Intelligentsia Exhibition Catalog No.9

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INTELLIGENTSIA GALLERY 智先 画廊

A VICTORY OVER NOTHINGNESS: PURSE SNATCH IN STREETCAR AND OTHER POST-FEVRALIST ABSURDITIES 战胜虚无:电车抢钱包及其他后联邦主义的荒诞 XIE MOLIN 谢墨凛 PAVEL KISELEV AOTO OOUCHI GARCIA FRANKOWSKI



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A VICTORY OVER NOTHINGNESS: PURSE SNATCH IN STREETCAR AND OTHER POST-FEVRALIST ABSURDITIES 战胜虚无:电车抢钱包及其他后联邦主义的荒诞 XIE MOLIN 谢墨凛 PAVEL KISELEV AOTO OOUCHI GARCIA FRANKOWSKI

24 January 2015 2015 年 01 月 24日


A Victory Over Nothingness: Purse Snatch in Streetcar and Other Post Fevralist Absurdities Intelligentsia Gallery is excited to present ‘A Victory over Nothingness: Purse Snatch in Streetcar and other post Fevralist Absurdities’ a group exhibition with works by Xie Molin (b. 1979 Wenzhou, China), Pavel Kiselev (b. 1984 Moscow, Russia) Aoto Oouchi (b. 1976 Vienna, Austria) Garcia Frankowski (b. 1983 San Juan, Puerto Rico & b. 1985 Dundee, Scotland). A Victory Over Nothingness explores the philosophical nihilism initially postulated by the Fevralist period of Kazimir Malevich that was consummated in the conception of his first Black Square in 1915. One hundred years after setting as a goal the destruction of the dominant rational worldview and reconceptualizing the role of the work of art, the exhibition presents once more the possibility of nothingness as ‘gesamkunstwerk’. A new set of existential questions arise in the form of strategies, concepts and processes venturing into an epistemological nirvana where machinistic paintings, reconstructed compositions, message carriers, and absurdist strategists are the flag bearers of a post non-objective anti-rationale battle. More than offering answers or stating ultimate conclusions the exhibition proposes art as anti-narrative, substituting the utilitarian banalization of art by the reapropiation of ‘nothingness’ as ethos. A Victory Over Nothingness challenges the possibility of ultimate reduction and aims to create a world no longer abridged to its representation, a world where the artwork would stand for itself and where the nonsensical ‘purse snatch in streetcar’ would reign supreme. Curated by Hao Chen, the 9th international exhibition celebrates the first anniversary of Intelligentsia Gallery and the centenary of the Black Square with a selection of painting, video, installation and mix media aiming at starting the ultimate philosophical battle and declaring A Victory Over Nothingness. Intelligentsia Gallery


战胜虚无:电车抢钱包及其他后联邦主义的荒诞 智先画廊将呈现群展“战胜虚无:电车抢钱包及其他后联邦主义的荒诞”,参展艺术家包括 谢墨凛 (b. 1979 温州,中国), Pavel Kiselev (b. 1984 莫斯科,俄罗斯) Aoto Oouchi (b. 1976 维也纳,奥地利) Garcia Frankowski (b. 1983 圣胡安,波多黎各, b. 1985 邓迪,苏格兰)。 战胜虚无探索了哲学上的虚无主义,这一概念最早由联邦主义时期的马列维奇提出,并在其1915年的首个 黑方块中得到完美体现。主导的理性世界观被解构,艺术作品的角色被重建。在这一目标树立百年之后, 此次展览再次将虚无的可能性展示为一种“整体艺术”。 一系列新的存在主义问题由此引发。策略、概念、过程正经历认知论的涅槃,而机械绘画、重构构成、信 息载体以及荒诞策略是这场后非客观、反理性战役的旗手。 此次展出不仅限于提供答案或声明终极论断。它将艺术设定为一种反叙事,通过对“虚无”的重访与回响取 代平庸的实用主义。战胜虚无挑战了终极减法的可能性,旨在创造一个不囿于缩减表现的世界,一个艺术 作品代表其自身的世界。在这里,荒谬的“电车抢钱包”或将占据统治地位。 由陈昊策展,本次第九届国际展既是智先画廊成立一周年的庆典,也是黑方块诞生一百周年。此次展览以 绘画、影片、装置、综合媒介的形式拉开了终极哲学之战的序幕,并宣布面向虚无的胜利。

