Fu Wenjun at 1st Asia Biennial / 5th Guangzhou Triennial

GUANGZHOU, China - Dec. 15, 2015 - PRLog -- 1st Asia Biennial / 5th Guangzhou Triennial 11 December 2015–10 April 2016 Guangdong Museum of Art, Yanyu Road 38, Er-sha Island, Guangzhou, China

This year, for the first time ever, the Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangzhou) organizes a unique combination of the renowned Guangzhou Triennial and the new Asia Biennial. It beholds great works that present Asian history, Asian culture, Asian trade and the problems facing contemporary Asia.

This Asia Biennial will be one of the largest biennials in Asia, with an international curatorial team and artists from all over the world. This ambitious project aims to extend the topics of Asian consciousness and Asian experiences established in the Asian Art Curators’ Forum of 2013, held by GDMOA and designed to explore Asian art development in a global context.

The first Asia Biennial/fifth Guangzhou Triennial not only intends to give an impetus to a topical way of thinking about time that comes from the arts, which may lead to a response to the crisis currently unfolding in the face of globalization and capitalism. The historical and current context of Guangzhou will also be involved as a starting point for searching alternative models and multiple perspectives able to better articulate the notion of “Asia Time.” Subsequently, new modes of thinking about Asia could emerge going beyond geographically and historically defined concepts.

At the 1st Asia Biennial/5th Guangzhou Triennial Chinese artist Fu Wenjun presents his conceptual photography installation work: Post-industrial Era. The project begins with his thinking on the famous sketch Uomo vitruviano of Leonardo Da Vinci, a “perfectly proportioned” male body on the base of the golden ratio. Mounting his conceptual photography works on the worn-out locomotive round wheels, imitating the square and round background of Uomo Vitruviano, he queries if the industrialization process also has its own golden ratio. The work is his reflections on the industrial civilization. Presenting the art project becomes a process, a transformation from industrialization to digitalization; a very small chip can contain a great quantity of information, which can be true or false, good or bad, just like the industrialization process: ugliness along with greatness. The installation reflects Asia’s unique civilization and industrialization process, and the temporal and spatial links between Asia and the starting point of Western industrial civilization.

Curatorial team Chairman Luo Yiping: Director of Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou Chief Curators Henk Slager: Dean of MaHKU and Research Professor, University of the Arts, Utrecht, The Netherlands Zhang Qing: Head of the Curatorial and Research Department of the National Art Museum of China, Beijing Curators Ute Meta Bauer: Founding Director of CCA, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Curator of Performance Program Kim Hong-Hee: Director of Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul Sarah Wilson: Professor of Courtauld Institute, London; Curator of Academic Program Sun Ge: Researcher, Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing; Curator of Academic Program