Joe Bradley, George Condo, Thomas Houseago, Nicolas Party and Zhang Enli in A Leisurely Stroll
19 May—13 August 2023
Group exhibition at Long Museum, Shanghai, China
The theme of this exhibition is A Leisurely Stroll, which points to two concepts that I want to talk about: one is "time and history", and the other is a "way of seeing". The exhibition is not an examination of specific art history, but a reflection on the stages of my dual identity as a museum director and a collector. Both the collection and the founding of Long Museum have been a slow process with small steps, moving forward with the vision of building up to a thousand miles. As evidenced in this exhibition's look at nearly 50 years of global art with the artists as case studies, no matter how intense the stage movements of art development, when we look back at the individual development of each artist, or when we use art history as a framework to narrate important turning points in contemporary art, it is like navigating through time.
The exhibition features a selection of more than 160 pieces of global artworks, looking back at the contemporary art from the late 1970s to the present, all of which echo their respective times and environments. When we have the opportunity to juxtapose artists from around the world, we can observe that artists from different cultures and regions may have had very different narratives about art during the same period; but when we stretch the historical timeline we are viewing and confront these works from a broader spatial and temporal perspective, the intertwining of cultures and mutual influences build a historical picture in this exhibition with the artists at its core. The intention is to show the viewer the dynamic relationship between contemporary art in China and the world at large over the past 50 years, or the individual artist's response to the times and the world in which he or she lives, using art as a method, in the midst of the convergence of world civilisations.
The exhibition attempts to allow the audience to step slowly through the contemporary art landscape of the last 50 years and to appreciate the creation of the times in the wave of history. The continuous undulating and interrelating spaces of the Long Museum (West Bund) are also treated as a landscape in this exhibition, with more than a hundred works spread out in the space, inviting the viewer to linger in and out of them, to slow down the gaze, to appreciate the richness of each work's creation and multiple perspectives. As a way of viewing, the audience will feel the power of art by "a leisurely stroll".