HOW Art Museum is pleased to announce that Oriental Mystery, solo exhibition of Etsu Egami, will be on view from June 9, 2023. Presented in Gallery 2 on 3F of the museum, the exhibition features 21 paintings and 4 recent sculptures by the artist, casting light on the evolution of orientalism from an intercultural and international perspective.

Born in Japan in 1994, Etsu Egami grew up in the United States and Europe. She studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China and HFG in Germany. Being one of the most active emerging artists of Japan, the rich experience of living and studying in different counties on the one hand enables her to practice in a cross-cultural and cross-language context, and on the other, gives her the opportunity to experience the subtleties and diversities of different native languages. Using mask as a medium, Oriental Mystery delves into the outside world's imagination and misinterpretation of the orient. The exhibition marks a prelude to Etsu Egami 's upcoming "Orientalism" trilogy.

Ulay: The Great Journey

Dates: Nov. 13, 2022 - Mar. 12, 2023

Artist: Ulay

Curator: Sherry Lai, Hana Ostan Ožbolt

Venue: HOW Art Museum (2F, No. 1, Lane 2277, Zuchongzhi Road, Shanghai)

Organizer: HOW Art Museum

Co-Organizer: ULAY Foundation, SPURS Gallery

Supporter: Art Algorithm Capital

With The Great Journey, HOW Art Museum presents the first institutional posthumous exhibition of the groundbreaking oeuvre of Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay (1943–2020), in Asia. The exhibition is co-curated by Sherry Lai, partner SPURS Gallery, and Hana Ostan Ožbolt, ULAY Foundation Director.

Comprising approximately 70 works, The Great Journey emphasizes the variety and the experimental, uncompromising and intimate character of the work and the legacy of Ulay, the pioneer in Polaroid photography, performance and body art. The exhibition is a journey through Ulay's life and his body of work, focusing on three different periods: his artistic activity in the early 1970s, his collaboration with Marina Abramović between 1976 and 1989, and his work as a solo artist in the late 1990s.

Ulay had a long-lasting and personal relationship to China, that inspired a great deal of his oeuvre. The exhibition highlights various series of works, which respond to China's vastness and greatness, its landscape, culture, religion and people.

The body as a reference, as a starting point, as Ulay's medium par excellence: "As soon as I began using the Polaroid camera, mainly pointing it at myself – a practice I called Auto-Polaroid – I immediately discovered its performative elements. Taking Polaroids was a performative act for me: I performed in front of the camera". 1 In the early 70s, Ulay developed an approach that was novel in both method and subject matter, using the Polaroid camera as a tool to capture the transformations of his own body, manipulated in a myriad of ways, and investigate the subject of identity. In those fleeting, intimate performances without an audience, Ulay explored socially constructed issues of gender, his masculine and feminine sides, as well as photography's slippery identity between the real and the illusory.

From 1976 to 1988, Ulay collaborated with former partner Marina Abramović. They met in 1975, when Marina held a performance at de Appel in Amsterdam. It was the beginning of an intensely symbiotic relationship in both love and work that lasted twelve years. Ulay no longer posed questions about his own masculine and feminine sides but, joint with Abramović, strived towards unification, towards an intersex state: that of the hermaphrodite. Between 1976 and 1980, they traveled through Europe in a Citroën van, creating performances in which they explored their relationship, and in particular their physical and mental limits. These are known as theRelation Works; performances that Ulay himself described as cathartic, very realistic, minimalistic, and highly erotic. Both artists wrote a manifesto, entitled ART VITAL, to ground their work. At their core, the performances are straightforward: no theatrical effects, no props or outside interference. Seminal in their sobriety and intensity, they are today considered iconic in the history of performance art.

