various states and fates. Some are carrying stories, some renewing hope and some just separating the distance.

 

Li Qing was chosen because of the relationship among his work, architecture and design. Windows are naturally part of a building. They themselves are also a kind of scenery. They are seen, experienced and observed because of "art". They resemble the mode of this exhibition, with the‘space’replaying and displaying the work, while‘design’summarizing and reconstructing the content. The story is always told by another story, and the description is always "witnessed" by another description.

 

All windows have a class, just as all designs imply a stance. Similar with Li Qing, architect Li Han shares his concern for old and new buildings, urban and rural changes, and for different social groups. Li Han interprets the exhibition site as a building about to be demolished. In this man-made ruin, the old and the new, all the buildings and archaeological sites record the fading history. Colorful tiles are decorating a dazzling dream. All are mixed. We can't tell if we see the city in the window, or if we see each other in this city.

 

Stories can have a myriad of versions. But no matter for artists, architects or designers, there is a commonality beneath the differences, or a complicity in the focus of work: How do we display and replay the stories and how do we view all connections and turns therein? We all have a deep understanding of what "rhetoric" means.

 

Curator: Cui Cancan

 

 

1.ARTIST

 

Li Qing was born in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province in 1981. He lives and works in Hangzhou and Shanghai. He has had solo shows at Fondazione Prada’s Rongzhai, Shanghai; Tomás y Valiente Art Centre, Madrid; Arario Museum, Seoul; The Orient Foundation, Macao; Zhejiang Art Museum; Goethe Institute, Shanghai; among others. Li is shortlisted for the Jean-François Prat Prize in 2017. His works seek rational rifts in similarity and contradiction, acting on the perception and acknowledgment of a viewer through circuitous and overlapped structures. In recent years, his works are testing the tension and contradiction between image, language, symbol and social space, connecting the multi-level elements of experience in series to construct a conflict structure.

 

 

2.Spatial Design

 

Li Han.Founding Partner of Drawing Architecture Studio, Class 1 Registered Architect (P.R.C.). Graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts and RMIT University. His practices include architectural drawings, urban studies and architecture design. He is the author of A Little Bit of Beijing, A Little Bit of Beijing · Dashilar, and Hutong Mushroom. He was the Overall and Digital Category winners of 2018 WAF Architecture Drawing Prize and won the Second Place at 2016 RIBA Journal Eye Line Drawing Competition. His works have been exhibited widely, including the Chinese Pavilion and Japan Pavilion of the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, The 7th Shenzhen / Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism / Architecture, and Architecture in Comic-Strip Form in Oslo, and are among the permanent collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Shenzhen Pingshan Art Museum.