Highway to Hell

Collateral Event of the 56th International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia

The 56th International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia will be held at the Arsenale and Giardini of Venice, Italy from May 9thto November 22nd, 2015.The theme “All the World’s Futures” put forth by chief curator Okwui Enwezor, is aimed at demonstrating and contemplating “how to precisely capture, comprehend, examine and explain the anxiety of this era”.
 
Through this exhibition “Highway to Hell”, the Chinese artist Jiang Heng uses his own personal experience of growing up with China’s reform and opening up initiatives to “interpret” contemporary Chinese people’s “anxiety toward the world”. Such a thinking pattern featuring individualized visions of regional development has attracted the attention of the organizing committee for the 56th International Art Exhibition -la Biennale di Venezia, who, therefore, extended the invitation to “Highway to Hell” for the Special Exhibition.
 
The current artist JiangHeng's exhibition, organized bythe Genoa Museum of Contemporary Art in Italy and co-hosted by Hubei Museum of Art in China, will be characterized by 23 sets of over 100 artworks including oil paintings, installations, multi-media, and porcelains. The curators for this exhibition are Ji Shaofeng, vice director of the Hubei Museum of Art and only winner of the “Exhibition Planning Prize” of the 55thInternational Art Exhibition -la Biennale di Venezia, and Ilaria Bonacossa, director of the Genoa Museum of Contemporary Art and co-curator for the Icelandic National Pavilion during the Venice Biennale in 2013.

“Highway to Hell’ will put on show JiangHeng's oil paintings from The Flowersseries, glazed colorful porcelain devices, andworks from the Monogatariseries. The exhibition highlights the artist’s personal reflection on contemporary art, society and life. The theme of this visual narration, apart from girls, cartoon Barbie dolls and butterflies, now also includes new elements such as flowers, pills and skeletons, which marks a leapfrog development in terms of image utilization.

The images of beautiful girls in The Flowersseries constitute the crystallization of JiangHeng’s earlier personal idea, statement and emotional experience, bringing to the audience an overwhelmingly visual delight and joy, mixed with an implied modicum of disillusionment, namely when we can’t hold any expectations for the youth that has gone and the inertia of thisboring era, then the illusoryreality and dream will naturally and completely be shattered. The skeletons and skulls from The Final Series not only please the senses, but indicate the supply-demand relationship for fashion consumption in the consumption-driven society. This is the irreplaceable urban life experience for the artists, which incurs reflection on the general problems brought about in society, or industrial society and post-industrial society.

When beautiful young girls no longer serve as the conceptual subjects of JiangHeng, he plays as a producer for culture industry. Hence, his artistic creation no longer represents the realization process of his creative skills, but the procedure of mechanic operation and duplication on the assembly line. When beautiful girls, Barbie dolls and flowers have been reduced to the “image” of the consumption society, as pointed out by Baudrillardthat“image has already penetrated into contemporary culture as a significant factor...”In a post-modern society, image does not imitate previous reality, it actually replaces reality. In his works, “dreams come true painfully”; “the happy moment of achieving beauty is accompanied by death”; “the extreme beauty renders real into fake”; JiangHeng seems to be narrating the “disturbing future” where beauty production and life destruction are peas and carrots.

This exhibition, to be held from May 9thto November 22nd, 2015, will be hosted by the world-renowned Italian Genoa Museum of Contemporary Art and co-hosted by Hubei Museum of Art in China, with the support of cooperative organizations such as Global Art Affairs Foundation, WeExhibit and Zhao Feng Heng Ye Corporation, Ltd. The planning supervisors for this exhibition are Fang Xudong and Xu Lili. Xu Lili is Weexhibit's Asia project director, the mastermind and the artistic director of “Highway to Hell”.

Vai alla guida d'arte di Venice