The Group Exhibition : A Spring of Magical Thinking
Beijing
February 26th-March 25th.2022
The Group Exhibition : A Spring of Magical Thinking
[THE GTOUP EXHIBITION : A SPRING OF MAGICAL THINKING]
Hunsand Space is pleased to present a group exhibition "A Spring of Magical Thinking”. Inspired by Joan Didion’s adventurous spirit in the face of devastating life events, her diachronic approach to storytelling, and her ability to collapse subjective interpretations onto objective realities to discover meaning, the exhibition “A Spring of Magical Thinking”aims to relay Didion’s style. The exhibition presents ways of addressing the experiences of loss and grief in their practice. By no means does the exhibition suggest that the eleven invited artists share, nor their artworks drew from, experiences similar to that of the writer.
"The Year of Magical Thinking" is a memoir by American fiction writer and essayist Joan Didion, in which the author responded to the death of her husband and the severe illness of their only daughter. Didion’s account of such a devastating period of her life was anything but depressing. In her seemingly forward timeline, Didion interjected her memories of the past with deadpan statements of the facts of loss repetitively. Her subjective responses of the present rivet her narrative with compelling thoughts as she takes readers into the whirlwind of memories, meandering to-and-fro through the overlapping time and space between the present and the past. When the past has become a memory, the author's reflections not only hope for the continuation of the past but also search for an exit in the present. Didion's way of writing this memoir resonates with what Norman Mailer commented on her journalism as “enormously personalized journalism in which the character of the narrator was one of the elements in the way the reader would finally assess the experience.”
In the present condition, issues as overarching as rapid urban development, global warming, the sudden onset of a global pandemic, or as personal as social injustice, gender, and ethnic inequalities, personal loss, every one of us experiences loss and grief, so much so that they have become invisible or we may have conscious or subconsciously normalized them. How does one derive and reconstruct meanings given these circumstances become the driving force for many artists' practices? Moreover, as our perceptual system dulls from technological advancements, and as multiple realities stack up together, disconnected or dislocated - physically or virtually, and as political ideologies encroach upon our sense of self, how can we find an outlet in the normalcy of transformation and restore our sense of existence?
The term "magical thinking" is neutral and does not simply refer to wild imaginations but instead gives a sense of "hope" to the hopelessness of the unfulfilled. Anthropological concepts often define it as pre-logic and generally refer to the irrational attribution of certain phenomena in folk beliefs or primitive cults. For example, two unrelated events may be considered causally related simply because they follow each other in time. "Whimsy" can even be understood as a symptom of confused thinking, often confusing private emotions with general reality, a mental activity that at the same time is often an essential combination of perceptual discovery and rational thought that drives artistic creation.
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