“Dream Time” is a bunch present the place fifteen artists and artwork collectives examine the complicated meanings of desires—each as reveries and aspirations—in works that span media together with portray, sculpture, images, video, set up, and efficiency. Desires are extraordinarily personal, depicting a person’s internal world, arousing their secret needs and fears, connecting them to the previous and future, and reinforcing their identification with the self and the collective. Trendy know-how appears to have intruded that personal area. Individuals develop into continuously interrupted by the infinite fragmented info accessible at their fingertips, and disadvantaged of the time to consider extra important subjects—gender and cultural identification, environmental sustainability, subjective notion, intimate relationships, evolution of know-how, private and collective recollections, to call a number of. On this exhibition, the artists and collectives convey these subjects again into focus, presenting ideas, tales, and views primarily based on their numerous private and cultural backgrounds. With their works, “Dream Time” transforms the Central, New and West Galleries at UCCA Beijing right into a dreamscape steeped in psychological and socio-historical fiction, opening a number of sensory and mental channels of the viewers, embedding reconsolidated recollections and reconstructed future photographs from their internal worlds into the desires of the collective, main them to rethink their up to date lives.

The primary art work that guests will encounter whereas coming into the exhibition by means of the West Gallery is a newly commissioned mural Sadly, We Can’t. (2024). Christine Solar Kim created a site-specific mural work utilizing her signature inventive language. She makes an attempt to assemble a spot of encounter impressed by desires and trauma expressed in American Signal Language (ASL), compelling the guests to think about completely different modes of notion. The work additional challenges the presiding narratives of artwork historical past, that are dominated by spoken language. Subsequent, they are going to come to Doreen Chan’s HalfDream (2021–now), by means of which the artist connects folks from completely different backgrounds and identities through a web based platform for dream sharing. Specifically for this exhibition, she designed a brand new interactive construction the place guests can lie again in semi-public area, browse or take heed to the desires of others, and add their very own desires to see if there’s a match.

Transferring on to the New Gallery, 4 our bodies of labor unfold tales from completely different corners of the world. Itziar Okariz leads guests right into a realm of subjectivity through Las Estatuas / The Statues (2019), a set of her murmured dialogues with statues and different items in several nationwide and regional museums. Via these dialogues, it’s as if she has established her personal intimate and unique relationships with the artworks. She will even carry out Diary of Desires (2015–16) through the exhibition and share her current desires to the viewers with a play of phrases. Sky Hopinka’s Lore (2019) pays homage to Hollis Frampton’s experimental movie from the Nineteen Seventies. By combining photographs, collage, and poetry created by the artist, the work tells a narrative that weaves collectively historical past and emotion. Tirdad Hashemi and Soufia Erfanian collectively created a brand new sequence of work that expresses their love, polyamory, and intimacy. Within the works, every flower turns into a singular lover, whispering its personal story and carrying its personal magnificence—a commemoration for his or her family members. As well as, impressed by his personal experiences, Guanyu Xu paperwork the lives of migrants with Resident Aliens (2021–now), depicting their struggles and insecurities even at dwelling, questioning the definition of citizenship and uncertainty.

Lastly, the Central Gallery presents an area the place conventional and fashionable energies intertwine. Aslı Çavuşoğlu and İnci Eviner collectively created Genies of Water (2023) with the hope to revive vitality to a closely polluted river in Turkey. By portray with a symbolic quantity of that river water as ink, the artists made silkscreen prints to redraw photographs of underwater creatures eradicated by air pollution, incorporating parts extracted from city tradition and native mythologies. Feng Zhixuan juxtaposes know-how, mythology and commerce from historic occasions and the distant future by means of the sculpture Starwishenge (2023), made with resin robotic arms from industrial waste, historic cash, and biomaterials. Chin Tsao presents an anachronistic setting together with her ceramics to discover how the East meets the West, the previous influences the long run, and identities evolve with globalization. Evelyn Taocheng Wang attracts on quotes filled with stereotypes within the novel Girl Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, and provides up to date views on these subjects in her False Posters sequence. Her artistic transformation and appropriation of language and context are each humorous and poetic, liberating the standard medium of ink artwork and calligraphy from easy imitations or repetitions.

Additionally within the Central Gallery, Aleksandra Domanović invitations guests to rethink the connection between people, know-how, historical past, and the roles that ladies have performed in these dynamics with a sequence of sculptures impressed by the Belgrade Hand—the world’s first synthetic hand with 5 fingers and sensory suggestions. Ma Qiusha’s newest work Flowers within the Mirror (2023–24) places antiquities and replicas acquired from around the globe in a movable show window, regarding her childhood recollections and her personal identification, each actual and imagined, opening a pathway to the previous. In Peng Zuqiang’s most up-to-date video set up, Autocorrects (2023), the artist invokes considering on amnesia and it’s impacts by means of lyrics lazer-engraved into 16mm movie, with a musical composition impressed by the trope of downtempo style from early Nineteen Nineties Mando-pop music. Collaging a variety of discovered footage, Wang Yuyan’s latest filmic set up The Sleeping World Turns Round (2023) depicts a synthetic lighting infrastructure in a fictive world, hoping to seize a cross-section of our age of obsession with visibility and effectivity, in addition to the afflictions of our want for boundless sight and illumination.

The exhibition ends with Sin Wai Kin’s It’s At all times You (2021), during which the artist reuses 4 masculine drag roles from earlier works, every representing a special projection of their self-image. They kind a boy band, every with a delegated function as a person whereas having an identification that solely capabilities as a part of the bigger group dynamic. In a post-globalized world, how can we keep linked whereas sustaining our individuality and self-identity, and the way can we maintain dreaming concerning the future whereas dwelling in an more and more difficult current? We could by no means attain a conclusive reply, however we will at the least begin with the chances introduced in “Dream Time.”

Collaborating artists:
Aslı Çavuşoğlu (b. 1982, Istanbul) & İnci Eviner (b. 1956, Ankara), Doreen Chan (B. 1987, Hong Kong), Aleksandra Domanović (b. 1981, Novi Unhappy), Feng Zhixuan (b. 1993, Wenzhou), Tirdad Hashemi (b. 1991, Tehran) & Soufia Erfanian (b. 1990, Mashhad), Sky Hopinka (b. 1984, Ferndale), Christine Solar Kim (b. 1980, Orange County), Ma Qiusha (b. 1982, Beijing), Itziar Okariz (b. 1965, Spain), Peng Zuqiang (b. 1992, Changsha), Sin Wai Kin (b. 1991, Toronto), Chin Tsao (b. 1989, Taipei), EvelynTaocheng Wang (b. 1981, Chengdu), Yuyan Wang (b. 1989, Shandong), and Guanyu Xu (b. 1993, Beijing). This exhibition is curated by UCCA curator Yan Fang.

at UCCA, Beijing
till April 28, 2024