新展预告 | 万里不挑一 Vol.2 洪浩
万里不挑一
Unparalleled collection Vol.2
Hong Hao
* Please scroll down for the English version
洪浩工作室一隅
photo courtesy of Hong Hao
物境之十 The Realm of Matters No.10
洪浩 Hong Hao
材质：宋瓷片、不锈钢板
Medium: porcelain pieces from kilns of the Song Dynasty on stainless steel plate
尺寸 Size：136 x 136cm
2021
洪浩工作室一隅
photo courtesy of Hong Hao
物境之十四 The Realm of Matters No.14
洪浩 Hong Hao
材质：古瓷片、烤釉、布面丙烯
Medium: acrylic and ancient porcelain pieces with glaze writing on canvas
尺寸 Size：89 x 137 cm
2021
艺术家本人对“收集”和“收藏”的界限极为看重，并很警惕自己对一件物品产生作为创作材料以外的冗余想法。所以他在创作过程中时刻观察、感悟及反思每一件物的历史信息与被赋予的意义之后，又将其“人为标签”去除，不断颠倒物品和信息的形式以及意义，机智地将这些物什安排于“有用”和“无用”之间，产生一种兼具形式感和荒诞性的图景。此次展览的入口处还有一处堆叠着快递纸盒，它们是尚未出现在洪浩作品中，但却与他日常生活息息相关的物品。为了添置合适的瓷片以供创作，近年来他时常通过网络消费平台，搜索并购买着感兴趣的材料，快递纸盒也日益累积。它们身上承有艺术家关于日常消费主义的记录与探讨，同时伴随着消费行为的产生与循环，可能这也是一种对物的迷惘，也是物“就势”的自身经历。
洪浩工作室一隅
photo courtesy of Hong Hao
特别鸣谢：佩斯画廊
海报设计：周嘉慧
「万⾥不挑⼀」系列企划
Unparalleled collection
©万一空间 Copyright©W.ONESPACE
Unparalleled collection series Vol.2
Hong Hao
W.ONESPACE is delighted to present the second edition of the Unparalleled Collection Series, and we are honored to invite artist Hong Hao as the featured host this time.
In this exhibition, we will present different series of works by the artist Hong Hao in recent years, and by visually presenting a "real-life" scenario in his studio, we will explore the artist's thinking and exploration of humanities, materials, collection, and consumption behind his works. If we really need to mention the word "collection", then Hong Hao is more like collecting his own life. From the initial "Selected Scriptures" to the most representative "My Things", and gradually evolving into the series "Everchanging Appearance", "Reciprocating", and “The Realm of Matters”, Hong Hao has developed a peculiar art form of self-consciousness, in which he collects and arranges the information of our time and daily objects from his life, and always maintains this observation and reflection on the established objective existence. However, from the artist's perspective, collecting is obvious not his purpose, these acts are more like a laundry list of his own life, the artist only tries to present a sense of evidence, an objective restoration.
In "The Realm of Matters" series, the artist's research subject shifts to ancient materials, so there are stacks of porcelain pieces, most from Song Dynasty in the studio. The precise classification and meticulous placement is astonishing, however Hong Hao himself is a little deprecating about his "obsessive-compulsive" ability to organize, laughing that "It's just to make my job easier.” From his point of view, the ancient fragments as materials nowadays represent only the consumer culture of people in different contexts. Rather than the objects themselves, he focuses more on the creative concept reflected in the works, which contains his creative process, personal perceptions and reflections on the intention of consumer behavior.
