James Cohan Gallery
1/F, Bldg. 1, Lane 170 Yueyang Lu,
French Concession
between Jianguo Xi Lu and Yongjia Lu
岳阳路170弄1号楼1楼1号
近建国西路
5466-0825
www.jamescohan.com
izhou@jamescohan.com
Open Tue-Sat 10am-6pm, Sun 12pm-6pm, Mon by appointment
- City Weekend
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This gallery from New York aims to cast itself as a place for progressive ideas from around the world to take shape. It seeks to showcase the most dynamic international artists, from those already well-known in China, such as American artist Bill Viola and Korean video pioneer Nam June Paik, to those who are just being introduced here, such as Nigerian-born artist, Yinka Shonibare.
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Description -
James Cohan Gallery Shanghai is located in the heart of the French Concession and occupies the ground floor of a 1930s garden villa set inside a lane on Yue Yang Road, between Jian Guo Xi Road and Yong Jia Road.
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The Tell‐tale Heart 泄密的心: Cheng Ran程然, Martha Colburn, Feng Mengbo冯梦波, Li Ming李明, Hiraki Sawa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Zhang Ding张鼎
Curated by 许宇Leo Xu
February 27 through April 11, 2010
Group video show The Tell‐tale Heart, a tribute to the classic short story by American 19th century novelist and poet Edgar Allan Poe. The exhibition showcases recent video works by artists from China, America, Japan, and Thailand that explore the diversity and possibilities of narrative forms.
Morakot (Emerald)(2007), a video installation by the award‐winning Thai filmmaker‐video artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, intertwines memory with intimate experience. Morakot is a derelict hotel in the heart of Bangkok that opened in the 1980s when Thailand experienced accelerated economic growth and Cambodians poured into Thai refugee camps after the devastating conflict between Vietnamese and Cambodian forces. The setting is a dilapidated hotel room filled with floating feathers and haunted by ghostly figures in bed. Inspired by the Danish writer Karl Gjellerup's 1906 Buddhist novel, The Pilgrim Kamanita, the protagonists are reincarnated as two celestial stars who re‐tell their stories to each other until they no longer exist. Morakot revisits fictitious memories bound to the history of the hotel through three voiceovers, each whispering their sorrows and eternal wait for love.
Mysterious stories continue to unfold in the dreamscapes mapped by Japanese‐born, British‐trained artist Hiraki Sawa. Known for artificial landscapes and displaced worlds, shifting between domestic and imaginary spaces, Sawa has ventured outside the confines of his home that have provided settings for his well‐known earlier pieces like Spotter and Hako. Out of the Blue (2008), a projected diptych, is shot in natural settings—where a Ferris wheel exists in a desert oasis, or a tiny house with electric light nestles in the root of a tree. In a shadow‐filled room an empty birdcage sways. On the adjoining screen, people incrementally accumulate and descend from a massive white sand dune. The viewer is jostled between two worlds. By meticulously combining images both fabricated and from real world elements, Out of the Blue engages the viewer's imagination to question a sense of place and discernible reality.
Rock Dove (2009), a short video by Hangzhou‐based emerging artist Cheng Ran, begins with a flock of doves roosting in the dark inside a factory building. This five‐minute work is a subtle and unsettling dance enacted by the flock. The video reaches its dramatic peak with the birds' eruptive and chaotic response to the sudden illumination of the factory's fluorescent lamps. Another emerging artist from Hangzhou, Li Ming, brings us the celebration of youth and intimacy in his video XX (2009), where two boys, seated on a rock, cling to each other while exchanging their T‐shirts. The slow and painstaking process becomes a seemingly innocent physical dialogue, addressing both the ambiguity of their relationship and sexuality.
Experimental narrative modes are notable in the ambitious nine‐channel video installation The Dream of Yabulai (2008) by Shanghai‐based Zhang Ding. This work has been re‐orchestrated as a site‐specific work and is situated under the gallery's staircase. The supporting structure of the work is an open wooden lattice framework suggesting unfinished architecture. Within the framework are the nine video screens. The central screen shows a monkey assigning identify‐specific props or costumes to eight actors who then assume their new roles on one of the individual screens. The subsequent eight different role‐plays depict various themes, unveiling a composite of new behavior in a "micro‐society" while attempting to visualize key ideas or events in human history, such as mapping territory, the creation of theory, science, energy, art, religion and war.