智先画廊


ENUNCIATING NOTHINGNESS Charles de Cloitre

Indifferent. The Black Square went from reflecting upon the world, to creating its own world. Radical obliteration led to a complete denial of all previous attempts at reducing, abstracting, synthetizing ‘something’. The Black Square marked the beginning of an end, and an end as a new beginning. Its urgent, imperfect surface was the blueprint of nothingness. With it, nothingness was graspable, within reach. The Black Square was nothingness as a project of aesthetic self-representation. Like Duchamp, Malevich was a solipsist militant leading a nihilistic mutiny. Black Square and readymade (both concepts born in 1915) were weapons for an epistemological coup d’état anchored in absurdist foundations. By the time the metaphorical fireplace transformed into a bicycle wheel started spinning on top of a wooden bar stool (1913), the nonsensical ‘кошелек вытащили в трамвае’ (c. 1914), ‘Purse Snatch in Streetcar’ or ‘The Wallet was Stolen in the Tram’, was allegorically framed inside the almighty square.


The Black Square, like the absurdist phrase, or the quotidian ‘object of complete indifference as far as aesthetics are concerned’—to put it on Duchamp terms—were rebellious acts against the world order, the world previously depicted, represented, portrayed, and summoned by art. Both devices were a new grammar for a new way of understanding. A hundred years later we’re left with the possibility of working on the aftermath of a victory over nothingness. Inside this rhetorical void, ideas, concepts and energy clash as works implode concepts of abstraction, pictorial representation, or even the purely aesthetic attitude easily sequestered into the polarization of the superstructural manifestation of the current socio-political-economic apparatus. Nothingness challenges the role of art as politico-aesthetic advertisement. Philosophical reflexes find material concretization in a realm beyond contextual narratives or temporary trends, working on the nothingness left by the theoretical collapse of preconceptions and assumptions of the profane and commonplace. Nothingness represents the most radical stance in a world where something has become the fleeting, flickering image of everything. It stands against a world where political stances are absorbed into their opposite, producing an ever expanding grammar of opportunism, a lexicon of populist ontological dimensions. A Victory Over Nothingness presents Nothingness as a total finality. It presents the possibility of works as post-critical praxis; Nothingness as dynamic Gesamkunstwerk, art as a total work of Nothingness. -In its role as post-linguistic apparatus and as total work of art Nothingness can be perceived both in the artwork itself and in the process of creating the artwork. This process is something that has characterized Xie Molin’s practice in recent years. Although previous exhibitions have drawn a picture of his work as ongoing exploration of procedural hybridity, these experiments of art-making, and conceptualization can be traced back to a nirvana, a defining moment in search for nothingness. Line Study No. 3 marks a departure within a departure. Developed by means of readapting a cutting plotter into a painting machine, the work belongs to the first series of pieces created using repetition of a process without pictorial representation as reference. The method instead creates a new vocabulary, a new form of concept as rhetoric. The work ventures into a space composed of colour, patterns, surfaces and textures. The machine is no longer used to translate references from reality; the machine is no longer a channel to drive an image into a work of art. Representation is substituted by self-representation. Process takes the place that inspiration or derivation usually occupies. Landscapes, and narratives disappear into gradients and atmospheres. The image disseminates into a vast array of unidirectional lines, moving horizontally through the paper surface. By utilizing the machine as collaborator to create art, no longer the question is posed over the role and


possibilities of the artwork, but it’s the artist who is challenged. Line Study No.3 nihilistic potential lies in its capacity to interact with the idea of the artist as creator, the concept of the handmade, and go beyond the mere idea of colorism in painting, or the idea of synthetizing abstractionism. It questions the concept of abstraction when there’s nothing to abstract, altering the process of creating an artwork as a submission to abstracting forces. Line Study stands as a victory over nothingness as it creates a new vocabulary, and on its way to consolidate it, constructs new tools to generate its grammar. It proposes the possibility of painting as automated creation, of artist as machine, and the relationship between artist, process and artwork as a dynamic form of collective production. One idealistic future, a future of nothingness, could foresee a moment when the machine takes over, as a form of artificial creative intelligence. Line Study postulates the possibility of artist as Nothingness. -The ubiquitous nature of Nothingness allows it to be manifested no only in the process of creation for a single body of work, but also it foments its capacity to be summoned through a diverse plethora of concrete forms. In this sense, Nothingness can be perceived everywhere, from a painting, to a video. Product of an epistemological exodus, Nothingness arises whenever an underlying rhetorical apparatus is transformed into conceptual erasures consolidating voids that cannot be filled by any of the current discursive contents. Still a concept in a post-conceptual world, Nothingness also uses art as a grammar to deliver undecipherable messages; malleable codes that react with indifference to actual language and narratives. The work of Garcia Frankowski presents a universal grammar of Nothingness. Manifested in its multiplicity of conditions, this grammar takes the form of an ontological juxtaposition as nihilistic vocabulary. Its forms are not just devoid of specific meaning, but allow for self-generation of new cognitive structures able to inhabit the desert first visited by the Black Square. Painting and video are two of the vehicles used to cruise inside that meaning-less desert. On one hand, ‘Reconstructed Composition No.3’ devices an archetype of a monochromatic set of endless variations of compositional strategies created by assembling, and sewing, painted and cut geometric shapes. Lacking a narrative story or a pictorial reference, the reconstructed composition, reconstructs also the possibilities of art as an epistemological device, offering pure form as post-conceptual grammar. A painting made out of other paintings, ‘Reconstructed Composition’ creates Nothingness by assembling fragments of nothingness inside an allegorical frame, like the one that outlined ‘Purse Snatch in Streetcar’. Reconstructed Composition, thus serves the same role of a nonsensical phrase outlined and framed as it has embedded all the meaning it needs to deliver its ‘non-message’ by way of its grammar of nothingness. With unfolding found footage as disjunctive narrative, the installation Rhetorical Reconstruction presents two video collages as compositional nothingness. Duchamp endlessly repeating “but I don’t mind at all,