In 1986, Ulay and Abramović visited China for the first time. And in 1988, it was in China that they ended their relationship with the monumental work The Great Wall Walk in which they walked for ninety days towards each other from either end of the Great Wall – a journey not yet made by any Westerner. After years of negotiations with the country's authorities, the artists got permission to carry out the durational performance: Abramović started walking at the eastern end of the Wall (at Shan Hai Guan, on the shores of the Bohai Sea), walking westward. Ulay started at the western end of the Wall (at Jai Yu Guan, the south-western periphery of the Gobi Desert), walking eastward. While they both continuously walked two thousand kilometres towards each other, they documented their journey: on view are Ulay's (Polaroid) photographs of the landscape and the people he encountered, as well as his intimate diaries from that time. Inspired by the architecture of the Great Wall itself, a large aluminium gate-like sculpture, one of the artist's very seldom examples of sculptural objects, is also exhibited. Abramović and Ulay met at Er Lang Shan, in Shen Mu, Shaanxi province. The Great Wall Walk, initially intended as a confirmation of their love, marked the end of their relationship, one of the most productive and celebrated artistic partnerships of the 20th century.

After breaking with Abramović, Ulay focused on photography, exploring the medium and its boundaries (several large format Polaroids and photograms), reflecting his inner states and own existential search, addressing the position of the marginalized individual in contemporary society and re-examining the problem of nationalism with its symbols. Nevertheless, although he was working primarily in photography, he remained connected to the question of the 'performative', which resulted in his constant 'provocation' of audiences through the realization of numerous collaborative projects, performances, and workshops. In the last 10 years of his life, Ulay has been mostly engaged in projects and artistic initiatives that raise awareness and enhance understanding and appreciation of water.

The period of his late artistic activity between 2014–2017 was marked in both form and content by the colour pink (Ulay's "pink period"). It consists of a series of drawings, middle-size Polaroids and (collaborative) performances.

Ulay's life was marked by various journeys with diverse people and cultures – physical travels all around the world and spiritual explorations of different states of mind. His identity search was a life-long project, closely connected to the process of "unlearning – forgetting the values by which I had justified myself, my commitment". "What I reached was a lot more fluid and no longer as concrete. (...) I began to see that everything is in constant motion: life is change."2  

[1] Ulay in an Interview with Alessandro Cassin: "Early Works: Ephermal, Intimate Actions, with No Audience, Arrested in Time through the Polaroid", pp 88-93. In: Whispers: Ulay on Ulay (by Maria Rus Bojan and Alessandro Cassin, ed. Astrid Vorstermans), Valiz Foundation, Amsterdam, 2014.

[2] Ulay in conversation with Alessandro Cassin: "Animism, Buddhism, Beckett and Cage", in: Whispers, Ulay on Ulay, pp. 226–227. in: Whispers: Ulay on Ulay (by Maria Rus Bojan and Alessandro Cassin, ed. Astrid Vorstermans), Valiz Foundation, Amsterdam 2014.

Dates：Oct.29 – Dec.16,2022
Artist: Zhao Xiaoli
HOW+ Curator: Zheng Guo
Academic advisor: Victoria Lu
Venue: HOW+SPACE ONE (3F, No. 1, Lane 2277, Zuchongzhi Road, Shanghai)
Organizer: HOW+

HOW+ is pleased to announce the opening of INTURSION·BLOSSOM, a solo exhibition by Zhao Xiaoli, on October 29, 2022 at HOW+ SPACE ONE.

Roy XR Chen: Wild Walls

Duration: August 27 - October 21, 2022

Artist: Roy XR Chen

HOW+ Curator: Nara Huang

Venue: HOW+SPACE ONE (3F, No. 1, Lane 2277, Zuchongzhi Road, Shanghai)

Organizer: HOW+

HOW+ is pleased to announce the opening of Wild Walls, solo exhibition by Roy XR Chen, on August 27, 2022, at HOW+ SPACE ONE.