Two other tell‐tale hearts inhabit the world of animation. Beijing‐based Feng Mengbo is a Chinese video‐new media veteran. His recent video game installation Long March: Restart revisits his earlier piece, Long March: Game Over. The artist pushes his experiments further by integrating the elements of Chinese model operas with late 1990's pixel aesthetics. Appropriating 1980‐90s vintage video games (Super Mario, Contra, Street Fighters, etc), Long March: Game Over relates a Don Quijotesque odyssey in a punkish manner.
New York and Amsterdam‐based animation filmmaker Martha Colburn offers a kaleidoscopic view of modern life in her recent animation One & One is Life (2009), where Hollywood stereotypes as Wonder Woman, car crashes, and policemen are seen in a montage of conflict that drives a violent and uneasy world. Unfolding in a precise, deliberate pace—and accompanied by its melancholy soundtrack—One &One is Life tallies up its tale of grief, culminating with symbols of hearts fleeing away....
http://www.jamescohan.com/exhibitions/2010-02-27_the-tell-tale-heart/
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Santa’s Workshop Shanghai 圣诞工坊: Selected works, toys and artists’ editions 艺术家创作的作品、玩具、限量版产品
December 12th, 2009 – January 30th, 2010
Opening reception and Christmas party: December 18th, Friday, 6-8 p.m. Venue: James Cohan Gallery Shanghai
Capturing the imaginations of children, and in the spirit of Christmas, Santa’s workshop has officially announced its relocation from the North Pole to Shanghai. In an effort to help Santa Claus keep up with the global demand for new and usual gifts, a selection of special editions by artists, Ai Weiwei, Francis Alÿs, Olaf Breuning, Pawel Althamer, Mariko Mori, among others, published by the prestigious critical art journal Parkett Editions, as well as works by Shanghai‐based Yang Zhenzhong and Xiao Jun presented by Shopping Gallery were on view. A special Christmas boutique has been set up inside the gallery, showcasing works made by artists such as Laurie Anderson, Carsten Höller, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Luc Tuymans, Zhao Bandi that cross over various disciplines like fashion, design and music. Also included in this show will be legendary American artist Vito Acconci’s large kaleidoscopic puzzle Blown‐Up Baby‐Doll and a series of silkscreened laser discs by the ground‐breaking pioneer of video art Nam June Paik.
As a centerpiece to this exhibition was Shi Jinsong’s motorized, stainless steel Christmas tree. Shi’s tree, titled Design 2007•Merry Christmas, turns the traditional holiday symbol into an ominous and elaborately embellished potential weapon. In addition, the gallery has commissioned artists Chen Wei, Guo Hongwei, Li Shurui, Liang Yuanwei, and Qiu Xiaofei to create Santa’s Post Office with handmade Christmas cards—drawings, photographs, collages—which revisit the special moment when the celebration of Christmas, and the huge consumption of Christmas cards, by young Chinese was initially deemed as major components of massive western cultural imports in the late 1980s. Visitors will also be able to write and send cards directly to Santa’s workshop using an edition of special postcards which will be available during the exhibition. Other works on view included a Richard Hamilton‐inspired silkscreen print by Shanghai‐based artist Yu Youhan and photographs from the 1970s by the American photographer Bill Owens, whose images of American suburban life (and during the holiday season) have become cult classics. Two extraordinary contemporary tapestries by Fred Tomaselli and Beatriz Milhazes, debuted at this year’s ShContemporary fair, were also on view....
http://www.jamescohan.com/exhibitions/2009-12-12_santas-workshop-shanghai/
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YOUNG AMERICANS 美国青年:
TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK, ERICK SWENSON, ALISON ELIZABETH TAYLORSeptember 11 – November 15, 2009
James Cohan Gallery Shanghai
1/F, Building 1, Lane 170 Yue Yang Rd., Shanghai
+86 (21) 5466 0825
This group exhibition features the work of three prominent gallery artists whose works are becoming highly regarded in the United States and Europe. All three of these young artist use narrative in their works, each one to a unique and stunning effect. This exhibition marks their Chinese debut.
