Spring Sprang Sprung
Beijing
2nd Mar - 7th Apr. 2024
Spring Sprang Sprung
Curator: Meng Xianhui
Artists: Chen Li, Yifan Jiang, Li Xiaohe, Qin Jin, Li Xinyao(Quan Zi), Li Li Ren, Xiang Jing, Yu Ruohan, Pocono Zhao Yu, Zhang Xuerui, Zhu Xun
Duration：2nd Mar - 7th Apr. 2024
Opening: 4pm, 2nd Mar. (Sat), 2024
Spring might have arrived, and people are lethargic. The Chinese characterkun (困) is a homonym, meaning lethargy, dilemma, and confusion.
The character, picturing the enclosure of wood, presents an engulfment, only that walls wouldn’t easily entrap living trees. In a time when technology permeates every aspect of society, invisible walls erected with information communication subtly transform human existence in the physical world. Being "trapped" becomes a type of normalcy, initially referring to a state of stagnation, and may also imply an extreme, one that has passed a critical threshold. The English title of this exhibition, "Spring Sprang Sprung,” playing with the temporalities of this verb, further attempts to underscore the push and pull between the central ideas of “confinement” and “struggle” of this exhibition.
In early March, Hundand Space (Beijing) invited eleven artists, including Chen Li, Yifan Jiang, Li Xiaohe, Qin Jin, Li Xinyao (Quan Zi), Li Li Ren, Xiang Jing, Yu Ruohan, Pocono Zhao Yu, Zhang Xuerui and Zhu Xun, to showcase their imaginative and unhinged art practices in diverse art media under the title of "Spring Sprang Sprung" from March 2 to April 7, that response to the status quo and current conditions.
With the ebbs and flows of research on the body, the long-shaped history has sunken its fate in many fields of study, which reflect the most perceptual epistemological experiences in which the individual has always lived uniquely in specific socio-cultural contexts. In her book Subject, Intertextuality and Psychoanalysis, Julia Kristeva suggests that women have a conflating view of time that constantly recycles and renews. In searching for the object (the plural "other"), thoughts and life coexist. Thus, in the creations of many artists, the lyrical language of the "semiotic" becomes an existence to be shared in the process of repetition，re-examining classic texts is a way of speaking shared by many works in this exhibition.
Although this exhibition brought female artists of different generations and cultural contexts under one roof, it does not wish to make gender an overly prominent topic. After all, history, culture, society, and various cognitive and social relationships emanate obvious and discrete dilemmas, casting psychological burdens and bondage that almost indiscriminately impact everyone. Fortunately, revelations of such conditions and circumstances are often exposed or even broken free from by the artists and transformed into their works of art.
Transcending borders is a theme that this exhibition tries to emphasise even more.If the frame of a picture was once the boundary of the image, and the gallery set the scope to the works of art, then the digital screen, with the intervention of technology, has built in a new frame to command that flattens the people’s aesthetic and perceptual experience of art. Indeed, every art exhibition cannot be fully recorded by a mobile phone; the paintings under a single spotlight, the sculptures viewed from multiple perspectives, and the moving images captured in a single frame neither would they fully represent the practice of any given artist. The dissemination of such works on social media that fulfill people's insatiable desire for expressions after viewing would become another way to break free from temporal shifts of "Spring Sprang Sprung."
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