LEO XU PROJECTS

May 10th until August 11th, 2013

Curated by Hou Hanru, The 5th Auckland Triennial is titled “If you were to live here…” which offers a way artists and creative participants can inhabit and transform social spaces by producing innovative ideas, projects and works. The 5th Auckland Triennial will provide opportunities to connect with different communities, as well as collaborations among various partners in and out of the city. It will invite discussion, debate and the exchange of ideas.

For further information, please visit: http://aucklandtriennial.com/.

April 24th through May 26th, 2013

The 26th EMAF presents media as art, cult media, media for reflection and media with a fun factor.

In its programme comprising short and feature-length films, documentaries, exhibitions, performances and lectures, EMAF introduces well-known stars such as Californian artist Kerry Laitala, filmmaker Harun Farocki, and documenta 13 participant Omer Fast, in addition to young talented artists from various universities and academies.

More than 180 new films, installations and artistic projects selected from over 2,400 entries will be presented at the festival.

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From April 24th to 28th, 2013, KINO DER KUNST, the first event of its kind worldwide, presents films by visual artists who push boundaries of cinema and explore new narrative forms.

KINO DER KUNST is an exhibition and a film festival in one, which showcases today’s trends in art and provides an international meeting point for artists, curators and the public. Spread across various locations, such as the University of Television and Film Munich (HFF), the Pinakothek der Moderne / Schaustelle, the Museum Brandhorst in the Kunstareal and beyond that the ARRI cinema, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Kunstverein Munich, the MaximliansForum and the Goetz Collection, it will feature a competition with generous prizes, a retrospective program of feature-length films by artists ranging from Rebecca Horn and Eija-Liisa Ahtila to Steve McQueen or Julian Schnabel, a wide range of works from specific geographical regions and a number of museum-based multi-channel installations, all aimed at examining the current relationship between cinema and art.

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March 13th through May 13th, 2013
Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

LEO XU PROJECTS is pleased to announce that Gabriel Lester will be presenting a commssioned new work in Sharjah Biennial 11 titled ‘Re:emerge, Towards a New Cultural Cartography’.

Curator Yuko Hasegawa proposes a Biennial that reassess the Westerncentrism of knowledge in modern times and reconsiders the relationship between the Arab world, Asia, the Far East, through North Africa and Latin America.

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June 30th through November 17th, 2013
The Orange County Museum of Art
850 San Clemente Drive in Newport Beach, California

Formerly known as the California Biennial, The Orange County Museum of Art has re-envisioned this important survey of contemporary California art and will re-launch it as the California-Pacific Triennial in 2013 with participating artists representing a cross-section of countries from throughout the Pacific rim.

2013 California-Pacific Triennial is organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and curated by Chief Curator Dan Cameron.

Michael Lin will be presenting a new body of site-specific installations in the Triennial. For further information on the artist and project please contact info@leoxuprojects.com .

To learn more about the Triennial, please visit the official website.

January 13th through April 14th, 2013
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

New works by Chen Wei, Cheng Ran, Guo Hongwei, and Liu Chuang are featured in “ON/OFF: China’s Young Artist’s in Concept and Practice” an exhibition that occupies all UCCA exhibition spaces and provides a comprehensive survey of the generation of artists born after the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution, and at the dawn of the country’s era of opening and reform. “ON | OFF” includes 50 commissioned works by 50 artists and artist groups.

November 25th, 2012 through March 1st, 2013

Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai presents ‘Roxy’, the first solo exhibition in China of internationally exhibited Dutch artist Gabriel Lester. Born in Amsterdam in 1972 and presently based in Amsterdam and Shanghai, Lester has been producing works since the mid-1990s that are informed by lexica of cinematography and architecture, and mediate the perception of the world that is constantly re-shaped by new technology and mass media. The show opens on November 25th 2012 and runs through March 1st 2013. It will be accompanied by a series of events and a monographic book describing the career of the artist.

‘Roxy’ draws its title and inspiration from American theatrical impresario and entrepreneur Samuel Lionel Rothafel, known as ‘Roxy’ (1882-1936), and his legendary Roxy Theatre. Roxy has become synonymous with theatre, cinema, and numerous international namesake venues, which enabled its infiltration into a broader culture sphere. In his Roxy, Gabriel Lester was inspired by the innovative spirits and eclecticism embodied in Roxy stories that he found while researching 1920s silent films. Lester’s defining works, produced between the late 1990s and present, focus on reinventing the fundamental grammar and rhetoric that constitute the cinema and narrative forms.
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Cheng Ran: Perspectives 180: Unfinished Country – New Video From China

November 2nd, 2012 through February 17th, 2013
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston(CAMH)
5216 Montrose Blvd, Houston, USA

Since the introduction of market-based economic reforms in 1978, China has become the world’s fastest growing economy. Parallel to this economic growth has been the unprecedented production of art. While the majority of contemporary art practices have centered upon the traditional genres of painting and sculpture, the expansion of work in video and new media has been rapidly evolving. Perspectives 180-Unfinished Country: New Video from China presents a cross-section of work by a new generation of artists from China working in video and video installation. Details »

FreePort [No. 005]: Michael Lin
March 22, 2012 through May 27, 2013
Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts
Located in the: Asian Export Art: China, Mellon Staircase and Galleries
 
Michael Lin delves into the Peabody Essex Museum’s renowned collection of Asian Export Art to animate the history of trade between China and the West. Part display and part performance, the show includes dramatic ornamental murals, photographs, prints, specially commissioned vases, and a large-scale installation of hundreds of replicas of ‘Mr. Nobody’, which is a key object in PEM’s Asian Export Collection and dates from 1690 and is one of the first depictions of a European in Chinese porcelain.

