2021.11.11 ~ 2021.11.14

ART021 SHANGHAI 2021

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ART021 Shanghai OVR2021 

Arario Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the 2021 edition of ART021 Shanghai with artist Xu Bacheng’s special solo project, The Elephant of Freedom at booth W17. The booth will feature the artist’s recent artworks in a variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, installation and video. This is the artist’s third major show with Arario Gallery, after the 2019 solo exhibition The Island of Immortality at Arario Gallery Shanghai and his solo booth at the 2020 Nanjing Art Fair International.

Born in China in the 1980s, Xu Bacheng grew up in an environment that emphasized collectivism over individualism. However, Xu believes that the creativity of any collective consists of the creativity of countless individuals within it, and the source of individual creativity essentially comes from individual freedom. For Xu, creativity is the fruit of whimsical ideas, the Chinese phrase for which is “Tian Ma Xing Kong” (literally meaning flying horse in the sky), a word Xu Bacheng appropriated and turned into “Tian Xiang Xing Kong” (literally meaning flying elephant in the sky). In the act of quoting the phrase, he replaced the “Ma” with “Xiang,” a recurring motif that has been central to his art since 2020.

The word “Xiang” also contains the meaning of “imagery” in an all-encompassing way, a clever wordplay by the artist to subtly combine his visual language with textual language. The word, along with its animal referent, is grand on a cosmic scale, while being optimistically childish and benignly rebellious at the same time. For the most part, these works are anti-secular, anti-intellectual, anti-system, and anti-solidification. The artist is also adept at merging traditional figurative painting and surrealism, integrating a series of seemingly realistic and familiar yet mysterious and unpredictable characters, elephants, and interstellar landscapes into a dreamlike, epic narrative. The houses, arcades, stairs, pipes, priests, psychic-like aliens, and dolls of man-beasts...Through fables and myth, the transient stream of consciousness is materialized into a lingering phantom, filling the holes and folds of the artist’s pictorial labyrinth.

VIP Preview

November 11 14:00 – 20:00

November 12 13:00 – 20:00

Public Hours

November 13 11:00 – 18:00

November 14 11:00 – 18:00