The works on view at "Wild Walls", Roy XR Chen's solo exhibition at HOW+SPACE, are selected from his "G Series". The series intends to cast more light on what behind the graffiti through the passing of time rather than merely the content of the graffiti itself. When he creates the works, Chen's role constantly swifts between a graffiti artist, an observer and a recorder. His works delicately depict the rich layers of graffiti: the top layer of fresh paint, the base layer showing decadent walls, and the sediments left over by the washing of time in the middle layer. The whole series conveys the message that human creation, be it graffiti or industrial productions, can never withstand the power of nature and time for good. In Roy XR Chen's paintings, we see modern cities eroded by nature, and buildings slowly deteriorating as if they had life in them. Old graffiti on the walls are covered and replaced by new ones over and over, leaving human traces in abandoned cities all the more distinct.

Roy XR Chen is deeply intrigued by the interplay between the sense of incompletion and dilapidation of ancient murals caused by the force of nature and traces of human intervention. His works depict scenes of post-human civilization. There are streets, walls and toilets, all with human traces, but not a single human figure. In these scenes, graffiti is the only non-industrial mark left by human beings. Viewers become both the observers of and pedestrians on these streets. Roy XR Chen sees graffiti as a modern form of mural painting that has emerged since the last century. With the development of industry and urban construction, graffiti start to be seen on surfaces other than walls, for instance, toilets, vehicles, garbage cans and skateparks. In ancient times, to make recordings was a main purpose of mural. Nowadays quite likewise, graffiti has also turned out to become a medium to witness and record the ongoing urban and community cultures. The graffiti and surfaces where they are presented collectively define the "Wild Walls".

In the eyes of some observers, graffiti continues the purpose of murals as a public art form. Great graffiti works as not only decoration but also a voice for people from certain communities. However, the question whether this kind of works is an innovative art form or a public nuisance has always remained controversial. In the discussion of the use of public space, graffiti artists are often regarded as intruders of urban public space. But at the same time, people give consent to displaying something more offensive in public places: advertisements. Ads always tells us that we are not good enough, not pretty enough, not wealthy enough. Although graffiti can be aesthetically immature in some aspects, at its best, it can be the opening of a communal space: a commentary, a conversation, a concept captured in an image on a wall. Real street art holds up a mirror to the world so that we can see the absurdity of it. It shows us who we really are, both good and bad, as a community. Street art has an amazing ability to do this because it exists in our real and everyday world, not vacuum-sealed and shuffled away in a privileged private space. Its very public nature makes street art unique and powerful.

Touring around the "Wild Walls", viewers would easily notice that there is a large number of works under the theme of toilets. What makes toilet graffiti special, and worthy of its own entire category, is the uniqueness of the space in which people are painting or writing. There's a tension to doing private activities in a public space, with only the flimsiest of boundaries hiding and displaying some of our culture's biggest taboos. Toilet graffiti also offers an interesting contrast to the way people typically behave in the bathroom. The unspoken rules of keeping to oneself, not making eye contact, and avoiding talking to strangers, all contribute to a sometimes-tense environment with the goal of shifting focus away from what's actually happening behind stall doors. But the graffiti on the stall doors does not ignore it one bit. It crudely acknowledges and pokes fun at what we all go to the bathroom to do, and flouts the politeness surrounding it as well. These "aggressive" graffiti enter spaces that should not have been entered, and now these spaces are moved into the art museum. The exhibition "Wild Walls" have also become a carrier of graffiti. Together with the paintings in the exhibition, they record the time and space of these graffiti, or the dynamic superposition of several different spaces and times, generating an moment of uncertainty.

