SPE - PERFORMANCE AND EXHIBITION SPACE   H 18.00

2-3 APRIL 2016

Yan Xing
The Official Story

 
Lessons on the Far East, 2015
performance; photo: Quincy Stamper. Courtesy Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

The performative research of Yan Xing incorporates diverse media; photography, video and installation, woven into obscure and often disturbing narratives, in which references from Chinese tradition and Western historical-artistic memory are indiscriminately hybridised, forming narrative complex structures, supported by a large dose of voyeurism and reflecting critically on the way the stories are transmitted and received, whether personal or collective.

In The Official Story, produced by the Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio, the artist develops a fictional story, focussed on the intricate dynamics between a group of seven students, who go into the countryside to debate art and literature. A potentially never-ending story that draws on multiple references, from Plato’s Symposium to Pasolini’s Decameron, continually generating itself, in which the artist combines decadent aesthetics to his well-known talent for storytelling.

suitable for an adult audience only

Yan Xing (Born Chongqing, 1986. Lives and works in Beijing). In 2012 he won the Best Young Artist Award from Chinese Contemporary Art Award and also received a nomination for the Future Generation Art Prize from the Pinchuk Art Centre and Focus on Talents Project from Today Art Museum. He has exhibited and performed extensively, at venues such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Montevideo; Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine; Tromsø Kunstforening, Tromsø; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; China Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Beijing; Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. His works have been featured at 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2012); 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2012) and 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (2015), among others.

Yan Xing