EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS

This exhibition is dedicated to the once radical, now conventional and fashionable modernist manifesto. As an infant in the art world I’m not sure if I ought to be endowed with such an honor.

As a definable movement the conceptual art from the 60’s and 70’s attempted to bypass the routine commercialization of the art world by emphasizing that “the immanent value of art lie in its method of production and processes of reflection”. The tool, as an enigmatic bridge, realizes the artwork through the process of visual evolution that begins in the virtual realm of the individual consciousness and transforms into the material realm via reification. An artist’s idea alone does not constitute as art per se, and for that reason if the idea is to be materialized one must utilize the capacity of tools and techniques.

Tools are a thread which can be trace back to the essence of art. As an integral part of the artist’s practice tools possess their own mode of visualization, this mode guides the artist’s operations, and insures that the given operation axiomatically reflects the materiality of the tool. As a result the work’s consciousness is thus shaped by these elements that lie deep within it.

We live under the regulations of instrumentalism, no thing exists on its own, instead it exists to achieve a given task. Only through our use of tools can we approach the world and establish a primitive connection to things.

Techniques to manufacture, operate, edit, or process are a way of revealing art, a way of creating an agora where truth can be revealed. They are closely related to the emergence of the essence of art. When a work loses itself in the art market or falls into a theoretical crisis, the "tool" becomes a transitory segment, one that can produce infinite quantity, a segment that has the creative potential to deconstruct the existing cognition, a segment capable of examining the internal examination of art itself. One that calls us to review the state of art production...

Curator: Zhang Yingying