Incarnation - Liu Yue
2019.11.30 - 2020.02.24
Artist:
Liu Yue
Liu Yue: Incarnation
November 30th 2019 – February 24th 2020
CLC Gallery Venture is pleased to present Liu Yue’s Incarnation, the artist’s third exhibition with the gallery after the Mass in 2016, and Owl in 2018. Bringing together a substantial group of found objects and scavenged materials, Incarnation furthers the artist’s long-term project Maximized Uniqueness, and explores the constantly evolving relationship between materiality and spatiality.
Liu Yue is known for his long-term, system atic and laborious development of chiefly two projects: Cognitive Studies, and Maximized Uniqueness, both started in 2006. While the former pertains to the decontextualised specifics and the uncanny nature of the topological mundane, the latter is in conversation with the legacy of the Arte Povera movement, the history of Conceptual Art - Baldessarian or Kosuthianalike - and the spatial principles of the Minimalism, and proposes a notion of the universal that is at once fundamental and other worldly in nature. Occupying the whole of the CLC Gallery Venture space, the Incarnation consists of a number of found objects, displaced mirror glass, used kitchen ventilationpipes, and a pair of tall and short rusty, erect, metallic centerpieces; the totality of the large-scale installation with its numerous seemingly arbitrary constructs is specifically conceived for the space, evoking a certain notion of a romanticised, disproportioned Gothic aesthetics, and a manifestation of materiality where functionality and religiosity are meticulously quantified, largely erodedby the reflective elements in the exhibition, and, subsequently, consolidated in the artist’s unique fashion.
After constructing the numer oussite-specific components of the exhibition, Liu Yue pours a mix of cement, self-rising flour and plaster from the top of the structures. To the artist, essential is the universal force of gravity, as a determinant par excellence; the territorialization and solidification of the liquid ponder gravitational possibilities, and testify to the temporal aspect of a choreographed space. Over the course of the exhibition, the slimy, murky substances further navigatethe controlled environment in a dense and self-developing fashion until its finally solidified.
Liu Yue considers the work at the CLC Gallery Venture as actively countering the geometrical proposal Volume that was actualised in Shanghai earlier this year: while the Volume deals with a reductionist, abstractionist tendency in relation to the truth of a given space that was being modified at the time of the exhibition, the Incarnation, in the space of a recently re-established enterprise, counter-excavates by addressing the dynamics between natural laws and man-made structures - the monumentality of which is constantly being reiterated, yet always already collapsing.
Liu Yue (b. 1981), currently resides in Shanghai. Liu Yue's works intend to dispelall the specific concepts and meanings attached to the objective world. He is interested in the innermost part of everything and studies its microscopicparts. He peels off the external attachments and dissolves everything to explore the most authentic parts, like an infant not yet influenced by the collective ideology. For him, art is actually an experiment to observe and analyse human and social cognition. His recent exhibitions include: "The Exhibition of Annual of Contemporary Art of China", Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing (2019); "Liu Yue: OWL", C-Space+Local, Beijing(2018); "LIU Yue: Maxim", ShanghART Beijing, (2016); "Mass – Liu Yue Solo Project", Local Space, Beijing (2016); "The Gentle Slope – Liu Yue Solo Project", AM Art Space, Shanghai (2015);"Nonfigurative", Shanghai Twenty-First Century Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2015), "Anthem – Xiao Ming & Xiao Hong", AM Art Space, Shanghai (2012); "Echo – Liu Yue Solo Exhibition", OFOTO Gallery, Shanghai (2012); "Alexandria Biennale", Alexandra, Italy (2011); "Photoquai Photo Biennale", Musee de Quai Branly, France (2011); "Absolute Zero– Liu Yue Photography Exhibition", OFOTO Gallery, Shanghai (2008) etc.