A Hundred Days of Solitude: Salvation through Adaptation Chapter 1

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In our group exhibition “One Hundred Days of Solitude” opening June 23th 2020 through September 30th, the Art+ Shanghai Gallery’s artists will reveal their attempts to re-create and capture that new sense of life. The exhibition will address, what we now call, the new reality, not as it is experienced by one observer, but as it was individually experienced by those with different backgrounds from their points of solitude and confinement.

Owing to its prolonged almost four-month duration and a great number of story-tellers, the narrative of this exhibition will be composed of several chapters, with the first titled “Salvation through Adaptation”. This chapter will boast works with a striking variety of media, size and form featuring new series of collage work from Ye Hongxing, quarantine diaries on Tibetan paper by Wang Haichuan, 3D-printed ancient-wisdom-inspired sculpture by Liu Ren, meticulous pigment and ink paintings by He Jian, photomontages by a renowned photographer Yao Lu, digital drawings by Yang Xiaogang from Tamen’s collective, miniature watercolors by Pang Yun, scrupulously knotted and embroidered works by Lin Fanglu, and relief-like mixed media works by Chen Linggang, and a new sculpture of a hooded scarecrow by Huang Yulong.

As the title suggests, the first chapter of the exhibition will tell stories of adaptation, and of what it felt like to work and live in the unique and unprecedented circumstances with many of the artists being cast away from their studios for months, yet consumed by the urging impulse to create and express.

“Disasters will definitely change and reshape the rules of human behavior and ways of thinking. 2020 will surely be written in the history of human civilization as one of the key years. As an artist, you should record and present this special period in one’s work and artistic ways,” – commented Ye Hongxing on the new series of work she was creating as the world was facing an imminent and invisible threat.