Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the presentation of the international group exhibition "LIMINAL CROSSING" on July 13, 2024 at 4pm in Beijing 2nd Space. Curated by Larys Frogier, the exhibition brings together more than 60 representative works by 9 renowned and emerging artists.
LIMINAL CROSSING is an unparalleled exhibition that encompass historical, acclaimed and emerging artists whose artworks unfold micro-explorations of materials and elements that compose our natural, cultural, social and digital worlds in transition. From the subtle, deep and critical attention paid to the rustles of life that are often neglected in exclusive binary systems of thoughts and dominant power structures, these artists engage in daring representations of shapes, colors and textures that offers reinvented perceptions of the living and creating open forms of languages.
Something is considered liminal when it stands at the limit of our perceptions. Our senses aren't fully capable of perceiving it and yet, if we pay close attention to micro contact zones between the living and artificial components, the liminal would emerge, reflecting something more profound shining through life as an on-going process of creation. At the crossroads of cultural iconographies and collective memories, vernacular practices and virtual realities, science and art history, the artists of LIMINAL CROSSING nurture transformative and creative practices, unveiling powerful shifts towards a more subtle and complex inter-relations between living beings, artefacts and technologies.
The ways we can engage with the changes from deep perception of the living and nurture constructive relations with each other are becoming precious and vital. In a society obsessed with fast industrial/technological/digital development, economical growth, mass consumerism, and rapid innovations, speed is the common word used to qualify spectacular change in a short lapse of time. In the arts, the futurist movement in the early XXth century, but also today with the frenetic (mis)uses of "digital technologies", the assimilation of change with speed often reflects an ideological utopia in order to achieve perfection of shapes, sounds, images, spaces, species and ecosystems.
What if we look at movement and change from a totally different perspective than speed, productivity and perfection, and that it is visible in the liminal contact zones between particles, light, air, surfaces, shapes, colors, solid objects and... people?
In (astro)physics, instead of speed, scientists use the word velocity to describe more complex equations between the time/movement/displacement of a particle, sound, light, an object or an image with regards to different parameters such as direction, magnitude, gravity, time, mass or momentum, resistance, friction... In physics and fluid dynamics, drag is referred to as fluid resistance, as a force acting opposite to the relative motion of any object, moving with respect to a surrounding fluid. In marine science, the photic also called the epipelagic zone, is the uppermost layer of a body of water that receives the sunlight, allowing phytoplankton to perform photosynthesis in the production of more than 70% of oxygen on earth. The bottom-most, or aphotic zone named the abyssalpelagic (below 1000m), is supposedly the region of darkness which includes most of the ocean waters. In fact, the aphotic zone is not as dark as we imagined: in the abyss, unknown living species were discovered and studied-on for the purpose of developing different spectrum of shapes, colors and lights. Unfortunately, on behalf of "green energies", the exploitation and the destruction of the aphotic zone had expanded across different oceans with the extraction of minerals to fortify our electronics, A.I. and VR technology.
Tapping into a 'micro and macro sources of energy', LIMINAL CROSSING conveys a profound imprint on contemporary art, driving social and cultural criticality, sensorial and emotional experiences. While societies are obsessed with simplistic dichotomies such as new vs old, tradition vs innovation, vernacular vs digital, north vs south, universe vs multiverse, how artists can touch on the off-field of images and develop artistic gestures that nurture transversal representations between human and non-human components, can they be a part of the natural, cultural, technological or imaginary worlds?
LIMINAL CROSSING offers three main field experiences:
Dragging... An Extra-Ordinary Life
Despite grand narratives claiming the end of the era of painting, in the midst of obsessive technological innovations, painting stands as an open field for artists to continuously remake histories and to offer substantial experiences that intimately inter-relate our perceptions and emotions with the extra-ordinary.
Pieter Vermeersch creates subtle but powerful spectrums of color graduation on canvas and architectural surroundings, and also combining paint with other materials and techniques such as silkscreen on marble. Far from being intrusive, his art is based on the emergence of intimate vibrations, resonances, and connections with our body, urban and natural environments, also with our inner mental space.
John Armleder delves into painting and abstraction but always by pointing our gaze to the collusion between mundane furniture, objects, music instruments that compose our daily life, turning upside down our social reality in order to bring attention to what we often disregard at the core of our "extra-ordinary" life.
Christian Bonnefoi explores the infinite possibilities of painting, questioning its predicates and histories, experimenting multiple relations to surface, transparence and opacity, margin and extension, combination and proliferation. His stunning collages made with different layers of paper, connecting us with the power in-visible image.
