2020 ─ Song Art Invitation Exhibition
Duration｜June 20 – August 30, 2020
Opening Hours｜10:00 – 18:00 (last entry at 17:30, closed on Mondays)
Venue｜Song Art Museum. Grasse Road, Shunyi District, Beijing, China
The Song Art Museum, founded by Wang Zhongjun, a world-renowned art collector, is located in Shunyi District, Beijing. The museum covers an area of 22,000 square meters with 199 evergreen pine trees planted in its courtyard. Its exhibitions include From Van Gogh to Chinese Contemporary Art in 2017 as its opening show, and the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois retrospective in 2019, which drew the attention in the Chinese art scene.
Examining the origins of Eastern culture and history, our artist LI Chen was invited to join the Song Museum’s 2020 ─ Song Art Invitation Exhibition. He presented two of his sculptures, Soothing Breezes Floating Clouds and Eclipse．Twilight Breeze. Standing in front of the Song Museum’s architectural complex, the two works represent the core values of Eastern aesthetics. Through this juxtapositional arrangement they are entering into a dialog with the museum’s modernist architecture.
“Formed as a morning dew, looking at the distant sky, standing on the sun blessed earth, driving with the green mist, the man can wave the fan of heaven, call for the wind, travel freely indifferent zones of spirits and manipulate power in unlimited forms.”
(Li Chen)
This is followed by the more concrete representation of Eclipse‧Twilight Breeze, in which ethereal clouds received a heavier black substantive form but exist in a state of lightness and floating on the wind. Among these golden ethereal clouds one of the shapes resembles a solitary wild beast surging out of the chaos of the cosmos, while another is in the shape of powerful animal limbs, the upper part resembling the sudden coming together of clouds in the sky, the lower part more akin to a rolling landscape. The sun represented by the golden part of the work is hidden and the nighttime or black part of the piece takes the lead. This is the moment in time when day hands over to night, when Heaven and Earth exchange places, the point at which the soul frees itself from physical constraints with Heaven and Earth in a state of flux. This is a solitary living organism flying in the vastness of the cosmos, while also casting an eye over this mortal coil.
(Dr. Xia Kejun)