Zhou Song: Inflating Universe

Duration: September 03 – October 21, 2022

Artist: Zhou Song

HOW+ Curator: Zheng Guo

Venue: HOW+SPACE TWO (3F, No. 1, Lane 2277, Zuchongzhi Road, Shanghai)

Organizer: HOW+

HOW+ is pleased to announce the opening of Inflating Universe, solo exhibition by Zhou Song, on March 23, 2022, at HOW+ SPACE TWO

Zhou Song's artistic practice goes beyond the boundaries of traditional media, deconstructs fragments of everydayness through a logical mind and humanistic vision, and reconstructs a universe that transcends the dailiness and is teeming with hidden profundity and implications. In Zhou's works, both his paintings and sculptures, the forms and contents are always mutually reinforcing each other. Through the sharply vivid visual images, the artist inquires into the very essence of human beings and virtually everything, and then subverts viewers' fixed impression of art, inspiring them to reflect from a more macroscopic perspective. 

Inflating Universe, Zhou Song's new solo exhibition, investigates the living environment of the contemporary times through art and probes into social issues that are of universal significance. The exhibition features a selection of works from the Inflating series and Strawberry series, two of the most significant series in Zhou's practice. The two series, from different periods of his artistic career, demonstrate his continuous exploration in the field of art. From hyper-realism to surrealism, Zhou Song constantly transcends and breaks through the boundaries of images, giving new interpretations to the superposition of works. In the Inflating series in particular, it can be perceived that the use of alien-shaped frames has been brought into play to the ultimate extreme. 

The Inflating series, in a sense, could be reckoned as a contemporary version of Stories to Awaken the World, a Chinese story anthology compiled in the 17th century. In his sharply humorous manner, Zhou Song manages to confine the subject within the geometric frame, leaving it to inflate infinitely and in the meantime imposing restraints upon it. As a result, tension and confrontation could be intuitively sensed from within the calmness and serenity on the surface. Bodies and objects that have inflated to the point of deformation form a metaphor of infinite desires and the growth process of all things. The surreal changes on the surface are in fact a reflection of humanity; while the forms that seem about to break through the boundaries but are in fact under restraints mirror the contradictory realities that all individuals are faced with in society. 

Moreover, by the combination of animal and human figures and geometric abstraction of fruits and plants, the artist probes further into the relationships and possibilities of mutual symbiosis and remodeling between human beings and the nature. From a cosmological perspective, inflation is at the core of universe evolution; in other words, it's the law of development of all things. In a finite time and space, different species encounter and interact with each other within the infinite universe, casting light on the artist's signature romantic temperament that forms an intriguing contrast with his meticulous and rigorous approaches. 

Visually speaking, the bold images strike a riveting balance with the alien-shaped frames. The strong senses of exaggeration and narrativity leave viewers with enormous room for reflection, while the interplay of rich colors and virtual reality further opens up people's imagination towards the work. 

The Strawberry series is a recent series the artist works on, but it's origin could be traced back to the early days of Zhou's practice.

In the early stage of Zhou Song's practice, strawberry already appeared on his oil on canvas in a surrealistic manner. Gazing closely at it, viewers would feel as if they were witnessing its gradual decay over time. The delicately red strawberry symbolized a beating heart, full of desires and yet too fragile to stand a single blow. The highly realistic brush strokes brought viewers with a sense of experience beyond the painting itself. What the artist intends to convey through the work is under constant development and exuberant with new vitality as time goes by. Sculptural works based on the strawberry transform the two-dimensional hyper-realistic image into the three dimensional for new and surreal expressive possibilities. The metallic surface inspires viewers to associate it with machinery and cyborg. The seemingly flowing but in fact frozen strawberry juice echoes the brand new relationship between nature and technology in this era. 

In a decentralized world, the relationships among nature, human beings and technology are extensively and profoundly explored in Zhou Song's work. Human beings are no longer the center of the world. We are both the spectators and the players; we are the consumers existing on the circular chain of the universe. In Inflating Universe, Zhou Song proposes a playful yet philosophical reflection upon the era we live in; and accordingly, viewers get a chance to reconsider the reality as well as the self from a new perspective. 

HOW+ is pleased to announce the opening of Tiger Arhat, solo exhibition by Gong Xu, on July 15, 2022, at HOW+SPACE ONE.

