The exhibition "It's Beautiful To Be Different" brings together artworks by students from Public Art Department and Fiber Art Department of China Academy of Art. These artworks come from different contexts and different times, focusing on young artists' exploration of practice in contemporary visual art. As the first project of the organic renewal of the ancient city of Shaoxing, Fengyueli builds a bridge between art, space and life through this exhibition. The artworks form a clever interaction with the indoor and outdoor spaces and surrounding buildings such as the East Tower, Star Island, old structures, and the garden in Fengyueli, completing the first collision and attempt of the immersive cultural experience of the alley.
▲ Poster
Preface
“It's Beautiful To Be Different” is a show brings together artworks of students from Public Art Department and Fiber Art Department of China Academy of Art that originated in different contexts, peers and times, and is about art practices in contemporary visual arts. The issues of social changes, information, production, consumerism, rapid economic development and everyday life matters bother the younger generation of Chinese artists. It shows how they use different materials in their artworks to express an idea or a concept.
Today the artist is a member of a community, is a question of balance between socially purposeful and aesthetically purposeful activity. In present-day aesthetics demand both process and spectacle and engagement with real world issues and people outside the arts, and an aesthetics of display inspired by new technologies, how new and anti-materialist forms of art were related to daily life.
Through all these artworks the exhibition emerges as an elaborate and fragile construction of an art and mental architecture, and is based on the incredible wish to concentrate the infinitive worlds of contemporary art in a place as Hangzhou is. Despite its title, therefore the show celebrates exceptions and eccentricities instead of attempting to achieve a total systematization of what is art, material, technique, and an object, a space, an act.
It's Beautiful To Be Different – this is what all these young artists in this exhibition embodied. I think this quote applies to what artists think, work and lived for and addressed in art, because they are “different” and they are demonstrated being different through their own very unique understanding of art. Their confidence in the power of art, their sensitivity, their visions, their elegance, which I understood as a promise, a promise of the unique power of art and how extraordinary it can be.
About Artworks
Jin Minghao, “Ode to the Bones”, 2022, 250×275×150cm, animal bones, metal mesh, plastic tubes, fur, motor
Liu Tiantong, “Expectation”, variable dimensions, bed, quilt, quilt cover, clothes, pillow
Li Xiang, “Thinking Threads”, 400×200cm, stainless steel, acrylic
Shao Manru, "Lost in Roads", 600×200cm, red fiber, sound sensor
Qin Xinyuan, "There are no flowers in my garden", variable dimensions, resin, video
Yang Shuqi, "Remembering the Empty Space", variable dimensions, wood, screen
Lu Tiancheng, “Twelve”, variable dimensions, wood, bamboo strips, rice paper, LED lights, plastic, metal
Jian Yuang, "Window and Labyrinth", variable dimensions, resin, angle iron, steel bar, steel pipe, channel steel, resin, LED light, cold light
Ruan Yuelai, “Greetings from Light”, 100×100×180cm, mixed media