I don’t care” creates an absurdist acoustic background environment in which images of Hugo Ball, Duchamp, Mayakovski and found footage of one of NASA’s space projects speculate on the possibility of cosmic discovery as driven by the same creative forces that pushed the avant-garde to not only look for the possibility of Nothingness, but to declare a victory over it. After all, aren’t the space and the universe the ultimate nothingness? Isn’t space exploration venturing in the same nothingness inhabited by the discontinuous poem of absurdism? Compositional Video and painting play with the notion of reconstruction, of disjoined surfaces and events, images, pieces attached to each other by external forces that respond to a metaphysical motive, to an ultimate, sublime manifesto of the assembling, and dismounting possibilities of nothingness. -The Manifesto as metaphysical motive acts upon the notion of transcendence of the artwork. In order for the artwork to push the project of Nothingness, it must rebel against the object of ‘something’ that would be the depiction of the world. On this notion Pavel Kiselev’s presents a work reflecting on the notion of contemporaneity and the possibility of nothingness today, in a period of oversaturation of information, in an age of commonplace prophecies and urgent messages. Exploring uncertain terrains opened by previous experiments of layering and stratification, ‘The New Message’ ventures inside nothingness as a black hole inside a universe impossible to navigate with clarity with current tools and knowledge. This absolute nothingness pulls the viewer inside its vortex, a black nothing that absorbs external forces challenging the fact that now, every two days humankind produces as much information as it was ever produced until the fin d’ siècle. The New Message creates the possibility of a new starting point for everything. It proposes a new Victory Over Nothingness based on the capacity of the artist to create a vocabulary able to cancel all the atmospheric noise produced by oversaturation of images, by the production and distribution of contents that are thrown to the world at exacerbating speed and in overwhelming quantities. The content of the artwork is freed from external forces with a form of radical indifference, creating with its own energy, the atmospheric gravity of the territorialization of nothingness. The New Message creates a new space to legitimize the concept of Nothingness as a challenge to the omnipresent ‘everything’ of information, language, and messages. It creates a space for articulation as territory against the deterritorialization of virtual space and ever expanding domains of external interests dominated by socio-cultural, political and economic interests. When an artwork reaches the state of Nothingness it does so by defying every platform that proposes ‘something’, however abstract this ‘something’ may be. -The Internet is one of these domains that offer the permanent possibility of interacting with something


happening somewhere. A channel for mass diffusion, it provides every moment with more information, more images, more content than ever before. Nothingness now is presented with challenges that didn’t existed a hundred years ago. Black Square and readymade are still transcendental today, although absorbed inside the milieu of the materialistic dialectical apparatus. Not just the work is submitted to external forces that corrode their nihilistic strength, Malevich and Duchamp as pictorial icons are thrown into virtual space incessantly, summoning their image and making the idea of Nothingness into its opposite. We are witnessing a banalization of the image of Nothingness. As Boris Groys affirms, it is through the Internet that conceptual art today has become a mass cultural practice. And while it can be argued that the visual grammar of a website is not too different from the grammar of installation space, it is still the challenge of the artist to conceive what power does he or she has by approaching the possibility of nothingness. Contemporary means of communication offer global populations new ways to consume art. In a Post conceptualist world, in a world of Nothingness a new relationship between the space of extreme proliferation of images and the controlled environment of the institutionalized space of exhibition is possible. Nothingness is a conceptual adhesive that can bring extreme opposites inside a constructed conceptual void. Aoto Oouchi (a computer generated name) proposes a merger between these two realities. Nothingness exists in the realm where the nothingness of the virtual and the physical become absorbed by a regime of philosophical nihilism. The image is created as nothingness, with nothingness as a reference, and nothingness as a goal. Black Square spins out of control over images of the commonplace as to highlight the varying speeds, conditions and characteristics of two dimensions that ate subjected to a complete different set of rules and conditions. The static image of nothingness is altered by a never-ending sequence of loops and spins, of reloads and refreshes (to use internet language), highlighting the abyss that separates something to nothingness, this and that. The infrastructure that supports accepted conceptions of aesthetics, and taste, of the production and consumption of art is tackled by a form of conceptualism that questions the foundations of the concept itself. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit postulates how self-consciousness arises at the moment of mortal danger. In a world where nothingness reigns supreme, in a world without ‘spirit’, the self-consciousness of the artwork arises when confronted with the endless void of nothingness. Black Square and Readymade are the hammers that torn down the walls of preconceived discourses, of understandable narratives. After a transition space was created by imploding obstructing structures a set of Machinistic paintings, juxtaposing compositions, absorbing vortexes and virtual/physical palimpsests could roam free on a world without walls. With the walls torn down, all is left is to enunciate the ultimate victory. To declare a victory over nothingness.


