18th August 2008
Down Town Production is a fiercely dynamic group show bringing cutting-edge, urban Chinese art to the UK. Curated by one of China's leading artists, Yan Lei, the exhibition brings together eight rising stars of contemporary Chinese art whose work reflects the recent dramatic social and economic transformation of China. It is anticipated that 70% of China's 1.3 billion population will live in urban areas by 2035. At the end of 2002, records showed that China's urban population totalled 502 million, living in over 21,000 towns and cities. Down Town Production is a selection of art that reflects and explores this dramatic shift.
The artists will give us a taste of China's emerging popular culture, with works as diverse as avant-garde architect Wang Hui's self-sufficient animal habitat and ground-breaking L.A.S.E.R. graffiti by conceptual artist, DJ and rapper, MC Yan. L.A.S.E.R. tagging is the very newest form of graffiti art developed only a year ago and currently cropping up in cities all over the world. Courtesy of MC-Yan, London will experience a major laser-tagging event this autumn, as part of the exhibition.
Down Town Production is being staged by The Red Mansion Foundation, which has been working to bring China's contemporary art scene to the UK for almost a decade, discovering new talent and establishing an exchange program between London and China for some of the biggest names in contemporary art. Many of the works in the exhibition will be for sale.
The Down Town Production show will take place both inside and outside the Red Mansion Foundation's gallery space, which will be completely transformed for the purpose of this exhibition. Curator, Yan Lei, will distort the traditional "white cube" concept and create a totally new environment for the show that will be particularly striking in the context of the Red Mansion, a listed Robert Adam building.
The exhibition will also include a one-off special performance by Brain Failure, trailblazers in China's burgeoning punk scene, who will play at the ICA on 17th October. Formed in 1997, the band were the first to emerge from the People's Republic of China, embracing Western punk ideals and now enjoying commercial success at home and in the US. This will be their first UK performance, and offers an insight into a youth movement that is gathering force. The bill also includes Stanley Kubrick Goes Shopping, a new collaboration between Youth of Killing Joke and Dennis Morris, lead vocalist of Basement 5 and music photographer, famed for his seminal images of the Sex Pistols and Bob Marley.
Down Town Production curator:
Yan Lei is one of the most outrageous, influential and prominent Chinese contemporary artists in China today. He is considered one of the bad boys of China's contemporary art scene, known for his daring and psychological portraits as well as video and installation work. A paid up member of the prankster-school of art personalities, Yan Lei (along with fellow artist Hong Hao) one year created fake invitations to Documenta and sent them to Chinese artists, who were unaware that they were in the subjects of a hoax. Yan borrows from the surrounding art world, but also rails against it in his pranks, public appearances and portraits. He is also well known for his oil paintings based on numeric photographic images and for his psychedelic, shimmering wheel portraits. In 2007, he participated in Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany. He lives and works in Beijing.
Down Town Production artists:
MC Yan is a truly urban creative. A conceptual artist, graffiti artist and rapper, he is the main creator of the Hong Kong LMF (Lazy Motha Fucka) Hip Hop collective. The music of LMF expresses the dissatisfaction and anger of Hong Kong youth towards the political environment. Also an innovative graffiti artist MC Yan says of his work: “my passion [is to] combine Chinese Art and Chinese Calligraphy in graffiti form. I love to reverse the system or break through the tradition. Instead of using paper, we use the wall. So far there's only one place which I haven't got my hands on - Tiananmen Square. Everyone is an ‘undercover' there. Don't even think about doing [graffiti] there. The old lady who is sweeping the floor next to you, for all you know, is an ‘undercover' too!” Recently MC Yan has produced new work using laser projection technology, writing words and images on Beijing's skyscrapers, putting the debate about the plight of the individual in full public view. MC Yan will be tagging a prominent London landmark to demonstrate the art of laser tagging for the first time ever in London.
Liu Ding has exhibited extensively internationally. Liu works mainly with installation, however he also works across a variety of media including painting, performance and photography. After moving to Beijing, Liu Ding collaborated with nine artists to launch the Complete Art Experience Project, an artist-led initiative that produces group and solo exhibitions with a focus on interdisciplinary artistic experiments. He has exhibited internationally, including China Power Station at the Serpentine Gallery in 2006.
Hong Hao is a major graphic artist and photographer whose intensely witty and sophisticated work celebrates the tradition of the artist's book in contemporary Western and ancient Chinese forms. Born in China in 1965, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Hong graduated from the printmaking department at Beijing's Academy of Fine Arts in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square protests. He is best know for his photographic series, My Things, which opened up a new realm of personal expression for the artist. The photographs are composed of thousands of scanned images of objects from his own life and several will be included in Down Town Production. He has shown at galleries and museums in China and all over the world including the USA, Ireland, France, Czech Republic, Canada, Sweden, Australia and Japan.
Meng Luding is one of China's leading abstract painters. His work, Enlightenment of Adam and Eve in the New Age, went on record as the pioneering work for the '85 Art Movement. The Football, one of his expressionist works, is considered a masterpiece of the genre, pushing the medium of oil painting into a new realm. His recent works show a strong personal style and unique art concepts and demonstrate a new visual language and production method.
Liu Zhenchen was born in Shanghai but has lived in France for the last eight years, so that Shanghai is now only a memory to him, a compressed experience. His recent photographs and films, which are documentary and poetic hybrids, show the frantic changes taking place in Shanghai and their direct impact on its residents. Zhenchen Liu has been awarded numerous prizes. His latest video was named Best Experimental Film at France's 9th Aubagne International Film Festival and was screened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Most Chinese people know Lao Liu as a rock ‘n' roll musician from the 80s. Now, he works as a photographer and lives in Beijing. In one of his more recent works, Lao Liu managed to elude border checks at the Ya Lu River, smuggling his camera into North Korea to take a series of photographs. Entitled Dance over the Border (Wu Guo San Ba Xian) they record and express the passion and romanticism of the local population. Liu has shown in the USA and China.
Zhao Shaoruo was born in China but lives and works in Espoo, Finland. Moving between Beijing, Hong Kong and Helsinki, Zhao has experienced a sense of displacement and his work explores loneliness and the absurdity of human incompetence. He reinterprets photographs for instance in Under the Name of the City, he replaces the faces of the passers-by in city scenes with his own face and places his own name on all the adverts, banners and street signs. He shows regularly in Finland and has also showed in Germany, Japan, Czech Republic, Indonesia and the V&A Museum in London. He will have four photographs in the exhibition.
Whilst much of China's most visible contemporary architecture ranges from glittering towers created by international architects to the kitsch of Thames Town (a mock English suburb near Shanghai), China, naturally, has it own architects who are now building for themselves, rather than for the state. Wang Hui, a founding partner of Urbanus Architecture & Design, is one such architect. With branches in Beijing and Shenzhen, Urbanus' projects include urban design, architecture, urban landscape design, interior design, exhibition design and public art installations. Urbanus is recognized as one of the avant-garde among young Chinese firms. Their concept of ‘urbane urbanity' instead of ‘chaotic urbanism' characterizes each Urbanus project and, as a firm, they aim to ‘restore humanity' back to China's vast and fast-growing metropolises. Hui will make wallpaper to dress the gallery space and an installation for Down Town Production.
23rd September – 21st November 2008
The Red Mansion Foundation
46 Portland Place
London W1B 1NF
