As a special exhibition of Yuz Museum 10th anniversary, “Out of Silence” will unfold in two chapters, the first of which will open to the public from August 10 to October 7, 2024, featuring a selection of more than 20 groups of works by contemporary Chinese and international artists from the collection of Yuz Foundation. Taking sound that is represented or implied as a clue, the exhibition will present the hidden power of these artworks through listening to the subtle or forgotten voices within them, which are the very “traces” and “signs” that Yuz Foundation and Yuz Museum (YUZ) are committed to preserving.
The Artists in Chapter One: CHEN Ke, CHEN Weimin, CHEN Zhen, Secundino HERNÁNDEZ, Shara HUGHES,Alicja KWADE, LI Xiaojing, Eddie MARTINEZ, OUYANG Chun, Elizabeth PEYTON, Katja SEIB, David SCHNELL, SONG Yige, XU Zhen / MadeIn Company,WANG Fenghua, WEI Jia, YAN Heng, Aaron YOUNG, YANG Zhenzhong, ZHENG Wei, ZHONG Jinpei
Mr. Budi Tek, the founder of YUZ, first started out in the world of collecting contemporary art from 2004-2005. With his entrepreneurial spirit of adventure, assiduous research into art, and persistent enthusiasm, he gradually expanded the collection, and developed to identify two main threads of collecting in 2008: one is “traces”, the threads, the representative works of established artists who have achieved significant positions in Chinese contemporary art history; the other is “signs”, the potential, the new works that he collected with support and expectation for young artists. These two parallel lines, focusing on the bidirectional vision of “history” and “future”, have become the source and core of YUZ’s subsequent collection and exhibition programs.
This exhibition will follow the trajectory that began in the early years of YUZ collection, to rethink the position of the collection in the process of “history” and “future” and the relative relationship between them. The selection of works is not confined to the framework of time or geography, so as to highlight YUZ’s unique color of collecting art through rational construction and emotional understanding. Most of the works in the exhibition reveal the creative process of the artists who integrate their individual thread of life with diverse historical, cultural and social backgrounds. Seemingly calm and silent, the works are nevertheless rich in ideological dimensions and expansive in spiritual world, nurturing a surge of booming power. They carry private emotions and feelings, and reflect the syndromes of society and the times, which not only condense the past, but also still apply to the present, and even foretell a certain visible future. The hidden power within the works leads us to “the deafening silence” and the experience of vigorous vitality, and at the same time alerts us to the fact that the history is not yet gone, while the future is already here.
The exhibition will also reflect on the platforms built by YUZ in its past collections and exhibitions, including 2008-2012 Yuz Museum in Jakarta, 2014-2022 Yuz Museum at West Bund, Shanghai, Yuz Project Space of Art since 2015, Yuz Museum at Panlong Tiandi, Shanghai since 2023, and many more projects, which have facilitated and realized many artists’ ambitious conceptions, with some of these site-specific practices and large-scale commissions being re-enacted. A selection of the masterpieces with breakthrough and transformative significance will also be on display for the first time to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Yuz Museum.
The change of seasons and the flow of time seem to be an irreversible process. On the stage of this eternal cycle of life and history, perhaps we could “progressus ad originem” and “regressus ad futurum”, trying to find our own roles and positions out of silence, and escape from the hustle and bustle.
The exhibition “Out of Silence” is organized by Yuz Museum and curated by Wen Shi, Curator at Yuz Museum, with its first chapter from August 10 to October 7, 2024, and the second chapter from October 19, 2024 to March 2, 2025.
