In progress:

Currently in Milano for Salone del Mobile 2009, we are preparing a new exhibition project (see introduction hereunder), comprising more than 30 artists from China, Korea and Japan.
Specific exhibition dates and opening times will come soon.


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EMPORIUM - A New Common Sense of Space

curated by: Beatrice Leanza

This exhibition project investigates multidisciplinary artistic practices from East Asia - China, Japan and South Korea - which implicate new formal and conceptual relationships with the space of the contemporary and the habitat of the everyday.
Emporium draws itself onto a cultural territory that defies notions of regionalism and nation-based entitlements, by privileging instead the impression of a mobile, productively unstable experience of identity, which signals the emergence of aesthetic strategies and subjective orders of yet specific cultural provenience.
These artistic practices resort to a sense of identity, specificity or locality that no longer claims for legitimate signs of ideological or historical authority; new patterns of identification have nowadays retreated from the grand narratives of transnational critique that often referenced the effects of expansive globality, and rather migrated into the expedient contingency of the quotidian and its material e­xpressions, by instituting a new logic of coexistence with its differential and perpetual character.
The new aesthetic order framed within this exhibition, inhabits the episodic nature of reality by reconnecting to its fragmented, scattered, precarious objects via subtle strategies of self-design, where fragile materials of everyday use and familiar forms are reassembled into new spatial relationships.

The projects included in this exhibition manifest an intrinsic connection with the spatial and social conventions of their original contexts, and intend to provide an understanding of the way new processes of artistic production and representation extend themselves into the community by forging aesthetic assemblages that subtend re-invented symbolisms and meanings for the contemporary.
The term Emporium, which literally translates as “a city of travelling goods and people”, is here employed as an allusive e­xpression for the visual ramifications of the different works exhibited, the mundane and functional quality of their stylistic languages and materials, as well as the explicit cultural interconnections among the geographical realities represented.  
Introducing an heterogeneous group of more than 30 among artists, art collectives and independent-run art spaces with backgrounds in art, design, music and architecture, the show is conceived both as a visual experience and a critical analysis of the way younger generations are formulating new ways to deal with the space of art and social action by assuming a position of open, dynamic marginality. The tentative, incomplete quality of these, for the large part, installation-based works (featuring photography, video, drawing, architectural interventions, publications, performances, sculpture) comes into being as a product of intimate negotiation and continuous readjustment with the immediate environment and its social implications.

The abandoned, discarded and cheap materials which are often employed in these works are recollected and brought into new relations of force, so to expand the field of vision beyond their contingent materiality. In this sense the relationship kindled between the viewer and the work is ever reformulated onto an ambiguous, non-deterministic territory, where consciousness and recognition are negated a manifest environment and rather accommodated in an unstable, non-representational space enforced by a rhetoric of the unexpressed. Between the facts of life and the fiction of art the visual experience that constitutes these works is the very place of artistic agency, where what is to be seen is not in the document of the represented image but in the logic tension it denotes in revealing itself as an object of interior consumption.  
Among others, alternative artistic collectives based in China (Homeshop, Arrow Factory) have been invited to contribute to the exhibition, as they themselves emplace critical action ‘spaces’ which enter into a specific material relation of use with the space of the local.

Designed as a special architectural intervention, Emporium includes also commissioned works by Doojin Ahn, Koki Tanaka, Naihan Li, Megumi Matsubara, Satoshi Hashimoto and Yotaro Niwa, together with a special project organized in collaboration with The Shop/Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing. They extricate the semantic layers upon which the show is constructed, and expose the transversal actions negotiated between stylistic contingency and self-process.
All of these works are juxtaposed in site of the exhibition in the guise of performative ‘moments’ so that the connection between everyday objects and their symbolic weight is continuously delayed and interrupted, and their visual literature casted in a shifting, ephemeral site, somewhere in-between real, perceptual space and psychological experience.


Artists and Projects by::
Ahn Doojin, An Jungju, Bae Young Whan, Birdhead (Song Tao & Ji Weiyu), Gao Shiqiang, Hashimoto Satoshi, Ho Elaine W./Homeshop, Jung Yeondoo, Kim Gisoo , Kim Sangdon, Lee Wooyeon, Li Naihan, Liang Shuo, Matsubara Megumi, Min Ji Ae, Moon Sungsic, Ni Haifeng/Arrow Factory, Niwa Yotaro, Young Jung Siren Eun, Qiu Xiaofei, Tanaka Koki, The Shop (featuring works and publications by: Yang Jun, Zheng Guogu, Duan Jianyu,Yang Jiang Group, Pak Sheung-chuen, Lee Kit, Heman Chong, Cao Fei, Xu Tan, Hu Fang, Yan Jun), Xijing Men (Gimhongsok, Chen Shaoxiong & Ozawa Tsuyoshi), Yan Jun, Yang Jun, Kimura Yuki, Kimura Taiyo.