Gu Dexin, Untitled, 1989, Melted and adjoined plastic, Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, © Gu Dexin.
‘The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China’ – LACMA The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents ‘The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China’ bringing together 34 works from the past four decades. June 2, 2019 – January 20, 2020.]]>
Source: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
”The Allure of Matter” features 21 of the most important and influential Chinese artists working today, including Ai Weiwei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Lin Tianmiao, Song Dong, Xu Bing, Yin Xiuzhen, Zhan Wang, Zhang Huan, and more.
Since the 1980s, Chinese contemporary artists have cultivated intimate relationships with their materials, establishing a framework of interpretation revolving around materiality. Their media range from the commonplace to the unconventional, the natural to the synthetic, the elemental to the composite: from plastic, water, and wood to hair, gunpowder, and Coca-Cola. Artists continue to explore and develop this creative mode, with some devoting decades of their practice to experiments with a single material. The Allure of Matter coins the term “material art” to denote this trend in contemporary Chinese artmaking.
The concept of Material Art is related not only to the general term “materiality” in contemporary art, but also refers more specifically to artworks with the goal of making “matter” the primary vehicle of philosophical, political, sociological, emotional, and aesthetic expression. Some of these works reject constructed forms altogether, but most reverse or problematize the conventional relationship between medium and representation. In either case the material (and related technology) becomes the message. The conditions of contemporary Chinese art offer reasons for the prevalence of Material Art and its continuous relevance, which has been developed to fulfill two simultaneous objectives of disavowing established art forms and inventing new artistic languages.
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