The Place of Indivisible Existence
CHOWspace, No.2, Lane 41, Yuqing Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai07/26/2024 - 08/21/2024
“If existence in all its moments is all of itself, Zoe is the place of indivisible existence.” — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Through hidden site specificity, “The Place of Indivisible Existence” presents paintings by eight artists who, utilizing direct visual languages, pay attention to daily life through personalized micro-narratives, providing empirical slices and cognitive maps representing the current transient and flattened zeitgeist. Touching on themes of material landscape, cultural identity, symbolic language, myth, and subconsciousness, the exhibition explores the complexity of their dislocated yet inseparable coexistence with existing history, memory, and entities.
“The Place of Indivisible Existence” takes its title from Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili), which imagines Marco Polo’s descriptions of fifty-five fictitious cities to Kublai Khan featuring general commentary on culture, language, symbols, time, and memory. Borrowing the signifying system, the exhibition unravels the former French Concession area of Shanghai, where CHOWspace dwells, as an “invisible” context. Within it, the coexistence of pseudo-nostalgic memory interpretation and neo-consumerist business models exemplifies a discontinuous spatial narrative that not only indicates wider hybridized states of heterogeneous time, cultural hybridization, and symbolic polysemy but also exists as a social space produced through their topological extension.
Amongst the intensifying postmodernist loss of grand central narratives, the exhibition considers participating artists’ alienated conversion of daily life scenes as a micro resistance, intending to disrupt the traditional order of reductionist narratives. The silent yet complex iconography of paintings reflects conflicts between the certainty of material entities and the untranslatability of cultural symbols and linguistic rhetoric. The exhibition points to the omission, slippage, and overlap of discursive configurations, focusing on where geographic, cultural, and imagined space shifts, mingles, and reconstructs, aiming to explore the spatial-temporal potentials of obtuse meanings.
Producer: Yuhui Zhou
Artistic Consultant: Junyao Chen
Curator: Sylvia Tan
Curatorial Assistants: Zhaohan Lu, Xinping Wang
Artists: Taiping Cao, Chang Liang, Chen Yinan, Lim Kaye, Wu Yusang, Mengfan Xia, Xie Xuanxuan, Ann Yan
