Aspen Art Museum debuts two new exhibitions on Wednesday
Nature and transformation are just two themes Aspen Art Museum explores through its four new artist exhibitions this winter. Two of the shows, Shuang Li’s “I’m Not” and Heji Shin’s “America Part I,” debut Nov. 20 and run through March 2. The other two, Ugo Rondinone’s “the rainbow body” and Megan Marrin’s “Austerity,” open Dec. 12 and remain on display through March 30.
“I’m Not” is Li’s first institutional solo exhibition, commissioned in partnership with New York’s Swiss Institute. Her work embeds small videos within larger sculptures, exploring how the internet — and screens, in general — inform language, relationships, and identities.
She leans on her love of the band My Chemical Romance to depict how digital content creates social bonds and fandom; it also considers the complexities of predominantly one-sided relationships built from a distance and fed by musicians, or other subjects of admiration. Growing up in a small town in southeast China, Li’s attachment to My Chemical Romance fostered a feeling of belonging to both the band and the English language. In this way, it becomes a case study of “faraway bodies and displaced desires.”
The actual sculptures reflect architecture Li viewed as a child, when her parents visited real estate showrooms during the economic reform of the 1990s, which supported rapid construction and the urbanization of China in the early 2000s. She witnessed the birth and bust of the country’s real estate bubble, with half-built skyscrapers abandoned, “their skeletons stand(ing) here as abstracted visions of home,” she says.
It takes a bit of hunting to find certain videos, as they’re not completely predominant, but once discovered, they add deeper layers to the works.
She filmed the video, Déjà vu, within one sculpture during the pandemic. In it, a duck captured footage wearing a GoPro as it walked through a rescue center. Subtitles describe “a town where people started mixing up words, then forgetting grammar, and, ultimately, losing the ability to speak,” according to the Aspen Art Museum press release.
Another video portrays her inability to attend the opening of her own show in Shanghai due to the pandemic. Twenty clones wearing My Chemical Romance T-shirts, bangs, and platform loafers act out choreography and talk to audience members as if Li had been able to attend the reception.
For the video “I’m Not,” Li rewrote lyrics to My Chemical Romance’s “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” in Mandarin Chinese and English. An a cappella group sings the lyrics, dressed as an army choir. Lyrics reflect Li learning English as a teenager from musicians that lived thousands of miles away.
In another gallery, “Heart Is a Broken Record” depicts a heart-shaped fountain with found footage projected into the rippling water from above. Stock imagery of dripping blood and pumping veins alternates with crowds waiting for My Chemical Romance to take the stage.
“Shuang’s exhibition is really adventurous,” Daniel Merritt, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs, told The Aspen Times in a previous interview. “I knew that the show would be great in Aspen, and I wanted it to bring in younger audiences who I think would have a unique understanding of what Shuang is discussing in the show.”
Each exhibition this winter shares a theme of attuning to popular culture and the broader concept of lifestyle.
Heji Shin’s “America Part I,” which also opens Nov. 20, showcases the nation through photos of rockets and waves. It is meant to contrast human ambition with nature’s forces.
The Korean-born artist, who’s now based between New York City and the Catskill Mountains, captured rocket launches in and around Cape Canaveral, Florida last summer. Aspen Art Museum showcases 10 of them.
The adjacent gallery features her photos of waves taken the night before a hurricane. The frames purposefully delete human beings; American painter Winslow Homer inspired the decision, as he portrayed beaches devoid of humans in the late 1890s, in order to emphasize the energy and spiritual power of ocean waves.
“These are elemental images in which air and fire, sea and earth, command attention,” according to Aspen Art Museum’s press release. “Gravity, too, presides over Shin’s scenes of surges and escape.”
In December, Rondinone’s “the rainbow body” brings in 16 life-sized sculptures of dancers rendered in fluorescent wax, referencing an Eastern belief about the body transforming into light upon death. Every plane in the gallery will be painted to create a kaleidoscope of color. Marrin’s “Austerity” will interpret designer Jean-Michel Frank’s signature interiors through five new paintings, which emphasizes the “fragile, salve-like quality of these rooms … where surfaces shine and seduce,” according to the press release.
By: I The Aspen Times I November 17, 2024