EMPORIUM - A New Common Sense of Space
Curated by: Beatrice Leanza
November 5 – December 8, 2009
Museo della Scienza e della Tecnica Leonardo Da Vinci Via San Vittore 21, Milano - Italy
Opening for Press and Invited Guests - November 4, 2009, 6:00 PM

Presented for the first time in Milan, the exhibition Emporium - A New Common Sense of Space features the works of 27 artists from China, Japan and South Korea by framing a critical analysis of the materials, places and processes of representation shaping specific uses and interpretations of the ‘contemporary’.

The different material, sonic, architectural and performative explorations here presented intend to encourage both an historical and aesthetic understanding of the social, urban and technological phenomena informing the present of specific cultural regions, and the way they outline a form of radically open, polycentric sense of internationalism.

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. The exhibition therefore sets forth an investigation of multidisciplinary artistic practices which implicate new formal and conceptual relationships with the space of the contemporary and the habitat of the everyday, by introducing a heterogeneous group of artists, art collectives and independently-run art spaces with backgrounds in art, design, music and architecture. 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 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 by forging aesthetic assemblages that subtend re-invented symbolisms and meanings for the contemporary. The 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 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.

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. More ambiguously, it plays with the “exhibition” intended as a discursive model foregrounding a certain ‘ordering of experience’, and its self-implications with the economics of global art (delocalization, differentiation, spectacle, etc).

Developed by Milan-based dotdotdot studio (www.dotdotdot.it) in collaboration with the curator, the special exhibition design for EMPORIUM orchestrates the works in a graded environment of platforms, bights and staircases, deployed as architectural reminiscences of ancient ports and voyages stretched between permanence and repetition. The newly commissioned and site-specific works by Doojin Ahn, Naihan Li, Megumi Matsubara, Satoshi Hashimoto and Yotaro Niwa are juxtaposed in site of the show so to create zones of pause and flight.

Two performances – Moon Shadow, by Satoshi Hashimoto and Homeshop Hawking by Elaine W. Ho - will be presented for the first 2 days of the show during the museum opening hours. Played out in the transiting area leading to, and inside, the exhibition room, both performances intervene in the processes of observation and participation grounding the relationship between spectacle and audience, subject and object, by subverting their consumptive orders. The relevant installations will be on view for the entire duration of the show. Among others, alternative artistic collectives/spaces 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 place of the local.
 
A 130 pages catalogue accompanies the show, with texts by the curator and the artists, images of all the works, drawings and pictures of the site-specific installations included.

Artists and Projects:

Ahn Doojin, An Jungju, Ahn Kanghyun, Bae Young Whan, Birdshead (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, Ni Haifeng/Arrow Factory, Niwa Yotaro, Young Jung Siren Eun, Qiu Xiaofei, Tanaka Koki, Michikazu Matsune/The Shop, Xijing Men (Gimhongsok, Chen Shaoxiong & Ozawa Tsuyoshi), Yan Jun, Yang Jun, Kimura Yuki, Kimura Taiyo.

Organized and produced by: BAO Atelier HK ltd. (Beijing/Hong Kong)
Graphic Project and Catalogue: BAO Atelier HK ltd. (Beijing/Hong Kong)
Exhibition Design: dotdotdot, Milano
Supported by: Regione Lombardia
With the support of: BMP Sas (Milano), The Nomura Cultural Foundation (Tokyo), Unione del Commercio, del Turismo, dei Servizi e delle Professioni della Provincia di Milano. Technical Sponsor: Hantarex, Electronic Systems, Milano.

Supported by: The General Consulate of Japan in Milano, The General Consulate of the Republic of Korea, Consulate General of the People's Republic of China in Milano.

THE CURATOR: Beatrice Leanza, lives and works in Beijing, China. Art writer and independent researcher, she held an MA in East Asian studies from Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, in 2002, whereafter she joined the China Art Archives and Warehouse (CAAW) directed by artist/architect Ai Weiwei, where she was curator and managing director until early 2005. Consultant for both international projects, institutions (MoMA, ICP, Pro Helvetia, Royal College of Arts, etc) and private collections, Beatrice has written extensively about contemporary art in China and Asia for various catalogues and publications, also as the China correspondent for Flash Art International. She has organized different exhibitions in China, including projects during the Biennales of Beijing and Shanghai, the Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, while also acting as co-director of the experimental festival Borderline-Moving Images (2006/2007). In 2006 she founded BAO Atelier (www.thabao.com), a creative studio for integrated research in editorial, curatorial and design practice. Beatrice has dedicated her research to interdisciplinary spatial practices and critical forms of urban interventions in contemporary Asia. Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci External Relations and Press Deborah Chiodoni - Paola Cuneo - Valeria Gasparotti Via San Vittore 21 - 20123 Milano T +39 02 48555 343 / 372 / 381 / 450 – C +39 339 1536030 stampa@museoscienza.it | www.museoscienza.org BAO Atelier HK ltd. | Beijing/Hong Kong Beatrice Leanza Chaoyang District, Jiuxianqiao Road n. 26 Jingdu Guoji Bldg 2D – 1703 100016 – Beijing, China www.thebao.com | curatorial@thebao.com M (IT) +39 338 2944 688