Manifesto on Nothingness Garcia Frankowski

Nothingness has the virtue of surviving through any battle. Modern warfare not in the format of drones or cyber espionage, but in the polarization of a materialist dialectic, absorbs everything into its insatiable vortex. Nothingness is the ungraspable matter that is left after everything has been consumed. Nothingness is that dessert of hard, irreverent edges. Nothingness waits indifferent at the other side of a door opened a hundred years ago in an attempt to reach the ultimate sublime. In a world plagued with opportunistic ideologies and temporary systems, passing regimes and totalitarian dogmas, Nothingness remains immutable. This Nothingness looks past the dialectical relationship between the existence-driven non-consciousness of objects in their being-in-themselves state and self-conscious subjects that through being-forthemselves become aware of their existence in their deprivation of autonomy from a world consisting of predetermined systems and objectivized matter. When rationale and logic, when the visceral and the subconscious are transformed in the grammar of commoditized matter, Nothingness speaks an unintelligible language. Nothingness looks past structures of reason, however pure, dialectical or cynical they might claim to be. Nothingness has no method and denies any praxis. Confronted with an ever-expanding black hole that absorbs whatever manifestation of everyday life, Nothingness is freed by its inherent lack of light. In a world without qualities, Nothingness is enlightenment as self-preserving darkness. Absolute Nothingness strives in absolute obscurity. Nothingness exists in the words of this manifesto and in the basic manifestations of its formal articulations. Its processes and actions, shapes and outlets are the inherent, universal language of silence. Without uttering a word, Nothingness communicates undecipherable dictums. Operating as a critical project since the creation of the Readymade, and as a post-critical axiom since the first Black Square, Nothingness inhabits an interstitial space invisible to the shortsightedness of current aesthetic-political values. Nothingness is the ultimate goal of its own project. Nothingness is selfsufficient, absolute. However clear its cartographic characteristics, and its intellectual makeup, Nothingness is not a doctrine, or a regime, or a dogma. Nothingness obliterates any stereotype, preconception, and expectation. It implodes any structure. It destroys the crushing weight of paraphernalia of superfluous authenticity, be it of the superficial metaphysics of awareness and responsibility, or the hypocritical forms of empathic aesthetics and altruism. Nothingness refuses to carry the fictional weight that has been thrown to in order justify volatile relevance, fluctuating value, and oscillating legitimacy. Nothingness is all that is left after humankind has been sequestered by its self- imposed conditions. Nothingness is pure freedom; Art as Nothingness.


1915-1915

Christopher Rey Perez In this inchoate multitude some art presents itself like a diaphragm, drying, and black. We look and stain because there is reality, which is different from la realidad. I was at that inconceivable point oscillating throughout the night, where I dried, also black. Imagine the fruits and their acids that have eaten a fine shape of our eroticism. The difference between nothing and nothingness is in forty thousand millennia of painting. This is a kind of victory and this victory reprieves our future. It was 1915; it was when we found ourselves in a war. Apples and the representation of apples but also mangoes and durian’s rich excess. It was 1915 and if there was victory it was outside of war. Imagine the fruits and their acids that have eaten a fine shape of our eroticism. Malevich was there with his humectants painting a black square. Now it’s 2015 during which I oscillate among the millennia that slowly dry out our hands. Nothing, which is unlike nothingness, reality, which is unlike la realidad.


