April 27 – August 11, 2013, Rockbund Museum, Shanghai
The Rockbund museum did not disappoint again and prepared another show worth a visit. This time, the exhibition includes more smaller works and thus may seem fragmented at first sight (on the first floor), but all the fragments come together to form a whole once the visitor has passed through all four floors of exhibits.
Generally speaking there are two kinds of works, a big share of works are graphic prints from the Louvre collection, some from 20th century artists, but some a few hundred years old. The prints are then supplemented by contemporary art of Western and of Chinese origin.
The gesture-language topic means that there is an emphasis on writing and calligraphy as a form of recorded physical gesture. At the same time, the notion of a narrative that is present in classical ‘composed’ images is contrasted with he written narrative that can exist by itself or as an ‘explanation’ of the painted narrative. Thus, the exhibition understands language in it’s most broad definition, as in ‘visual language’, ‘written language’, ‘body language’ etc.
I also like how Chinese and Western artists are presented on par with each other – there is no playing out of East vs West differences, but instead the emphasis is on similarities in relation to the central gesture/language topic.
Compared to previous exhibitions at Rockbund, “Gesture to Language” is a truly complex show, where the visitor need to take time to take in multi-layered overlapping narrative threads. Those who take this worthy endeavor are rewarded with the good feeling one has when all the pieces of a puzzle come together.
