Galerie Urs Meile is pleased to announce our participation in 2023 MOORDN Contemporary Art Fair. Since 1995, the gallery has been dedicated to Chinese contemporary art. We currently have exhibition spaces in Beijing, Zurich, Lucerne, and Ardez. We will be presenting the representative works of emerging and established Chinese artists including Cao Yu, Hu Qingyan, Ju Ting, Li Gang, Miao Miao, Xie Qi and Zhang Xuerui, as well as pioneering Swiss artist Rebekka Steiger.
Cao Yu’s (b. 1988, Liaoning) work challenges propriety and other social conventions, questions the value and identity of current Chinese society using an approach that is not only inherent but also performative, also shedding new light on relevant and timely women’s issues. We will present her painting Drawing a Pancake No. 2 (2023) and sculpture 90℃ V (2019, marble, silk stocking). A marble from classical times is a sort of material with coldness and eternity, while a soft feminine silk stocking is bound with it tightly together. Two completely unrelated materials are closely intertwined to a well-matched battle.
Hu Qingyan’s (b. 1982, Shandong) understanding of sculpture, whilst using a conceptual approach, is ever developing. His ideas on representation and space are based on an expanded definition of the medium of sculpture and he challenges his viewers with his autonomous concepts. Hu Qingyan’s works and forms, sometimes frank, sometimes humorous, have come together into a distinctly individual artistic language that encounters the unexpected, while inspiring the viewer to reflect on everyday convention. Hu Qingyan chooses his usual marble—a mostly neutral and cold material—as a medium to transform and reproduce the original proportions of surrounding objects, leading our attention to the sculpture’s interior and essence, as well as the multidimensional exploration of society, philosophy, and politics.
We will also present the Amber and Coral series of Ju Ting (b. 1983, Shandong). Coral is artist’s reflection on time, life, death and rebirth. She reshapes strips of paint that had been cut off in the creation of the Pearl series, and places them atop a concrete cinder block, an object that is extremely modern in nature, and then pours several more layers of paint over these materials to fuse them into a single, growing whole. Through a powerful visual impact and explosive colors, these objects convey a unique vitality, making these long dormant objects radiate with new life, just like the beautiful corals that tenaciously cling to the limestone remains of their ancestors. In the Amber series, the serendipitous, random, and lively state of these amorphous round shapes evoke the feel of life in amber. These unique visions originate in the artist’s long-term “experimentation,” and the emotional, visual, and lived experiences that accumulate from this “experimentation”.
Li Gang (b. 1986, Dali, Yunnan) has always been focusing on the most ordinary and basic things, which are rough and simple. In the Tactile Paintings series, Li Gang begins by weaving a canvas with thick rope and piles paint over this unusually coarse surface to arrange the picture. The structure of the canvas comes together with the paint to highlight the unique tactile aspect of oil painting. The result resembles a detail from a classical painting magnified 100 times. For the Skin Colour series, Li Gang rubbed colour pigments of paper money directly from the bank notes in a rectangular shape onto marble plates. Beneath the translucent shades of pigment he chisels the title Skin Colour, as a reference to the trust required among the people to make the modern banking system, based on mutual credit by using the relatively worthless paper money as an equivalent, work worldwide.
The pioneering Swiss artist Rebekka Steiger (b. 1993, Zurich, Switzerland) understands painting as a “state of mind”. In her self-confident fusion of form and color, she develops a fascinating, intense visual language that deals with the familiar and unfamiliar and sets no limit to the viewer’s imagination. Her works have been presented as solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Galerie Urs Meile in Lucerne and Beijing, Kunst (Zeug) Haus in Switzerland, and as part of many group exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad. Her first institutional solo exhibition in China would be launched at Tank Shanghai in the upcoming Spring.