She looked at the square very closely and saw nothing but that nothing was there too and drying. Heaven was a place suited to small comforts. I was with her until she talked about the future and its people because there was blood, which felt pedestrian, and could there be anything more terrifying? Pedestrian or “prosaic,” our sentiments and their movements, recorded, or “written.” Some people say, Can Malevich’s black square be considered art? It was 1915 and heaven was a concept best suited for those working outside nothing. Now, on Earth we tend to drink water. I oscillate and she counts the years that are terrifying and all this is done during contractions called breathing. Out of the black square came another that was red. Bataille says literature is the parody of silence; so cannot work be the parody of nothingness? There is reality but we found ourselves in la realidad. Imagine the fruits and their acids that have eaten a fine shape of our eroticism. Love requires work, and so do machines, time, money, Russia, sleeping, and victory. Does the red square want to be black? It is usually night where we live beside the peasant woman and feel flattened. But before this centennial: another square, words written, laughs. Some people say, this red square is the red of religious iconography, and I find this argument, if not unsatisfying, at least one of many prudently tsarist or holy. Religion requires work, and so do languages, class struggle, painting, failure, and birth. In the year 2015, I promise to live another hundred years, or even millennia, to experience the oscillating humidity and aridity of nothingness, which is terrifying and bloody. It occurs to me that a victory over nothingness is possibility in two dimensions. Humidity and aridity, or: the proletariat and 1915, for what it’s worth. She was already in another future taking me toward its acids. Again, I want to emphasize that Malevich was doing something not for himself but for a new temporality, possible because of heaven or its deviant axis, which no one knows is Earth. Because paint dried, because we find time in humidity. But between nothingness and work, humidity and an arid “dearth of,” one finds a very timely joke. I like work because it dissimulates nothing, which is a kind of communion. The black square that continues to crack, the time it takes for two dimensions to enter the realm of quasi-tutorial scenes of envy. It was 1915; it was when we found ourselves in 1915. I took a pen and wrote within her frame: “quasi-tutorial scenes of envy.” This is a scene of envy: la realidad, red cheeks, the wetness of Earth. This is a scene of envy: she was over all her victories but I was lost on how things must work.


Chen Xi 痛不欲生着、可怜兮兮着、轻声呻吟着、肆无忌惮着、 持续熬夜着、惺惺作态着、稀释灵魂着、海阔天空着, 与借高利贷的、难以形容的、不讨厌的、 太夸张的、群情喷涌的、鼻子下面的、沙哑的、 无法自抑的、异常粗野的、千篇一律的、不厌其烦的、 返璞归真的、大难不死的、自娱自乐的、 黏糊糊的、软绵绵的我们同步永生。


Ophelia S. Chan

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Garcia Frankowski Confluence 1915 2015

THIS IS THE END Jacob Dreyer

Neither black nor white are properly human colors; the human body, a sack of fluid hauled through landscapes, is as blue as the night when unseen, and red when gouged open; the color of our life-substance. Blackness: the end of history, a total inscription; and black is beautiful. Whiteness: a deep snow, a complete amnesia, a nothingness. A black square: that would be a real victory over nothingness. A time when all words could be said, safe in the knowledge that they’d be lost in a cacophony and immediately forgotten; an end to history, praise His name. Yet today in our city, the color is not yet black; from the air, it looks grey, punctuated with lights by night, diseased veins straddled with pinpricks, rickety pathways through


which new energy gasps. The sparks are the clacking of blades in our homeland, the adorable site of the war of all against all. Everything changes, every shack will be razed, every object consumed and reproduced, every person will die, their fluids staining the streets; nothing will change, our replacements will repopulate the world without anybody noticing our absence. Ah yes: an exception, the artist. The artist or intellectual is an observer; in the process of removing ourselves from the scene to gain perspective in the creation of the work, we remove ourselves from that scene; far enough away and it looks pure black, like the future, or pure white like the past. Malevich: a scribbler, a graphomaniac, a pervert riding the streetcars. He has floated out of the square, outside of the field of vision; like the creep he is, he stands behind us, tapping us on the shoulder. Of the author of a “Memoir of the Future” have been written words that could be equally true of Malevich, his contemporary: “he wanted to perform imaginary experiments with the nature of space and time. Outside, in the streets, the state was performing such experiments for real.” In the predictive utopia of art, a black square was possible; in the city, a red square, the human color of a stain, was the closest thing possible; a red which soaked into a greasy grey pavement. The city, a flattened hive; a vector through which humans swerve apparently at random. Nothingness has been vanquished; in its place, somethingness, for the black which defeated white has for us decomposed into a dusty grey smoke, the smoke of the old world, its cinders daintily landing onto our faces, dropping into our open mouths like birdshit: another M. wrote in a suicide note that love’s boat has crashed against the everyday. Our revolution, our victory, our victory, has proven to be only a victory over nothingness; against somethingness (sachlichkeit?) we struggled, and struggle still. You’re waking up. Your mouth is dry, your apartment drab and filled with trash. Your bicycle squeaks; the air is noxious, this city congested, this country corrupt, this world relentlessly squeezing itself down the drain. Thrown against the everyday, an egg filled with the optimistic milky fluid of life itself trickling down a stony gray pavilion. This grey is not nothing, it is not everything, it is only the knowledge that power is real, and that it hurts, and that every day we are hurting and being hurt, to be sensate. Endless repetition of these actions, an eternal recurrence; it can be considered erotic, fort und da. (The movement of the earth around the sun, the original revolution, is the most repetitive and dependable of all facts). In the sleepless dark (black?) quiet of my room, I want only you; when I’m buried deep within you, world, I am fantasizing about another. Buried deep within your body, like a grave. The human is the only perpetual motion machine; driven by our desire, we, particles of the Godhead, emulate the earth, constantly moving along the same ruts, in rings sparkling brilliantly through the white air of the winter. We travel through a house of mirrors; black and white flickering, the grotesque countenance of one’s own face repeated in the faces in the crowd, in the past, in the sodden contents of a plate, in the atmosphere. World, I love you; world, I am you. I tried to leave you; chains suddenly slipped off, and I launched into the cosmos, only to discover myself once again: this victory was a victory over fucking nothing at all.