Texas-born, Trenton Doyle Hancock’s work encompasses a wide variety of media from painting, collage, sculpture, printmaking, to the performing arts; however, primarily, Hancock identifies painting as being central to his practice. Well-known for sprawling works, Hancock uses storytelling as a way of creating context for his paintings albeit an absurdist one populated by imaginary characters like the bony, nocturnal Vegans who are engaged in an epic battle with the gentle forest dwelling Mounds, and others like helpers Torpedo Boy, St. Sesom, and the Color Babies and enemies like the evil Betto. The artist’s densely layered works are composed with a collision of symbols and visual tropes that create what he refers to as an “alternate universe.” Hancock says, “Like our own corporeal universe, my painted universe is comprised of a series of systems within systems that extend inward microcosmically and outward macrocosmically. It is a universe that constantly questions itself and expands in order to accommodate answers to those questions”.
Trenton Doyle Hancock is the 2007 Joyce Alexander Wein award winner from The Studio Museum, NY. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis, at the Contemporary Jewish Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, and was recently part of the Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger at the American Folk Art Museum, New York. He is included in Prospect 1 New Orleans Biennial, (2008 / 9). In April 2008, Hancock provided the narrative, costumes and set design for Cult of Color: Call to Color, a collaboration with choreographer Stephen Mills and composer Graham Reynolds for the Austin Ballet, TX. In 2007, the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, hosted Hancock’s major European solo show, The Wayward Thinker, which traveled to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Holland. Hancock was one of the youngest artists ever to be included in the Whitney Biennial, in both 2000 and 2002. Born in Paris, Texas, Hancock currently lives and works in Houston, Texas. His works are included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; The Netherlands; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Studio Museum of Harlem, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and Museum di arte moderna e contemporanea, Trento, Italy.
With skillful object-making, Erick Swenson creates sculptures that embody a complex emotional terrain. Inspiration for the mythical creatures that populate Swenson’s sculptures springs from the artist’s childhood passion for the taxidermied animals in the dioramas at the natural history museum.
Swenson creates his own brand of drama rife with vulnerability, loneliness and isolation, as exemplified in the work Untitled, 2008, where an innocent deer-like creature, swathed in a black cape, is being swept up into the air and carried off by the wind. Depicted at innocent moments, but in what often appear to be the face of tragic circumstances, Swenson’s animals are a comment on the fragility of life. The viewer bears witness to an unexplained scene frozen in time. By giving few clues, Swenson sets the scene for the viewer to ponder the mysterious events leading up the creature’s fate. As curator Lynn Herbert has written, “Swenson leaves the story in our hands… and we come to see and understand the human condition, as in many a child’s fable, through the eyes of the animal.”
Erick Swenson graduated from the School of Visual Arts, University of North Texas, in 1999. His work has received solo exhibitions at ULCA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and at the Villa Stuck, Munich; and is the permanent collectors of The Dallas Museum of Art, The Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, Texas; as well as the Saatchi Collection, London, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Alison Elizabeth Taylor is well-known for re-invigorating the ancient craft of marquetry, or wood in-lay as a means for creating figurative works that explore the hidden stories of everyday lives. By using wood veneer as her medium, Taylor subverts the material’s customary use as a decorative element in objects created to display wealth and power and instead uses it to depict people who are down and out on their luck. Thus, her intricate and masterful works uniquely transgress the traditional distinction between craft and high art.
With her critic’s eye, Taylor’s works take on as subject society’s outcasts, people who live on the fringe, as the characters portrayed in The Tattooist, the centerpiece of this exhibition. Here, we are witness to the tattoo artist at his kitchen table, practicing his meticulous craft on the skin of a raw chicken. With its subtle reference to classical subject matter—the portrait of an artist working in his studio, Taylor’s oblique narrative also hints at the underbelly of mainstream American culture and its fascination with large vehicles, guns and sex. Limited to a palette of natural woods, Taylor innovates by using the grain and tone of the veneer to explore formal issues of space, surface, line, color and form.
Alison Elizabeth Taylor is a graduate of Columbia University, School of the Arts and has had two solo exhibitions at the James Cohan Gallery in New York. Concurrent to this exhibition, Taylor has a solo show at the College of Wooster Art Museum, Ohio. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions such as 96 Gillespie’s Dirty Pigeons, London; Other America at Exit Art, New York; Truly She is None Other at New Image Gallery, Los Angeles; and The Powder Room at Track 16 in 2007, in Los Angeles....
http://www.jamescohan.com/exhibitions/2009-09-11_young-americans/
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CONTEMPORARY TAPESTRIES: GARY HUME, BEATRIZ MILHAZES, SHAHZIA SIKANDER, FRED TOMASELLI, GAVIN TURK, KARA WALKER
September 10 - 13, 2009
ShContemporary Art Fair, Booth W35 Shanghai Exhibition Center (1000 Middle Yan An Rd.)
