James Cohan Gallery Shanghai is pleased to present new works by Shanghai-based artist Li Wenguang, opening May 12 and running through June 22. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
 
Li Wenguang is known for his highly subjective and idiosyncratic works, many of which have been based on notions of pseudoscientific equations, personal diaries, and dream interpretation. Continuing his exploration of these themes, his recent works are delving further into the territory of the subconscious. Li, who is a completely self-taught artist, presents his works on rice paper mounted to traditional Chinese silk scrolls, using a combination of pen, brush, tea, ink, acrylic and oil paint.
 
The exhibition will feature new works from three distinctive and ongoing series: Withered Plant, Solo Dance, and Science Fiction. Extending the idea of botanical illustration of traditional flower painting, Li’s drawings and mixed-media works are labor-intensive diagrams of half-blooming, half-withering plants. In the Solo Dance scrolls, the artist uses his own footprints to create a choreography and movement staged against a grid resembling bricks or tiles. Together with the artist’s footsteps, words in Chinese and English (“loneliness”, “faith”, ”pursue”, "courage”) suggest a transition from past to future, but without imposing rational connections to the meanings of the words or phrases, and thus leaving it open to interpretation by the viewer.
 
Also on view will be Li’s latest Science Fiction works. Here we encounter spaces where the traditional and futuristic collide. In this series, too, there are apparent commentaries on environmental concerns, specifically about water, and the exploitation of water resources on the planet. Li’s vision is a post-human, non-carbon world where water itself has become a living, conscious entity. The creation of these new pieces is also based on accident and chance, and on the artist’s use of fundamental chemistry: oil and water. By first pouring water and oil paint on sheets of plastic, allowing the paint to mix as thoroughly as possible against the film, it is then transferred to the surface of the rice paper. When it is removed, it creates a traditional shan-shui effect, leaving traces which often appear as mountains or geological formations.
 
Li Wenguang was born in Shanghai in 1985. Previous exhibitions include Stir Gallery Shanghai in 2011; Huating Space Shanghai; Songjiang, Shanghai in 2010, 2011; and the Shangyuan Art Museum, Beijing, 2012. His work was also featured in group projects at the James Cohan Gallery Shanghai in 2012.
 
For further information, please contact Ivy Zhou at izhou@jamescohan.com or contact the gallery at +86 21 54660825. Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 to 6:00 p.m.; Sunday 12:00 to 6:00 p.m.; and Monday by appointment.

NO WAY! + TRACKING BAUDELAIRE
 
NO WAY!
 
Shanghai Gallery of Art is pleased to present NO WAY!, Gao Weigang second solo exhibition at the gallery. The Beijing-based artist questions the nature of communication using a unique contemporary visual language.
 
In this ambitious project, Gao has extended one of his signature sculptural forms throughout the gallery, in the form of a monumental installation, bringing the SGA space into full play and expanding the scope of his oeuvre. As an undulating mirrored stair form weaves its way through the gallery architecture, the artist submerges the viewer into endless web of reflections, which distort, unsettle and reconfigure our spatial logic.
 
A number of new sculptures and mixed media paintings are also on view, and compliment the large installation. Rendered with delicate technical skill, the artist then subverts the artwork’s apparent meaning by inserting visual alterations that make us question what we see. Gao’s simple yet surprisingly powerful images function as an ontological inquiry, and they reveal the web of signifiers that underlay our experience.
 
Winner of 2011 ART FUTURE prize at ART HK, Gao Weigang (b. 1976) is a versatile artist who works in a wide range of media. Using traditional media as a point of departure, the artist often incorporates natural phenomenon such as light and recorded sound into the work, to link disparate forms and narratives.
 
TRACKING BAUDELAIRE
 
Shanghai Gallery of Art is pleased to announce the launch of a new platform, SGA WING. This series emphasizes new paradigms of transformation and production in visual culture. With a particular focus on Asia, SGA WING’s programming invigorates the field of contemporary art by exploring interdisciplinary creations. By expanding the boundaries of art and engaging different discourses, SGA WING explores the numerous avenues, theoretical and practice-based, endemic to contemporary curatorial practice.
 
It is with pleasure that SGA WING #1 presents TRACKING BAUDELAIRE by Map Office, winner of the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2013 for their photograph “Back Home with Baudelaire, No. 5” (2005).
 
TRACKING BAUDELAIRE recalls MAP Office’s 2005 work, Back Home with Baudelaire, where the duo accompanied the cargo ship named Baudelaire from the Yantian port in Shenzhen to Hong Kong. Throughout the voyage, they documented the 24-hour operation of cranes and moving containers, and produced a series of eight photographs and a 16-minute film that captured the world of global production and distribution. TRACKING BAUDELAIRE recalls the original trip, where they looked back to their personal archives, and extends the initial dialogue with their findings, into Shanghai. Across history and time, the Hong Kong-based artists embarks on a nautical route, acknowledging the port city as a new leader in the field of maritime movement.
 
Techniques of observation – and their geo-politic impact – play a key role in MAP Office’s work and function as an entry point for broader investigations into perception, mapping, and understanding. For their first Shanghai exhibition, they present a three-part installation. Juxtaposing a light-box diptych of stacked shipping containers in a night setting, a series of 8 radar plot etchings and an illuminated map of the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), their installation highlights the built environment, each element framing a different aspect of the same project.
 
Further complemented by the imagined reconstruction of a ship’s Captain’s Quarters; this project elaborates on the temporal aspect of tracking of Baudelaire. To this day, MAP Office time and again creates work at the intersection of art, territories, and time-based media.
 
MAP Office is a multidisciplinary platform devised by Laurent Gutierrez (b. 1966, Casablanca, Morocco) and Valérie Portefaix (b. 1969, Saint-Étienne, France). This artist/architect pair, based in Hong Kong since 1996, has explored real and imagined territories through various media: drawing, photography, video, installations, performance, and literary and theoretical texts., A monograph on their work, MAP OFFICE – Where the Map is the Territory, was published in 2011.
 
MAP Office has exhibited in major international art, design and architecture expositions including: 7th Asia Pacific Triennial (2012); 1st Kiev Biennale (2012); 6th Curitiba Art Biennale (2011); 7th, 11th and 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (2000, 2008, 2010); Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008); 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008); 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007); 52nd Venice Art Biennale (2007); 15th Sydney Biennale (2006); 2nd Guangzhou Triennial (2005); 2nd and 3rd Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale (2007, 2009); etc.