Shanghai-based young artist Gong Xu is an independent art practitioner slash brand owner. Known for a very distinct personal style, Gong Xu manages to unfold diverse artistic expressions and subversive world-views through bold colors, narrative structures and the delineation of the cultural background unique to those born in the 80s and 90s while retaining elements of traditional eastern culture.

Born in the zodiac year of tiger in 1986, he is in the third round of zodiac year of birth. Tiger Arhat as a work to commemorate the year of special meaning marks a kind of continuation of his The Twelve fierce animals of the Chinese zodiac project. The exhibition takes household folk tales and literature as its source of inspiration, and presents a mind-opening and unconventional perspective of interpretation. Seeing himself as a narrator of the contemporary times, the artist takes the position of the imaginary "painter from Dunhuang" and shares his perception of traditional literature and folk culture in a non-preachy and story-telling manner. The contrasting combination between a philosophical delineation of temples and bar elements featuring entertaining and pop colors presents an intriguingly vivid imagery.

In terms of the form of the works, the artist has also managed to make a breakthrough and tried something different from before. This time he endeavors to put large-scale installation on view in juxtaposition with the comic-book style paintings to imbue new verve into the interpretation of the totems of Zodiac symbols. As a matter of fact, the comic-book style derives from the cave paintings in Dunhuang which, to some extent, are like a panoramic comic book. By building connection between the paintings and two large-scale tiger installations, the artist manages to transform the two-dimensional images on the paintings into three-dimensional, which brings a visual spectacle to the viewing experience of the audience.

Take the work Pilgrim Wu Song Teasing a Tiger for instance. It reshapes the relation between the protagonist Wu Song, the famous tiger-beater, and the tiger, breaking the viewers' fixed impression of the widely familiar story and inspiring new and different associations through re-narration. The exhibition intends to cast light on the artist's adoration for an amicable and harmonious nature as well as his perception of the pop elements of the "now" while diluting the sense of violence commonly seen in traditional folk stories. In the meantime, the exhibition also probes into the difference between the depiction of characters in the East and the West by interweaving different cultures into the same context.

Duration: July 15 - August 30, 2022

Artist: Kebeyo Chen

HOW+ Curator: Nara Huang

Venue: HOW+SPACE TWO (3F, No. 1, Lane 2277, Zuchongzhi Road, Shanghai)

Organizer: HOW+

HOW+ is pleased to announce the opening of Weaving of Times, solo exhibition by Kebeyo Chen, on July 15, 2022, at HOW+SPACE TWO.

Kebeyo Chen is a Shanghai-based artist with a unique personality and experience. She explores inner growth with bright and bold colors and a smart and imaginative visual style. The works on view at "Weaving of Times" feature some of her signature creative elements such as eyes, braids and seeds. The exhibition opens a door into the world woven by the artist's memories, dreams and imagination through the eyes that shine the sparks of inspiration. In this world, dream and reality, the two seemingly contradictory states, are woven into a kind of surreal imagery. We exist between ourselves and others, between sleep and wakefulness, between the internal and the external, between reason and emotion, between past and future. What makes each and every one of us complete is the intertwinement of all the above, thus "zhijian" – the weaving of times.

Dreams are the playground for the mind, but we are rarely aware of the freedom granted to us by our dreams. A normal dream is much like passively watching a movie screening in your head. In a lucid dream, the dreamer is the writer, director, and star of the movie. Kebeyo Chen is an artist with this dream-weaving ability. She combines the whimsy in dreams with her experiences in reality to create a spiritual work of pomegranate seeds. These seeds are like elves wandering in her dreams, and the braids growing out of the seeds are her tentacles to explore inspirations and the unknown. A dream is by no means something completely detached from reality; it represents an alternative reality that, although not of the same tangible quality as the external world, is no less real than the external world. The dream is a reality that unfolds in an inner space – a world revealed when the outer space is shrouded in darkness. The pomegranate tree at the door of the artist's childhood house often appeared in the artist's dreams. Lush green is the color of growth, which means the continuation of the vitality of the pomegranate flower seeds. From sowing to germination, the seeds continue to spread, and strands of braids emerge from them, intertwining and forming the encounter of space and time, bringing together this vibrant and interconnected "ecosystem". In the blue space, the artist draws a metaphor between these containers and people: each person is a container, carrying different things, some light like a plate, some heavy like a filled jar. The braid is like a life link between the containers, connecting the inside and the outside of the container, and the space between the container itself and the outside world.