Welcoming... The Ones With No Name
The shift from the (post)industrial era to the digital one is vertiginous and decisive: while machines are endlessly duplicating commodities to satisfy eager consumerist societies, the digital is now able to predict and control bodies, identities and behaviors.
Jannis Kounellis has radically undermined the established norms of industry, culture and the arts, while developing a profound and unique poetic gesture based on our capacity to engage with the down to earth re-incorporation of life. Bedframes, charcoal, fire, clothing, oil lamp, lead, iron plate etc. are combined to create large panels of "paintings", reconnecting us to an extremely powerful experience of rawness and immediate materiality of the world.
Duo artist Ittah Yoda expand the medium of painting by integrating AI and VR with living components, vernacular practices, scientific researches, creating new representations of unidentified, mysterious, and deep organic shapes and environments, constantly engaging in on-going process of transformations.
Instead of using the brush to paint, Nicholas Hlobo opts for a knife and a scissor to cut through and sew the canvas, coupled with other materials (leather, ribbons...), making visible scars, wounds, gaps, stitches as a dynamic and alternative way of re-mapping (post)colonial histories, individual and collective memories. Floating on backgrounds that are freed from any composition, Hlobo's shapes can either refer to abstract or organic forms, microscopic cells or spatial constellations.
Representing... Beyond Languages, Frontiers and Landscapes
In art and social history, it is now acknowledged that "landscape" is a human construction of what we used to call "reality", "nature" or "society". However, a few artists are challenging the limits of "landscape" as an artistic genre, reaching out to the unsaid, the forgotten, and sketching out the importance of keeping the doors wide open to multiple forms, languages and interpretations of our environments.
Anna-Eva Bergman created minimal paintings with metal leaves (gold and/or silver) associated with vinyl, oil or acrylic paint applied on wooden panel or canvas. Her art creation is based on intimate but deep perceptions of natural elements (air, water, earth, metal, fire/light), paying careful attention to the interstices allowing the contact zones between mountains, rocks, skies, lands and seas.
Seffa Klein, grand-daughter of Yves Klein, engages in an alchemical and fastidious process of melting bismuth to produce her paintings. The elemental metal has distinct chemical properties including a high density, a low melting point, and expansion upon solidification. According to different parameters of time, temperature, light, liquefaction and solidification, the metal in fusion will generate multiple iridescent colors from the refraction and reverberation of light upon its surface.
Paul Mignard transposes landscape as a journey towards fascinating and enigmatic layers of shapes, colors, materials, luminosities... Blowing glitter pigments on the canvas and combining abstract shapes with space constellations, symbols, esoteric signs, ancient scriptures, he creates counter-cartographies of our worlds in mutation, offering an impressive experience where organic forms, vascular systems, ancient traditions, contemporary cultures are resisting any form of enclosure, exclusion and systematization.
LIMINAL CROSSING unties the codes of representation to better link the elements of the living in their capacity to engage us in transformations, unexpected encounters, extensions and combinations, germinations and efflorescences. At the opposite of unproductive argumentations opposing the media, technologies, geographies, people, cultures, it is worth to perceive and question what could be the porosities and the inter-relations between the living and in our imaginary worlds. From the intimate experience of the natural elements to the powerful embracement of theoretical concepts, traditional cosmologies and the digital metaverse, there might not be that much contradictions but full of infinite possibilities!
EXHIBITING WORKS
Artists
Anna-Eva Bergman
Anna-Eva Bergman was born in 1909, married twice to Hans Hartung. She has recently benefited of a renewed and important interest. Recognized during her life-time, her works were left in the shadows by art historians after she died. Besides the fact that she was a woman at a time when art history was a matter of men, it’s also the singularity of her work and her artistic choices that overshadowed her importance in the post-war art scene. As Annie Claustres writes it : “Anna-Eva Bergman’s production isn’t part of the linear history of the “avant-gardes”. The use of materials, such as gold leaf or silver with paint and the attachment to a symbolism bound to a metaphysical conception of landscape, places her in a remote dimension from the aesthetics issues of the 20th century.” It’s probably the reason why her works have found such an echo in the contemporary art scene where she’s compared to living artists. Situated where the “abstraction meets the nature” as stressed out by the historian, Ole Henrik Moe, her work strike by its contemporaneity as far as its universality.
Anna-Eva Bergman’s work was exhibited twice in Turin, first in 1969 for a retrospective at the Museo Civico and in 1975 at the Centro Annunciata. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo held a major exhibition of her work in November 2015 and, more recently, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid has devoted a major monographic exhibition to her in 2021. In 2023, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris held a major retrospective of her work. Present in numerous museums in the world, her works have rejoined different contemporary collections such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), the Samdani Art Foundation (Bangladesh), and the Carré d’Art (Nîmes), etc.