In 2005 the London-based art organization Banners of Persuasion invited fourteen internationally renowned artists to create a hand-woven tapestry. Three years in the making, the collection titled “Yarns, Demons and Tales” was exhibited at the end of 2008 at The Dairy, London and at the Miami Basel art fair. James Cohan Gallery is pleased to be presenting a selection of the works at ShContemporary 2009 to be followed by an exhibition of complete collection at the New York gallery next winter. The tapestries were hand-made by women weavers from the outskirts of Shanghai.
Hand-woven tapestry faded long ago as an art medium in much the same way as the magnificent tapestries of the golden era themselves disintegrated under the harsh spotlight of mass-production. The works in “Yarns, Demons and Tales” themselves reveal a transformation from each artist’s unique artistic practice into the uncharted territory of this yet, for them, un-explored craft. During the process of creation, the artist’s were initially preoccupied with technical matters: limited colors, the texture of the material, the properties of the different threads and the complexity of the weave. But as the process developed, the new medium began to enhance, rather than compromise the finished work; thus giving birth to a thoroughly contemporary body of work, one that evolved naturally from its historical past. The hand-woven proved to be an alternative soft canvas; warm, tactile, and well-able to represent ideas and images on a vast scale, both in terms of imagination and sheer physical presence. The notion of Tapestry, an art form with a complex and well-documented past, is thereby re-vitalized, enabling us to reconsider it as an illuminating and revelatory format for today's world.
Contemporary Tapestries is a collaboration with Banners of Persuasion.
http://www.jamescohan.com/news/contemporary-tapestries-at-shcontemporary-2009/
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The Tree 树
June 26 - August 30, 2009
James Cohan Gallery Shanghai
1/F, Building 1, Lane 170 Yue Yang Rd, near Jian Guo Xi Rd., Shanghai
This group exhibition brings together over 30 international artists who explore the subject of trees in various aspects. The show is also inspired by the city of Shanghai with its many tree-lined streets and lanes and its wonderful history with the Plane tree first planted by the British and French in the 1840s. These trees are one of the outstanding features of this remarkable city and are symbolic of Shanghai’s colonial and post-colonial history. They provide shade and shadow, a dramatic and ever-lasting sense of seasonal change amidst a city in constant flux.
The Tree offers both whimsical as well as poetic perspectives by such artists as Francesco Clemente, whose extraordinary watercolor depicts human forms as boughs and branches within a tree that could, at any moment, become a cloud. Or in the work by Philip Taaffe, from his Composite Nature series, where the underlying patterns and structures of the natural world have been central to his work during the past decade. More atmospheric views are found in April Gornik’s charcoal drawing, a darkened meadow of trees, and in the paintings by Yuko Murata and Joan Nelson, whose works take us on a journey to serene and melancholic forests.
The Tree exhibition also includes works by Jessica Backhaus, Manfredi Beninati, Chen Jie, Lorenzo de Los Angeles, Carroll Dunham, David Dupuis, André Ethier, Alicia Framis, Lynn Geesaman, April Gornik, Guo Hongwei, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Yun-Fei Ji, Amy Kao, Yayoi Kusama, Michael Lin, Frank Majore, Keith Mayerson, Robin O'Neil, Hiraki Sawa, Shi Jing, Mark Steinmetz, Sun Xun, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Yuken Teruya....
http://www.jamescohan.com/exhibitions/2009-06-26_the-tree/
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Matters of Faith 事关信念 April 4 – May 30, 2009 *Private preview of Xu Zhen’s commission Untitled, March 27, 6pm
Matters of Faith, a group exhibition features works by German painter Anselm Kiefer, video pioneer Nam June Paik, American video artist Bill Viola and Shanghai-based conceptual artist Xu Zhen. Artists have always been the agents of change.
In the exhibition “Matters of Faith,” works by four prominent international artists from both the East and West make reference to the sacred and spiritual by borrowing imagery from their respective traditions and by giving material presence to the myths and metaphors of their cultures. As transformed in the framework of contemporary art, these symbols and iconography take on the role of talismans that pave the way for a world where tolerance, compassion and harmony can reign.
http://www.jamescohan.com/exhibitions/2009-03-27_matters-of-faith/
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FOLKERT DE JONG: THOUSAND YEARS BUSINESS AS USUAL 一如既往
Nov 14, 2008 through to Jan 17, 2009
James Cohan Gallery has invited Dutch sculptor Folkert de Jong to create an exhibition for its new Shanghai location, which opened July 10, 2008.