The artist balances rational thinking with the energy of dreams in the subconscious, weaving different moments of life with each work, interweaving the past and the future with braids, and linking the seeds in memory. The pomegranate tree in the courtyard outside the window in her childhood seems to have traveled through time and space, and reappears in front of us in the form of a dream and reality. Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa once wrote "There was a moment of a different life between sleep and sleep". What is between sleep and wakefulness. Dream, probably.

Curator: Fu Liaoliao

Duration：2019/11/23-2020/03/15

Venue：Gallery 6/7, F3, HOW Art Museum (Shanghai)

Organizer：HOW Art Museum

HOW Art Museum (Shanghai) is proud to announce that it will host the solo exhibition "Li Binyuan" by the artist Li Binyuan on November 22nd, 2019. For the first time, the exhibition brings together the work of Li Bingyuan over the past decade in a single space. The exhibition will also present the latest film projects by artists supported by HOW Art Museum.

Since the work Infernal Affairs was carried out entirely on the subway in 2010, Li Binyuan has continued to integrate his practice into different spaces. Of course, his experiments on behavior and objects can be traced back to his graduation work Two Stones when he was studying in the sculpture department at CAFA. In this work carried out in the classroom, Li Binyuan slammed two stones against each other in an attempt to make them shatter each other.

This sort of performance which leads to uncertain results is based on discussing the relationship between disintegration and creation, which is a theme that continues to be explored throughout his work. For example in the piece Freedom Farming (2014), the artist repeatedly hurls himself into his own rice paddy, or in the case of Deathless Love (2015), where the artist slams 250 hammers against one another over and over again. It's this approach that he takes which hints at his background in studying sculpture, but at the same time, the material and that which Li Binyuan addresses in his work is by no means traditional sculpture. Instead, it entails the social realm, objects found in nature, and even gravity, it's this instability of the topics chosen and the material itself that often pushes the result of his behavior in the works to the edge of uncertainty and sometimes even complete failure. The tension between the individual, society, and history is constantly rubbing up against and colliding into one another sending out thundering shrill throughout this hair-raising border zone.

The first thing that triggers this tension and faces this impact head-on is the body. As Jean Baudrillard once pointed out: "The entire contemporary history of the body is the history of its demarcation, the network of marks and signs that have since covered it, divided it up, annihilated its difference and its radical ambivalence in order to organise it into a structural material for sign-exchange, equal to the sphere of objects, to resolve its playful virtuality and its symbolic exchange (not to be confused with sexuality) into sexuality taken as a determining agency, a phallic agency entirely organised around the fetishisation of the phallus as the general equivalent."

In Li Binyuan's case, the body, as an individual and socio-historical archive of its own text resists the disappearance and transformation of the body into a symbol for exchange. However, such resistance is not negative. Instead, it constantly seeks feedback from the object it resists in an open attempt to establish dialogue and mutual stimulation.

As Li Binyuan's first solo exhibition of the same name, the exhibition not only presents the works of artists in the past ten years but also tries to initiate a new exploration of body and action. Li Binyuan will introduce the cinematic language of film, carving out a new situation and live scene. Different from the previous method of recording performance, the film shot here is likely to resemble a highly intricate dismemberment, one which penetrates deep into the internal space of the body, excavating the body that lies under the body, then deconstructing it and to finally reconfigure it.