A Victory Over Nothingness: Purse Snatch in Streetcar and Other Post Fevralist Absurdities

战胜虚无: 电车抢钱包及其他后联邦主义的荒诞


Xie Molin 谢墨凛 Line Study No. 3 Marker on Paper 550 x 650mm 2006



Pavel Kiselev The New Message Inkjet and Acrylic on Canvas 1200 x 1630 2014-15



Aoto Oouchi ⃞ Video Duration 4’13” 2015



Garcia Frankowski Reconstructed Composition No. 3 Acrylic on Reconstructed Canvas, Painted Artist’s Frame 1060 x 2060mm 2014-15



Garcia Frankowski Reconstructed Composition No. 4 Acrylic on Reconstructed Canvas, Painted Artist’s Frame 1060 x 2060mm 2014-15



Garcia Frankowski Rhetorical Reconstruction No. 1 Video Duration 3’10” 2014



Garcia Frankowski Rhetorical Reconstruction No. 2 Video Duration 3’10” 2014



Garcia Frankowski Untitled Oil and Oil Stick on Wood Blocks 5 x 5 x 5cm, 5 x 5 x 7.5cm, 5 x 5 x10cm 2014



Bio Xie Molin (b. 1979 Wenzhou, China) Born in Wenzhou, Zhejiang in 1979, Xie Molin graduated from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (BFA) and Edinburgh College of Art(MFA). He currently lives and works in Beijing where he creates works using the “triaxial linkage painting machine” he invented while experimenting with the limits of painting. Recent solo shows include ‘Light / Deposits’ at Beijing Commune and ‘Xie Molin’ at Pace Hong Kong. Group exhibitions include “28 Chinese,” the Rubell Family Collection show (Miami, 2013); “On | Off: China’s Young Artists in Concept and Practice” at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, 2013);“CAFAM/Future” at the Art Museum of China Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing, 2012); “Leaving Realism Behind” at Pace Beijing (2011), “Chinese Art-the De Heus-Zomer Collection” at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam, Netherland, 2014) and “Pull Left” at Urban Arts Space, Ohio State University and Hillstrom Museum, Gustavus Adolphus College (U.S., 2014). www.xiemolin.com Garcia Frankowski (b. 1983 & 1985) Garcia Frankowski is a Beijing-based art collective founded by artist, architect, author and theorist Cruz Garcia ( b. 1983 San Juan, Puerto Rico) and artist, architect, poet and theorist Nathalie Frankowski (Dundee, Scotland, 1985). Garcia Frankowski co founded Intelligentsia Gallery, an independent contemporary art space in Beijing. Their work includes painting, video, collages, performance, installations, publications and more. The works of Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Intelligentsia Gallery and Pifo New Art in Beijing, the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) in Manchester and in shows in Barcelona, Madrid, London, Beijing, Paris, San Juan, Porto, Lisbon, Tokyo, Osaka, Melbourne, Sydney, Shanghai, Helsinki, Chicago, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Montevideo, Prague, Bratislava, Milan, Guadalajara, Zurich, Los Angeles and more. Recent publications include Shapes Islands Text: A Garcia Frankowski Manifesto (Sevilla: Vibok Works, 2014), Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture (London: Artifice Books on Architecture, 2013), the children’s art book The Story of the Little Girl and the Sun, the self-published series of What About It? Magazine and several artists’ books. www.garciafrankowski.com


