All posts tagged: Chen Shaoxiong

Pragmatic Experimentalism: A Review of Society Guidance (Part one) at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art’s (UCCA) summer group exhibition Society Guidance (Part I) is a show lesser seen. Compared to the institution’s other summer exhibition, the spectacularly displayed Picasso: Birth of a Genius, coterminously happening onsite, this well-researched curatorial project about Chinese art and culture in the 1990s gained much less viewing and media attention. A not-so-trivial detail is telling of the two shows’ relation: in order to see Society Guidance, I had to purchase the 150 RMB (22 USD) ticket and first view the birth of Picasso. Such a comparison may seem provincial at first: for one, Picasso is a great modernist whose first major retrospective in China is fitting for a contemporary art institution like UCCA. As its Director Philip Tinari was quoted saying, “For UCCA this marks the realization of a dream we have held since our opening in 2007, to present not only recent developments in contemporary art but to examine the underpinnings of the contemporary by showing modern masters.”[1] But perhaps more importantly, a show like Picasso grows out of …