Christian Bonnefoi
Christian Bonnefoi born in France in 1948, he has been a unique figure in the contemporary French art scene since the 1970s. He developed a practice based on a radical approach of disarticulation and rearticulation of the components of painting, particularly through the technique of collage. With a particular interest in the materiality of painting and the geometry of forms, Bonnefoi’s work oscillates between abstraction and figuration, while creating numerous dialogues with the masters and avant-gardes of the 20th century (Matisse, Picasso, geometric abstraction, minimalism, surface support, etc.). Author of numerous articles and books, Bonnefoi is currently director of the “L’Éclectique” collection at Eliott, which publishes 4 to 5 volumes a year on art, psychoanalysis, philosophy and theology.
Christian Bonnefoi’s work is held and has been shown in international museums and exhibitions, including the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou in Paris, which hosted his first retrospective in 2008; the Musée Matisse, Cateau-Cambrésis, Nice (FR) ; Fondation Jean-Paul Najar, Dubai (SA); Fondation Hermès, Le Forum, Tokyo (JAP); Fondation Hermès, La Verrière, Brussels (BE); MoMA PS1, New York (USA); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (FR); FNAC, Fond National d’Art Contemporain, Paris (FR); etc.
Ittah Yoda
Ittah Yoda is formed by Kai Yoda and Virgile Ittah based between Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo. They both attended the Royal College of Arts in London. Kai Yoda initially studied environmental information at the prestigious KEIO University in Tokyo, before pursuing photography and moving image studies at the Royal College of Arts in London in 2011 where he met Virgil Ittah who specialized in sculpture. The duo formed following their graduation from the Royal College of Arts in 2013.
Ittah Yoda’s practice constitutes the prefiguration of a post-anthropocene world, that of a “symbiocene” where the human, the natural and the digital would live harmoniously. This term of “symbiocene” is based on the concept of symbiosis, this lasting and mutually-beneficial relationship for each being involved in this exchange. Symbiotic relationships can already be observed in nature, such as the one between phytoplankton and zooplankton, which the duo studied with biologists in order to abstract it and make it the intellectual and artistic material that links all the elements of their varied practice. Their work must be thought of as an ecosystem in its own right, where each of the many mediums they invest (sculpture, installation, virtual reality, painting, furniture, etc…) acts as a species and where each form shares genetic-artistic information with its ancestors.
Galerie Poggi held their first solo exhibition in Spring 2023, alongside several group and solo exhibitions at the Centre Culturel Jean Cocteau in Les Lilas (FR), the Musée des Beaux Arts d’Angers (FR) and the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage (FR). Their works are shown at Huiden Club in Rotterdam and at Collection Lambert in Avignon in early 2024. Ittah Yoda has already had numerous exhibitions, including Paris + by Art Basel, Paris (FR), the Armory Show, New York (US), the Palais Augmenté, Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris (FR), the Biennale de Nice, Le 109, Nice (FR), the Rencontres d’Arles, Arles (FR), Poush Manifesto, Paris (FR), Sprout Curation, Tokyo (JP), Annka Kultys Gallery, London (UK), Cité International des Arts, Paris (FR), Frieze N°9 Cork Street, London (UK), ARCO Madrid, Madrid (ES), etc. They are part of the most promising artists of 2022 according to the newspaper Le Monde.
Jannis Kounellis (1936-2017)
Jannis Kounellis (1936-2017) was a Greek-Italian artist associated with the Arte Povera movement. Born in 1936, in Piraeus, Greece, Kounellis later moved to Rome, where he became a prominent figure in the international art scene. In the early 1960s, he emerged as a key exponent of Arte Povera, a radical art movement that emphasized a raw, elemental aesthetic and a rejection of traditional artistic mediums.
Kounellis gained widespread recognition for his groundbreaking installations that incorporated found objects, live animals, and diverse materials. In 1969, he presented one of his most iconic works, Untitled (12 Horses), which featured live horses tethered to the walls of a gallery space. This piece exemplified his interest in creating immersive, multisensory experiences that challenged the boundaries between art and life. Throughout his career, Kounellis continued to explore themes of transformation, ritual, and the relationship between the natural and industrial worlds. His works often incorporated everyday materials such as coal, steel, wood, and cloth, contributing to the distinctive aesthetic of Arte Povera.
Jannis Kounellis exhibited widely across the globe, participating in major art events, including Documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale. His works are collected by many important art galleries, foundations and private individuals in the world. He is the artist who has exhibited most frequently in the most important museums around the world. Since 1972, he has participated in the Venice Biennale seven times. He was invited to participate in the Kassel Documenta for ten years from 1972 to 1982.
