West Bund Museum and Pond Society jointly present
A Cloud in Trousers: Painting Today
26 October 2024 – 5 January 2025
West Bund Museum | Gallery 0
Return and Breakthrough
The Diverse Facets of Contemporary Chinese Painting Practice
“If you want—
I’ll rage from meat
—and, like the sky changing its tones— if you want—
I’ll be irreproachably tender,
not a man, but—a cloud in trousers!”
——Vladimir Mayakovsky
The West Bund Museum and Pond Society jointly present the exhibition A Cloud in Trousers: Painting Today. As the first collaboration between the West Bund Museum and a local Chinese art institution, this exhibition continues Gallery 0’s commitment to research and support for contemporary artistic practices. Bringing together 23 artists from different generations and backgrounds, the exhibition explores the interplay between figuration and abstraction, tradition and modernity. With distinctive personal styles, these artists express their reflections on the present across various temporal coordinates, offering the public a first-hand experience of the diversity in contemporary Chinese painting. The exhibition will be open to the public free of charge from October 26, 2024, to January 5, 2025.
The painting was once the most revolutionary medium of the modernist movement, with avant- garde artists continually challenging the concepts of traditional painting, expanding its flatness and abstract language. At the same time, the surface of the canvas also recorded the "otherness" in history and culture. Under current post-medium conditions, painting practices reveal more structural possibilities. As art historian David Joselit pointed out, painting in the post-medium condition exists within networks of structure and symbols, which involve not only the relationship between artists and communities, or art and the public but also the complex connection between the form and content of painting. The context of contemporary painting is crucial, as artists disrupt, redistribute, divide, and assemble their subjects, embedding meaning in a flowing network of time, thus redefining painting and its rich traditions.
