Guggenheim Museum Presents New Art from Greater China

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Tales of Our Time, an exhibition featuring nine newly commissioned works by artists born in mainland China, Hong Kong or Taiwan.

This is the second exhibition of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative, a long-term research, curatorial, and collections-building program at the Guggenheim Museum.

Though diverse in subjects and strategies, the works are united by the artists' use of storytelling to propose alternative ways of looking at place.

Working in drawing, animation, video, photography, sculpture, installation, and participatory intervention, the artists in the exhibition address the concept of geography and territory in ways as specific as where they are based or as big as China itself, which they see as a concept constantly being questioned and reinvented.

The artists freely cross divides to examine the tensions between past and present, myth and fact, reality and dreams, rationality and absurdity, and individuality and collectivity.

The artists represented in Tales of Our Time are Chia-En Jao, Kan Xuan, Sun Xun, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Tsang Kin-Wah, Yangjiang Group, and Zhou Tao.

"The artists represented in Tales of Our Time vary greatly in their practices and viewpoints," said Xiaoyu Weng, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art. "But they share a broad perspective, one that places China's culture, history, and social reality in the context of the wider world. And like so many artists today, they register acute discomfort with the tension between the personal experiences of regular people and the dominant narratives and conventions of power."

All commissioned works will enter the Guggenheim's collection.

Public Programs

On Friday, 4 November at 4 pm , the public programs accompanying Tales of Our Time begin with a discussion about the intersections of art, urbanism, and literature, featuring Cosmin Costinas and David Harvey.

Special exhibition tours in Mandarin occur on Saturdays at noon starting from tomorrow, 5 November 2016.

And on Wednesday afternoons, beginning 9 November 2016, local tea brewers serve tea in a gallery on the museum's fourth floor, inviting visitors to converse and contemplate calligraphy and a Chinese garden as part of Yangjiang Group's participatory installation Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken.

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