Kounellis passed away on February 16, 2017, in Rome, leaving behind a rich and influential body of work that continues to be celebrated for its experimental nature and its profound engagement with the human experience.
John Armleder
John Armleder was born in Geneva in 1948. He is one of the most influential Swiss artist of his generation. His career spans five decades and synthesises many of the competing aesthetic developments associated with that period. Student of Fluxus in Geneva in the 1960s, and founder of the Ecart group, Armleder was later, in the 1980s, associated with Neo-Geometric Conceptualism. He is known for the variety of his work, which combines Fluxus spirit and abstract painting, readymade and sculpture, performance and room-size installations.
Armleder’s Pour Paintings focus attention on the movement of paint across the canvas as it is thrown. In each he privileges sweeping, calligraphic arcs (complete with the drips that fall from them), channeling the energies of abstract expressionism and action painting. And yet, as is often true of his work, these paintings somehow replace the solemnity of their modernist predecessors with a light-hearted appreciation for the ingenious nature and innate visual interest of their materials, not to mention the very act of creating and looking at energetic splashes of color.
Exhibitions (selected): “YAKETY YAK”, MRAC, France（ 2023 ） ； “Again, Just Again”, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai， China（ 2021 ）；“IT NEVER ENDS”，Centre Pompidou，Brussels，Belgium（ 2021 ）； “DELLAMATERIA SPIRITUALE”, MAXXI, Rome, Italy（ 2020 ） ； Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA（ 2019 ） ； Schirn, Frankfurt, Germany（ 2019 ） ； MADRE, Naples, Italy（ 2018 ） ； Fondazione Museion, Bolzano, Italy（ 2018，2016 ） ；Le Consortium, Dijon, France（ 2014， 1996， 1989）and so on.
Armleder was awarded the MERET OPPENHEIM PRIZE in 2011, the LEENAARDS FOUNDATION PRIZE in 2007, and the VILLE DE GENÈVE PRIZE in 1995. He has participated in the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Greece (2013); the Yokohama Triennale of Contemporary Art, Japan (2008); the Prague Biennale, Czech Republic (2008); the 7th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, France (2003); the 6th Lugano Sculpture Biennale, Switzerland (2001); and the 42nd Venice Biennale, Italy (1986).
Nicholas Hlobo
Nicholas Hlobo was born in 1975, Cape Town, South Africa, lives and works in Johannesburg. He began his career around the end of apartheid in 1994, when there was a new sense of freedom and national pride in South Africa. Hlobo’s subtle commentary on the democratic realities of his home country and concerns with the changing international discourse of art remain at the core of his work. Using tactile materials such as ribbon, leather, wood, and rubber detritus that he melds and weaves together, Hlobo creates intricate two- and three-dimensional hybrid objects. Each material holds a particular association with cultural, gendered, sexual, or ethnic identity. Together, the works create a complex visual narrative that reflects the cultural dichotomies of Hlobo’s native South Africa as well as those that exist around the world. His evocative, anthropomorphic imagery and metaphorically charged materials elucidate the artist’s own multifaceted identity within the context of his South African heritage.
Hlobo received a fine art degree from Johannesburg’s Technikon Witwatersrand in 2002. His work is included in numerous international public and private collections, including Tate Modern, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art, Savannah; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, Cape Town. Solo museum exhibitions have been held at the Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague (2016); Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia (2010) and Tate Modern, London (2008). Hlobo has participated in several biennales including the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2012), 54th Venice Biennale (2011), 6th Liverpool Biennial (2010) and 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China (2008).
Paul Mignard
Paul Mignard was born in 1989 in Paris, France, his work explores the many aspects of landscape, whether interior or exterior, real or imaginary, sometimes reconstructed from memories of travel. He works on printed fabrics or blank canvases without frames which are then nailed to the wall. Mixing pigments and glitter, he creates dreamlike images inspired by cartography, mysticism and anthropology.
Working with an acrylic medium, he sifts or blows pigments, metal powders and glitter dust directly onto loose canvases, sometimes printed beforehand and always exhibited unframed. His colorful aqueous compositions unfold visual palimpsests that evoke occult charts, linking motifs pertaining to the human body and nature to esoteric signs, geometric forms, and partial reproductions of ancient scriptures – notably pictograms and ideograms. Profoundly inspired by Taoist doctrines, Paul Mignard further suggests the mutual transformation of the self and its environment through his depiction of mental landscapes, where the past and the present, reality and imagination, as well as the sacred and the profane aren’t separated but irrevocably connected.