简介 谢墨凛 (b. 1979 温州,中国) 謝墨凜1979年出生於溫州,曾就讀于中央美術學院壁畫系,并獲得英國愛丁堡美術學院繪畫專業碩士。藝 術家現生活及工作於北京。他的作品曾於“中華廿八人”(邁阿密盧貝爾家族收藏馆,2013)、“ON|OFF:中 國年輕藝術家的觀念與實踐”(尤倫斯藝術中心,2013年),“首屆CAFAM未來展:亞現象-中國青年藝術 生態報告”(中央美術學院美術館,2012)和“現實主義之後“(佩斯北京,2011)等展覽展出。謝墨凜正 在參與的同期展覽有在荷蘭鹿特丹的波伊曼•凡•布寧根博物館舉辦的群展” 聚焦北京:德赫斯-佐莫收藏展 “(2014)和泰康空間策劃的美國巡展項目“向左拉動”(亥俄州立大學的城市藝術中心,明尼蘇達州的古斯 塔夫阿道爾夫學院Hillstrom美術館,2014年) www.xiemolin.com Garcia Frankowski (b. 1983 & 1985) Garcia Frankowski是位于北京的艺术团体,由艺术家、建筑师、作家、理论Cruz Garcia(1983,圣胡 安,波多黎各)与艺术家、建筑师、诗人、理论家Nathalie Frankowski(1985,邓迪,苏格兰)创立。 继2008共同创办WAI Architecture Think Tank之后,Garcia Frankowski共同建立了位于北京的独立艺术空 间,智先画廊。他们的作品包括绘画、影像、拼贴、行为表演、装置、出版及其他。 Garcia Frankowski的个展与群展遍布世界,包括美国纽约当代艺术博物馆,德国维特拉设计博物馆,北 京智先画廊、北京偏锋新艺术空间、曼切斯特中国当代艺术中心,并参展于巴塞罗那、马德里、伦敦、北 京、巴黎、圣胡安、波尔图、里斯本、东京、大阪、墨尔本、悉尼、上海、赫尔辛基、芝加哥、布宜诺斯 艾利斯、智力圣地亚哥、蒙得维的亚、布拉格、布拉迪斯拉发、米兰、瓜达拉哈拉、苏黎世、洛杉矶等。 近期的出版物包括,形状岛屿文本:Garcia Frankowski的宣言(塞維利亞:Vibok Works,2014),纯粹 极致标志:一部关于纯粹形式的宣言(伦敦:Artifice Books on Architecture, 2013),儿童艺术书 小女孩 和太阳的故事,自出版系列What About It?杂志和艺术家书籍。 www.garciafrankowski.com


Pavel Kiselev (b.1984 Moscow, Russia) Pavel Kiselev graduated from the Institute of Issues of Modern Art and the British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow, specializing in Fine Art. At present, the artist is taking part in a series of group projects being carried out by young artists, and he has received a nomination in the Strabag ArtAward. His works has been presented in solo exhibitions including Random Dialogues at Triumph gallery, Moscow, Russia, and group shows including Artbat Public Art Festival in Almaty, Kazahstan, the Doma Art festival, Vivacom Art Hall, Sofia, Bulgar; «Sale» project, Cambridge, UK; “Inner Geography”, Random gallery, Moscow; “News in the forest”, group installation in WT4 restaurant, Moscow; V_Museum Platform Moscow, Berliner festspiele, Berlin; and the Festival of young modern art “INNOMINIS”, Novosibirsk among others.. Pavel Kiselev employs an original technique: his abstract objects-sculptures are created from large quantities of wooden components of a monochrome color. Pavel Kiselev’s focus of attention is riveted to volumes, shapes and textures, with the aid of which he endlessly models a multitude of points of view and interpretations in his works. www.pavelkiselev.org Aoto Oouchi (b. 1976 Vienna, Austria) Aoto Oouchi (computer-generated name) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His work explores different phenomena that occur in and through social media, both in the sense of the language production of images and in their consumption. Through repetition and duplication Aoto Oouchi aims at rethinking the ways in which objects are shaped ontologically, how certain types of aesthetic languages and objects become fetishes that define social groups within pop culture or how value-driven systems as likes and reblogs create a specific setting for the work. Just as the actual depiction of objects in real life hold a different value than when shared in the internet as a 3d sculpture, Aoto Oouchi likes to use these schemes to create 3d object installations and watch their symbolic value shift and reshape by reseeding it back to the social media. aotooouchi.tumblr.com


