I-Ching At The Opposite House
The Opposite House in collaboration with PZcontemporary is pleased to present an interactive performance art and installation of sculptures by Huang Rui, curated by Martina Ziesse. The exhibition will be held for three months in the atrium of The Opposite House.
Huang Rui is one of the founders of the short lived but revolutionary nonconformist avant-garde group Xing Xing (The Stars) in 1978. The Stars were the first in China after the Cultural Revolution to proclaim individual artist creativity. To this day, his works continue to be nonconformist, exploring the society that he lives in with a highly intellectual approach. Rooted in conceptualism, his works are socially and historically relevant yet intriguingly beautiful and poetic. Performance, painting, installation and sculpture form the basis of his connotations from Chinese philosophy to modern-day life. He often uses words as imagery and plays with their meaning of duplicity and irony.
I-Ching is one of the most important series of Huang Rui’s artistic career. Huang Rui began exploring the I-Ching (Book of Changes) in the early 1980s, and he has since interpreted the divinatory symbols in the I-Ching in a variety of visual forms. These works have been determined by time and place and have included two-dimensional, sculptural, performance, and installation works. For the performance held this past December at The Opposite House, Huang Rui invited 64 volunteers to participate in the interactive art piece representing the possible combination of the symbolic hexagrams found in the I-Ching.
The sculpture installation will be complimented by three-dimensional representations of the Chinese characters for ‘woman’ and ‘all for one.’
Martina Ziesse is an art historian, writer and freelance curator based in Beijing. She curated several exhibitions, such as the 2009 “Käthe Kollwitz and her Influence on Chinese Art” exhibition and the 2010 Lucien Clergue exhibition at ARTMIA Foundation in Beijing.