As an indigenous material, the "porcelain pieces" symbolize and reveal the "past" time and the ancestors’ consumer culture in a fragmented form. The artist transcends time and space by collaging porcelain pieces from different eras together, giving them a "secondary value" in a contemporary context, and linking different forms of consumerist culture in ancient and contemporary times. In terms of material selection, porcelain pieces are an incomplete form of objects that can instead sectionally present the aesthetic paradigm of daily use and real lifestyles from common people to royalty in ancient times. Their popular functions and evolving iconic shapes also reflected the consumer culture in the historical context and served as a "symbolic" specimens. Hong Hao precisely classifies these porcelain pieces based on physical characteristics such as color, size, shape, as well as kiln, age, and region as determined by modern archaeological research. Relying on his physical cognition, aesthetic intuition, and humanistic judgment, Hong Hao sets these pieces on the canvas with a “grow out of the momentum" state of mind, either in a regular arrangement or scattered in dots. This comprehensive perspective abandons the sense of utility and commerciality of the materials themselves, and instead relies on the objects as a material medium, an information relic and a sense of aesthetic consideration, thus triggering the audiences’ thinking and judgment of the objects’ value. In his reciprocating refinement, the social meaning of "object" gradually dissolves under the intervention of human-made circular acts, and finally returns to what it is, an essential physical form.
The artist himself takes the boundary between "gathering" and "collecting" very seriously, and is wary of having redundant ideas regarding an object other than seeing it as a material in his works. Therefore, in the process of creation, he always observes, perceives and reflects on the historical information and the meaning given to each object, and then removes its "artificial label”. By doing this, he constantly reverses the form and meaning of objects and information, and wisely arranges these objects between "useful" and “useless”, thus creating a picture of both formality and absurdity. A stack of delivery boxes will be set at the entrance of the exhibition, which are objects that have not yet appeared in Hong Hao's works but are closely related to his daily life. In order to acquire suitable porcelain pieces for his works, he has often searched and purchased materials of interest through online platforms in recent years, as a result, the delivery boxes have been accumulating. They bear the artist's record and discussion about everyday consumerism, and are accompanied by the production and circulation of consumer behavior, which may be a kind of confusion about objects and their own experience of “as it is".
In the never-ending life of consumerism, individual still has faith and spirit. Compared to external exploration, this kind of inner seeking and enrichment of one's own soul can give the individual more stable values, and this state of self-observation and self-sufficiency will also enable one to maintain a subjective judgment. For the exploration of consumerism, as Hong Hao says, "A calm awareness in a changeless world may make one feel more at ease." Could we think carefully and find this kind of ease from the commodity economy and hedonistic inertia?
This exhibition will continue to May 6th, 2023.
洪浩
Hong Hao
洪浩生于1965年，1989年毕业于中央美术学院版画系，目前工作和生活于北京。艺术家擅长使用摄影、版画、拼贴、录像装置和绘画来探究我们与消费文化之间的复杂关系，他以敏锐的艺术直觉和恰到好处的距离冷静地观察着当代社会，作为中国当代艺术发展的重要人物，洪浩的艺术探索与时代价值体系的变迁紧密相连。洪浩的作品被众多公共机构收藏，包括美国纽约现代美术馆、大都会美术馆、加拿大国家美术馆、维多利亚和阿尔伯特博物馆、英国大英博物馆、澳大利亚白兔美术馆和香港M+博物馆等。
Hong Hao was born in 1965 and graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1989. He currently works and lives in Beijing. Specializing in the use of photography, printmaking, collage, video installation and painting to explore our complex relationship with consumer culture, the artist calmly observes contemporary society with keen artistic intuition from the appropriate distance. As one of the most important pioneers in Chinese contemporary art history, Hong Hao's artistic exploration is closely tied to the changing value system of the times. His art works can be found in numerous public collections including those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The National Gallery of Canada, White Rabbit Gallery, The British Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Hong Kong's global museum of visual culture(M+), etc,.
“万里不挑一”为万一空间推出的系列特别企划，每期将邀请不同角色的艺术从业人士，为观众带来自己的艺术作品以及横跨多学科的收藏。该项目旨在通过万一空间这一弥合古今和多元艺术形态的特殊平台，使主展人在展厅内还原一个艺术与生活的平衡点，以此让观者真情实感地理解收藏如何与生活融合。借由一个“真实发生”的场景，抛开对艺术种类的冗余界定，以一个能够亲身感知的角度，去体味艺术背后的故事与丰富的意识世界。