Pavel Kiselev (b. 1984 莫斯科,俄罗斯) Pavel Kiselev 毕业于现代艺术学院和英国高等艺术设计学院的艺术专业。 目前参与了一系列由年轻艺术家发起的团体设计项目,并获得Strabag艺术奖的提名。他的独展包括莫斯 科凯旋艺术馆举办的“随机的对话”,他也参加了在哈萨克斯坦的阿拉木图举办的Artbat公共艺术节、保加 利亚首都索非亚的维亚康姆艺术馆举办的多玛艺术节、英国剑桥《出售》项目、莫斯科随机画廊的“内心地 形”展、莫斯科WT4餐馆展出的群体装置“森林的消息”,柏林艺术节的V_Museum Platform Moscow的展览 和新西伯利亚无名现代艺术小卒的艺术节。 Pavel Kiselev 采用了一种独创的技艺:他用大量单色木质部件组成抽象的物体-雕塑。Pavel Kiselev的关 注点集中于体量、形状、质地等,通过这种技巧及其艺术创作,他不懈地形塑众多的观点与多元的阐释。 www.pavelkiselev.org Aoto Oouchi (b. 1976 维也纳,奥地利) Aoto Oouchi (计算机生成名字)曾于维也纳美术学院学习。 他的作品旨在探索产生自社会媒介的纷繁现象,既关乎形象的语言表达,又关乎形象的消费。通过重复和 复制,Aoto Oouchi希望重新思索客体如何在本体论意义上被塑造的方式,特定类型的美学术语与对象如 何成为在流行文化圈中定义社会群体的偶像,以及诸如likes和reblogs等价值驱动系统如何为艺术提供了具 体的创作背景。 正因对现实生活中的观察对象的如实描绘转化为网络环境中分享传播的3D雕塑时会具有不同的价值和意 义,Aoto Oouchi喜欢使用这种技巧创作3D装置,并通过将其重新植入社会媒介去观察这种装置所反映的 价值的转移和重塑。 aotooouchi.tumblr.com


Intelligentsia Intelligentsia explores the relationship between art and life, between concepts and creation. Intelligentsia is a space for the conception and diffusion of ideas and their manifestation in the realm of contemporary art. Intelligentsia presents ideas in the form of texts, publications, images, pictures, photographs, paintings, performances, videos, objects, events. Intelligentsia offers collectible materials that communicate the ideas of artistic production. Intelligentsia creates a space for positions and oppositions, for dialogue and contradictions. Intelligentsia is a platform for converging projects, juxtaposing narratives, and conflicting art. Intelligentsia recognizes that diversity of projects create an intelligence of contemporary art. Intelligentsia is concerned with artistic production and artistic process. Intelligentsia is fueled with the intellectual discourse of art. Intelligentsia presents events as artistic production. Intelligentsia is an independent art space in Beijing. 智先 画廊 智先探索艺术与生活,观念与创作的关系。 概念在这一空间中孕育和传播,并以当代艺术的方式得以展现。 智先的思想通过文本、出版物、影像、图片、摄影、油画、表演、视频、物体、活动的形式呈现。 智先提供具有收藏意义的素材,传播艺术生产的理念。 智先的空间兼容了立场与对峙,对话与矛盾。 智先作为开放的平台,兼有趋同的项目、并置的叙事、冲突的艺术。 智先认识到当代艺术的智慧源于项目的多样性。 智先关注艺术生产及其产生过程。 智先以艺术的思辨讨论为驱动。 智先将活动作为一种艺术生产。 智先是位于北京的独立艺术空间。

www.intelligentsiagallery.com intelligentsia.gallery@gmail.com


Acknowledgements Intelligentsia Gallery would like to thank everybody involved in the realization of this exhibition. Without the enthusiasm of Michelle Garnaut; Geisel Cabrera; Hao Chen / 陈昊; Zhang Yanping / 张燕平; Ronald Frankowski, Joao Dias Pereira, Christian Melz; Li Shan / 小静, Amanda Zhang / 小静; Kai Nan / 南开; Celyn Bricker; Guido Tesio; Annie Wang; Lingbo Liu; Natasha Qin / 覃美律; Jacob Dreyer, Xu Ruiyu / 徐瑞钰

致谢 智先画廊感谢以下诸位对实现此次展览的帮助: Michelle Garnaut; Geisel Cabrera; Hao Chen / 陈昊; Zhang Yanping / 张燕平; Ronald Frankowski, Joao Dias Pereira, Christian Melz; Li Shan / 小静, Amanda Zhang / 小 静; Kai Nan / 南开; Celyn Bricker; Guido Tesio; Annie Wang; Lingbo Liu; Natasha Qin / 覃美律; Jacob Dreyer, Xu Ruiyu / 徐瑞钰

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