Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project
Yao Qingmei: Mole
29 April - 3 September 2023 | Gallery 0
For her first museum exhibition in China, the multidisciplinary artist Yao Qingmei (born in 1982) explores her questioning of the body, its presence and its resources, from the experience of three years of pandemic. Confronted with the closure of the country’s borders, but also with the multiplication of barriers and restrictions that invaded daily life in China in a more massive and prolonged way than anywere else, the artist presents a set of works that mixes reality and fiction, narration and contemplation, in a joyful meditation on human destiny.
Yao Qingmei, Room (1) Wrap, Room series, 2022-2023,
Single channel video, colour, sound
Over the past decade, Yao Qingmei has been developing an intriguing body of works that mostly navigate between performance and video, emphasizing the dynamics and movements of human activity. These movements that she often provokes or amplifies, and then observes carefully, are always fueled with the energy that radiates from the living bodies whatever the environment in which they may be placed.
Yao Qingmei, Night, 2022-2023,
Single channel video, colour, sound
The nine videos presented in the exhibition, despite their diversity, all feature characters somehow at odds with the space that surrounds them, be it a mysterious darkness, a small room crammed with standard furniture, an open space office or even a bed. This feeling is being reflected in the exhibition space itself, which has been divided in small sections linked together with a logic that challenges common sense and will alternatively diffuse a sort of exasperation and a sense of genuine playfulness.
Yao Qingmei, Mole, 2022-2023,
Single channel video, colour, sound
The characters in the works rely on the singularity of their bodies and on their own liveliness to overcome the pressure of the space. They seem curious to explore even the tiniest details and possibilities of the place where they are. Remarkably, they rely on the unique resources of their own selves to find enjoyment or at least interest through a dialectic between repetition and invention.
In a comparable way, the visitors are invited to immerge themselves into the exhibition and discover its multiple facets.