B-hopping

Boers-Li Gallery is delighted to present “B-hopping”, an all-female artists group exhibition by Michele Abeles, Pan Wangshu, Sun Yitian, Amalia Ulman, and Yuan Keru, whose works span artistic mediums from paintings, photographs, sculptures, light-signage, video-installation to live performance. The exhibition will be on view from April 20th to June 2nd, 2019.

Conceiving the gallery space as a shopping mall - one of the most frequented public spaces for social interaction and consumption, this exhibition aims to explore the shopping mall as a site of imagination, where the various aspects of consumption, such as, artificial materials, consumer psychology, fashion, and fictional narratives inform and redefine our identities. Since women are the primary influence on consumer spending, these five female artists’ critical positions articulate alternative iterations to the often, skewed notions of gender profiling. Moreover, their works elaborate on their tactile relationship to the present day ubiquity of consumption. The ground floor conjures the essential features of such site, shops, atriums displays, advertisements, models and etc., while the staircase and the second floor lead to the entertainment section of the establishment.

Michele Abeles’ photographs capture the urban catwalk of upmarket shoppers. Although the physical features of the individual wearing the expensive watch have been truncated from the photograph, the luxury item itself, depicted in its visual context, offer a different type of “advertisement”, one not necessarily focusing on the commercial value of the object, but the social status of those who possess them, which ultimately define and distinguish them from the others.

The cluster of Pan Wangshu’s ceramic sculptures on display at the center of ground floor survey the ennui, malaise, and idiosyncratic scenarios in social interaction. These seemingly kawaii figurine animals personify an array of human interactions and expressions that are analogous of the muted thoughts in our social behavior, exemplifying a naïvete that is often lost in conventional codes of social conduct.

Sun Yitian’s photo-realistic paintings depicting plastic objects examine the tenuous relationship between nature and man-made expressions. Gaia (2018) and Shut Up and Hug Me (2019) on view in this exhibition present contrasting functions of plastic dolls – one, named after the earth goddess in Greek mythology, is an object for seduction, the other, a familiar childhood toy conveys the desire for affection. Both on display as objects of consumption, not only reveal the extensive scope of artificiality in our lives, but also the desires that drive consumption.

Amalia Ulman’s three works take fashion as a vehicle to question the whiteness, maleness, verticality, and linearity as the dominant aesthetic of power and legitimacy. In Privilege (2016), Ulman enacts the theatrical version of herself and the multiplicity of her “real identity”, particularly with her fictional pregnancy captured in a fashion photo shoot and circulated on social media, juxtaposes the expectation of women with their objectification. While International Intrigue (2019), the imprinted lining depicting a female in “real-life” situation is concealed under the iconic garment – the trench coat, hence revealing a disparity between the perception and the representation of one’s identity.

Yuan Keru opens up her inner psyches on innocence, agitation, pain, fear, passion, obsession and adventure through the film, Moon and Sixpence (2016-2017). Inspired by W. Somerset Maugham’s eponymous novel, Yuan reimagines the novel’s isolated Tahiti island as the site for her Sci-fi story. The film shot in the Vertical Glass House designed by the acclaimed architect Yung Ho Chang, in West Bund Art Centre, adopts 3D digital special effects in transforming the space into a mysterious aircraft in the Ice Age. Each floor represents respectively, the Garden of Eden, the civilized world and the spiritual world. The five characters of the film, each embodying one aspect of the artist’s personality or features, are conceived as the creators and the terminators of the world. In addition, a live performance from the characters of the film will take place at the opening.