He was recently invited for a residency at the Domaine des Oseraies (Faverolles, France). In 2023, Paul Mignard is invited to produce an original work for the IN/SITU program of Expo Chicago 2023. His works have been exhibited in solo and group shows, including “Nopal” at Galerie Poggi (Paris, France), “The Return” at Fabre (Paris, France), “Outside Our” at the Villa Emerige (Paris, France), “Le temps des assassins” (The Time of the Assassins) at the Galerie Michel Journiac (Paris, France), and “Rappelles toi de la couleur des fraises” (Remember the color of strawberries) » at the Crédac (Ivry-sur-Seine, France).
Pieter Vermeersch
Pieter Vermeersch was born in Kortrijk in 1973, his artistic research of painting expands beyond the confinement of the canvas. His work often consists of large spatial interventions, consistently subverting territory whether conceived for an exhibition space or adjusted to a pre-existing architectural site. In addition to the immersive, painterly installations and gradient wall paintings, his oeuvre also includes an array of ephemeral zero degree paintings on canvas. Pieces are brought to a concrete reality by the irreversible process of chiseling and milling natural stone. His works are complimented by a series of photographic prints or marble slabs reactivated with delicate touches of paint, a stroke of the brush or gradual color planes. With representation and abstraction set as parameters, Vermeersch’s oeuvre triggers infinitesimal perceptual experiences, presenting us with a sense of color that is referential of the gap between appearance and disappearance; the gap in which the divisions between two and three dimensional, immaterial and tangible, time and space are blurred.
Vermeersch won the "Young Belgian Painter" Award in 2007 and now lives and works in Turin, Italy. He has held solo exhibitions at major artists around the world, including the Blueproject Art Foundation in Barcelona, Spain, the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts in Belgium, and the Ibaraki Prefecture North Art Festival in Japan. His commissioned permanent installation projects include the exterior wall of the Galeries Lafayette in Biarritz, France, and the salt tanks on the roads of Geneva, Switzerland. His works have also been collected by the National Bank of Belgium, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, and the Rose Art Museum in the United States. Vermeers is represented by Perrotin and his works have participated in the Frieze Art Fair in New York, the Basel Art Fair in Switzerland, the Basel Art Fair in Hong Kong, and the West Bund Art & Design Fair.
Seffa Klein
Seffa Klein was born in 1996 in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, Seffa Klein is the granddaughter of Yves Klein and the daughter of artists Kathy Klein and Yves Amu Klein. She has an impressive artistic pedigree and is known for her works on abstraction, alchemy and brain science. She was named by artnet one of 9 emerging Los Angeles artists to watch in 2019.
Since 2017, she has been creating works on glass canvas using not paint, but bismuth, which she ignites to bring out its colors, playing with the iridescence of this metal and its symbolic, if not alchemical, significance. More than purely abstract, these are works that represent cosmic energies or geometric systems based on a sacred mathematics governing the laws of the universe. Passionate about science, particularly mathematics and chemistry, Seffa Klein fuses purely conceptual and/or spiritual, even meditative, methods with a profoundly manual and physical practice: playing with fire to transform matter in its form and internal organization, drawing and sculpting in molten metal, sometimes combined with plaster, immolating flowers, and congealing plants within the concretions of cooled metal.While resolutely turned towards the cosmos, Seffa Klein’s work is equally rooted in the natural, mineral, plant, and animal worlds.
Curator
Larys Frogier
Larys Frogier is the former Director of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai. Since 2023, Larys Frogier is the scientific and artistic director for the long term research program "Becoming Worlds" lead by the Culture Europe Agency/Relais Culture Europe (Paris), in the framework of the Horizon Europe Program initiated by the European Commission (Brussels). As a curator, critic and art historian, he is involved in artistic and social challenges in post-global contexts where ongoing social, economical, cultural transformations demand new ways of interrelations, citizenship and reinvented creativity.
He has curated numerous exhibitions and published extensive essays on the works of international artists: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Nan Goldin, Paola Pivi, UgoRondinone, Wang Du, Yang Jiechang.
Previously the Director of the contemporary art centre La Criée in Rennes (France), he curated long-term projects (symposiums, residencies, exhibitions, publications), which question the links and ruptures between broadening transcontinental areas. Chair of the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART jury since 2013 at the Rockbund Art Museum, he is conceiving this new award, exhibition and research program as an evolving platform to promote emerging artists and to question Asia as a construction to investigate rather than a monolithic area or fixed identities.
Larys Frogier taught art theory, history of art, and curatorial studies at the University of Rennes, while he was also a researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and at the Archives for Art Criticism.