“Michael Lin’s artwork eloquently explores cultural translation, craftsmanship and commerce. Lin’s installation at PEM vividly connects east and west, past and present by animating global trade relationships established 300 years ago and playfully redefining what Asian Export Art looks like today.” Comments Trevor Smith, PEM’s Curator of Contemporary Art.
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October 2nd, 2012 through March 31st, 2013

Li Qing and Guo Hongwei are featured in the 9th Shanghai Biennale, running from October 2nd, 2012 through March 31st, 2013.

Curated by Qiu Zhijie, Boris Groys, Jens Hoffmann, and Johnson Chang, this Biennale, titled ‘Reactivation’, looks into artists’ practices that motivate the public, revisit/rewrite history, convert and transform energy and organize dialogues and communications respectively. In the section of ‘Revisit’, Li Qing presents a selection of large paintings from his recent series ‘Book of Creation–Reincarnation’, which is a time capsule that investigates the overlooked history of contemporary society and civilization, through a series of portraits of sacred and historical objects against transforming landscapes.

In the City Pavilion of Palermo, Guo Hongwei, who is inspired by his visit to this ancient city, exhibits a special diptych that comprises one photorealistic painting on wall and one extensive layer of acrylic paint on the floor. With Guo’s idiosyncratic sculptural brushwork, ‘A Page of Ocean’ (2011) emancipates the images of infinite wavy ocean from the frames and re-imagines the time and space.
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Cheng Ran: The 1st CAFAM FUTURE

August 8th through September 6th, 2012
CAFA Art Museum
No.8 Hua Jia Di Nan St., Chao Yang District, Beijing, China

The “CAFAM • Future” Exhibition, initiated by the China Central Academy of Fine Arts and organized by CAFA Art Museum, was officially launched in February 2012. The Exhibition aims to encourage young people’s exploration into artistic language and new ideas, finding and supporting talented young artists in China, establishing a database of young Chinese artists, as well as improving the social impact and awareness of contemporary art both in Chinese and international art fields, so as to create a core platform for promoting the art of young Chinese people.
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Gabriel Lester participates in dOCUMENTA (13). The exhibition runs from June 9th through September 16th 2012, in Kassel, Germany.

For dOCUMENTA (13), Gabriel Lester produced two site-specific projects, continuing his experiments in time and space and probing possibilities of cross edits and cinematic repertoire. Located in Karlsaue Park, “Transition 2012” (2012) is an architectural sculpture in shape of a curved tunnel about 5/8 of a circle and 5/8 in diameter. The work borrows its title from a cinema term that indicates a technique of film editing by which scenes or shots are combined. “Transition 2012” is a punctuation mark and functions as a narrative instrument, as the artist comments. It materializes the fade-in and fade-out, and represents a cinematographic passage from one scene to another. Leading the viewer through a transient moment of black-out, the tunnel reveals how the angle of perception is reversed, and becomes a metaphor for day and night, life and death, or despair and hope.

Also on view is “Kaufhaus Incidentals—Music for Department Stores” (2012) a sound project at the SinnLeffers, the department store in the immediate vicinity of the Kunsthalle Fridericianum. A research on silent film score database conducted (between 2011 and 2012) led the artist to discover about twenty compositions listed at the Amsterdam Film Museum under the category of “thoughts”, which were presumably used to underscore scenes in silent films of actors’ thinking, pondering, plotting, conniving, or daydreaming. This inspired a recording of music for thoughts—16 tracks selected by Gabriel Lester and John Snijders—which are installed in and outside the SinnLeffers. During the one hundred days of dOCUEMNTA (13), the increase of sales at the department store is anticipated, and the sound intervention lends an atmospheric layer of contemplation to a site where people are stimulated to think whilst engaged in business and consumption.

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August 8th through September 6th, 2012
CAFA Art Museum, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing

Gallery artists Chen Wei, Cheng Ran, Cui Jie, Li Qing and Liu Chuang participate in the first “CAFA·Future” exhibition titled “Sub-phenomena”.

Curated by Xu Bing and Alexandra Munroe, the show survey the art expressions of a younger generation in China who work in a fast transforming social context and are inspired by new media and unprecedented lifestyle. More information on this exhibition, please visit CAFA Art Museum’s website.