期待相见 | “萨勒曼·图：夜虹”将于2022年12月17日向公众开放！
策展人：王宗孚
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展览将呈现艺术家新近创作的27幅绘画和23件纸上作品，深入探究其创作中的重要主题——从博物馆学讽喻和对帝国主义殖民历史的指涉，到将自然作为酷儿群体自洽的空间与之展开对话。
Night Walkers
2022
Oil on panel
50.8 x 40.6 cm
通过模糊自传与虚构的界限，萨勒曼·图在作品中以细腻的视角描绘酷儿和移民群体的生活体验，展开对文化遗产归属问题的思考以及对自爱和群体归属感的寻求。艺术家以极富个人特色的具象风格——温柔的，浪漫的，崇敬的，甚至骇人的——征引和致敬西方艺术史经典的同时，亦巧妙地对其进行揶揄和批判。他的画作探讨艺术家游移于东方穆斯林和酷儿棕色人种之间的自我身份认同，并试图调和多重身份及其承载的社会期望之间的矛盾。
2022
布面油画
121.9 x 76.2 cm
The Yellow Group
2022
Oil on canvas
121.9 x 76.2 cm
萨勒曼·图的创作反映了艺术家对服饰的关注和兴趣。当下以及不同历史时期的服饰风格相互杂糅以有意混淆阶层、文化和个体的差异，为时而严肃的画面主体增添幽默荒谬的意蕴。《黄色的人群》（2022）描绘了一个混杂的人群：衣衫褴褛的贫民、拥有提线木偶般长鼻子的秃顶年长男子、头戴拿破仑帽的蓝眸冒险家，以及阴影下戴头巾的穆斯林女子，他们谦卑地等候在移民柜台前。对准这些旅人的相机镜头在此作为监控的工具，而在《艺术家》（2022）中相机则被用于拍摄艺术家肖像以实现艺术家的自我赋权。这些作品反映了外表如何受到他人的审视，进而揭示身份认同如何由外在和内在共同界定。
2022
亚麻布面油画
50.8 x 40.6 cm
The Artist
2022
Oil on linen
对讽喻的使用是萨勒曼·图创作中的另一个重要手法，突出表现在艺术家虚构出的博物馆场景之中。在《历史的房间》（2022）中，画中人物——一个时常出现在他画作中的南亚移民，身处博物馆一般的空间，他的面前堆放着各式令人困惑的物件：古罗马半身像、残缺的人像木雕和一本打开的书。艺术家以批判性的视角揭露了一直以来博物馆如何默许并采用种族、性别、地域等标准来划分馆藏体系。作品向观者提出了这样的疑问：画中人物与这些物件的相遇仅是巧合吗？他是否在进行控诉并要求归还这些文化遗产？抑或，他在哀悼着它们的流落海外？
2022
布面油画
162.6 x 248.9 cm
The History Room
2022
Oil on canvas
162.6 x 248.9 cm
本次展览的中央展厅以“夜”为线索串联起空间内的作品。夜晚的场景成为了酷儿群体获得庇护且充满了渴望、振奋和愉悦之情的潜在空间。《夜晚的公园》（2022）中低垂、扭曲的树木呼应了艺术家画笔下阴柔的人物形体和姿态，并以其代表性的绿色调被呈现于画布上——微妙的色调变化使绿色展现出平和、葱茏而又危险、毒烈的丰富意涵。艺术家巧妙地将欧洲古典绘画技巧融入对现代生活的描绘之中，搭建起不同文化和时代之间的桥梁以反思当下的日常瞬间，并铺展开一个关于未来的另类叙事。他的艺术促使我们思考爱、性别以及群体和个人身份认同的复杂性，意图构建一个包容的场域，从而引发本地观众对这些议题的思考和讨论。
2022
布面油画
40.6 x 30.5 cm
Ali
2022
Oil on canvas
40.6 x 30.5 cm
所有作品图片由艺术家和卢赫灵·奥古斯汀画廊（纽约）惠允
© Salman Toor
摄影：Farzad Owrang
All images of the works courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
© Salman Toor
Photo: Farzad Owrang.
关于艺术家
Salman Toor: New Paintings and Drawings
17 December 2022 – 9 March 2023
M WOODS 798, Beijing, China
Curated by Victor Wang, Artistic Director and Chief Curator, M WOODS
Assistant Curator, Qi Yuanlin, M WOODS.
Salman Toor: New Paintings and Drawings is the first solo museum exhibition in Asia of Pakistan-born, New York-based artist Salman Toor. The presentation will showcase a selection of 27 new paintings and 23 new works on paper, exploring important themes that converge in Toor’s work, from museological allegories and imperialist histories, to his conversation with nature as a space for queer freedom. Toor created an ambitious new body of work for the Beijing exhibition, and the presentation was developed over the last two years through close conversations between the artist and Victor Wang, Artistic Director of M WOODS.
Blurring the line between memoir and fiction, Toor’s work presents a nuanced view of the queer and the immigrant experience, questions of cultural ownership, and the search for self-love and community. Rendered in Toor’s signature figurative style, which both pays homage to and wryly subverts a variety of art historical references, the works are camp, macabre, romantic, and reverential. Probing his own identity – oscillating between Eastern Muslim man and queer brown boy – Toor’s work speaks to the challenge of reconciling multiple selves and the expectations carried by each.
A love of costume features prominently in Toor’s work. Contemporary and historical styles comingle to deliberately confuse class, culture, and individuality, at times adding a layer of humorous absurdity to otherwise somber subjects. The Yellow Group (2022) depicts a motley crowd – a patched-up pauper, a bald old man with a marionette-like nose, a blue-eyed adventurer in a Napoleonic hat, and a darkened Muslim woman with a head covering – waiting humbly at the threshold of an immigration counter. The cameras which point at these travelers function as tools of control and surveillance, whereas in works like The Artist (2022) they are employed for a portraits of self-empowerment. Toor’s emphasis on the way appearance is scrutinized brings into relief the way in which identity is both externally determined and internally defined.
Another important device that Toor employs in his work is the use of allegory, exemplified in the recurring scenes of imaginary museum spaces such as The History Room (2022). In this painting, a man confronts a mysterious assortment of museological artefacts including Roman portrait busts, fragments of wooden figures, and an open book. These objects lend a critical view to the manner in which museums have historically enabled and supported systems of classification and colonial pillage. The painting also raises questions: Did the protagonist just chance on these objects, or is he here to reclaim them, or mourn them?
The central hall of the exhibition at M WOODS is dedicated to “queering” the nocturnal as a space of desire, shelter, thrill, and the potential of pleasure. The drooping and contorting trees in Night Park (2022) echo the shapes and gestures of Toor’s femme figures, and are rendered in his signature array of poisonous, peaceful, and verdant greens. Effortlessly weaving together modernist impulses with European Old Master techniques in painting, Toor’s work bridges cultures and eras in order to reflect on our current moment and propose an alternative narrative for the future. His art allows us to contemplate the complexities of love, gender, and communal and personal identity. Specific works and themes have been selected for display in this exhibition in order to stimulate local discussions and provide a space for a critical openness to develop and take effect.
Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, a concurrent solo exhibition organized by and originating at the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, is touring in the United States with upcoming presentations at Tampa Museum of Art in Florida, Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawai’i, and Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Toor’s widely acclaimed first solo museum exhibition, Salman Toor: How Will I Know, was on view in 2020-21 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Toor’s work is in the permanent collections of the Tate, London, United Kingdon; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; M Woods, Beijing, China; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; and Wake Forest University Art Collection, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, among others.