Folkert de Jong, is best known for his theatrical, narrative-based installations. His life-sized sculptures presented in tableau-like arrangements, take on the themes of war, greed and power. These provocative sculptures are surprising for their unorthodox choice of materials—sculpted out of industrial Styrofoam and Polyurethane insulation foams. De Jong’s figures embody a grotesque horror and macabre humor that is reminiscent of the work of the 20th century European artists Georges Grosz and James Ensor.
This new body of work entitled Thousand Years of Business as Usual consists of three new sculptural tableaux. The conceptual underpinnings of the exhibition relate to Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest.” De Jong’s work applies Darwin’s evolutionary theory beyond the natural world and into an exploration of the competition between global entities. Using this scientific theory and his startling imagery, Folkert de Jong attempts to illuminate the notion that the delicate balance of power between nations can evolve into a patterrn similar to that of the natural environment. In Thousand Years Business as Usual, Folkert de Jong examines the many paradoxes inherent in what humans attempt to control and what is ultimately not in their power to control. These concepts provide fertile territory for de Jong’s singular brand of expression.
Folkert de Jong, born in 1972, lives and works in Amsterdam. De Jong studied at the Academy for Visual Arts and the Rijksacademy for Visual Arts, both in Amsterdam, and was awarded the Prix de Rome for Sculpture in 2003....
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Yinka Shonibare, MBE at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai September 11 - November 8, 2008 Opening September 11, 6-8 pm
It was the second exhibition in James Cohan Gallery’s Shanghai space since its opening in July 2008. In this exhibition, Yinka Shonibare, MBE’s photographs and sculptures dating from 2005 through 2008 address the colonialist impulse and the struggles with power and identity that result from it. On View were the recent photographic series, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 2008. The five richly-hued photographs are based on Francisco Goya y Luciente’s etching of the same name. Shonibare has reworked Goya’s original warning against irrational behavior and expanded its reach, depicting figures who together represent five of the world’s continents. Each figure is outfitted in Victorian-style garments made from what we have come to recognize as African textiles—in fact, cloth that was originally imported by the Dutch to Africa but which has become so closely associated with the continent that it is assumed to be indigenous. Accompanying the photos will be Immanuel Kant (2008), sculpted after the Age of Enlightenment philosopher and presented with amputated legs-a fictional disability suggesting that intelligence can be a hindrance when it creates a damaging thirst for conquest. Earlier works by Shonibare includes Eleanor Hewitt (2005), a sculpture of the American collector born in the 19th century who is playfully perched atop stilts to indicate her elevated taste and adventurous spirit, as well as several of Shonibare’s Toy Paintings from his 2005 series. Also shown will be the film Odile and Odette (2005), in which two ballerinas—one black , one white--dance the Swan Lake roles, separated by a mirror to indicate the interplay between reality and reflection, conscious and unconscious. Yinka Shonibare, MBE (b.1962) is a painter, photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist whose work is influenced by the culture of Nigeria, where he grew up, and England, where he studied and now lives.....
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James Cohan Gallery Shanghai Mining Nature 发 掘 淤 自 然 Inaugural Exhibition Opening July 10 through August 31 Reception, July 10 6 – 8 pm
James Cohan Gallery, a New York-based contemporary art gallery established in 1999, and the first to establish in Shanghai, will inaugurate its new gallery with a thematic exhibition entitled Mining Nature, opening July 10 and running through August 31, 2008. James Cohan Gallery Shanghai is located in the heart of the French Concession and occupies the ground floor of a 1930s garden villa set inside a lane on Yue Yang Road. The gallery’s augural exhibition, which features artists from the gallery roster, will address man’s changing relationship to nature. In a world in which the “real”—either virtual or actual—has become muddled, where genetic engineering is possible and environmental change is alarmingly rapid, the very definition of nature is complex. Mining Nature will examine the presence of the natural world in contemporary art. This exhibition includes works by Ingrid Calame, Yun-fei Ji, Richard Long, Roxy Paine, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Bill Viola, Wim Wenders.
Bill Viola exhibition is stunning. Must see