Mariagrazia Costantino — 王 Wáng

王 wáng

OCAT Shanghai

The LANDSEASKY exhibition project evoked in my mind the Chinese character “king” – 王 wáng – that in the cultural tradition and history of China is the one who connects the sky and the earth. The character shows three horizontal traits crossed by a vertical line: the central horizontal stroke actually stands for the human sphere, somewhere in-between sky and earth. At a further, careful consideration, this is exactly the function of the “medium”, that in the pre-modern world is the offcer of shamanic ritual (the one connecting gods and men, or the dead and the live), it’s now also the paradigm of technology, the so-called “media”. All these aspects make LANDSEASKY a pretty unique project.

By bringing this project inside the space of OCAT Shanghai, Kim Machan and the exhibited artists have brought the enchantment of serene landscapes inside the old bank warehouse at the ground foor of a deco building located on the northern shore of the Suzhou River, and showed how the same landscapes may fnd a meaning, but also get disrupted by the human intervention, establishing a thread which connects different worlds: China (eminently man-made) and Australia (dominated by nature); East and West; city and countryside. What LANDSEASKY does indeed is bridging instances inbuilt in human vision, in the way we relate to space, the way we control it and use it to get an understanding of the physical and social world and our presence in it. At the same time, landscapes can contain history or be contained in it, they can shape our way to relate to society or be shaped by socio-historical circumstances, and cultural values. Landscapes can be even modeled by fashion, but eventually always go back to the basic alignment of natural elements, and the slightly curved line (always reminding us the shape of this world) separating the sky from the land – or the sea.

The enlightening experience of hosting this exhibition has made us and the audience come close to another possibility and approach to media-based art, one that fnds its inception with Land Art and the conceptual experiments with space of the Sixties, but it’s now enriched with references to contemporariness, to new economical and political courses, to the contradictions implied in the encounter/clash between old landscapes and new sceneries, between physical dimensions and virtual or augmented reality, which is no less real.

LANDSEASKY also marks the collaboration between OCAT Shanghai and MAAP. Organising this show with Kim Machan has been a very valuable experience for the international dialogue it triggered but also for the insight we could gain, through the eyes of Kim, her team, and of course those of the seventeen featured artists showing that media art is a genuinely cross-national and transcultural language. From my personal point of view, in these time of uncertainties when uniting moral and economical forces has almost become an imperative, when large (and not so large) institutions are somehow delegitimized and local artistic practice cannot and should not be self-suffcient, this type of cooperation across nations, cultural contexts and operative backgrounds is a successful model that is already becoming a standard for the years ahead. We were extremely happy to act as forerunners, and we are sure this will not remain an isolated case or exception.

Mariagrazia Costantino

Artistic Director at OCAT Shanghai