Aranya Art Center North is pleased to present the first museum solo exhibition of Chinese artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun, featuring the latest video, sound, and installation works from the “Water System Project,” an ongoing art project begun a decade ago.
The “Water System Project” sets out from the historical flows of the water ecosystem up- and downstream of Dujiangyan, engaging in field observations, research, and dialogues as working methods, and emphasizing interaction and collaboration with local residents, community practitioners, and multidisciplinary scholars. Most of the works in this exhibition are appearing in Mainland China for the first time, revealing how the pastoral residents of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in the Ruo’ergai Region, at the headwaters of the Dujiangyan watershed, employ traditional knowledge to adapt to a changing environment, establishing living relationships and spiritual connections of mutual care with other forms of life in the highlands (the grass, the sand, the black soil, pikas, yaks, and Naga).
From ritual to folk ballad, even down to a single stone, Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun’s creations have always focused on specific people, things, and practices. They have done away with the romanticized vision of the creator as investigator on the scene, and use simple, powerful aesthetics to reveal the complex, invisible web of connections between these concrete things. Aside from the spatial dimensions Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun have traversed in their travels, the two artists have further broken down the limitations in the dimensions of time and life, keenly and sincerely recognizing the current ecological reality and its seemingly distant yet inextricable connections to the substantive presence of the immaterial, as well as to systems of non-modern traditions and wisdom, revealing for us an approach to unified, living connectedness through which to confront environmental issues.
This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, together with Exhibition Coordinator Wu Yiyang and Curatorial Assistant Wang Jiaming. The exhibition is on view from September 22, 2024 through February 9, 2025.
Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun
Artists and transdisciplinary researchers. Live and work in Chengdu.
Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun’s art practices are research-based and process-oriented, highlighting the reciprocal collaboration between the artists and their partners. Dedicated to the dialogical relationship between the realities and the survival of myriad things, their practices grow from a space of entanglement in-between the material ecology of waters and the current socio-environmental realities of mankind. Tapping into this space largely untouched by existent inquiries, they explore the vicissitude of ecologies and the re-imaginaries of the future. The entanglement space indicates neither a reactionary and passive way to protect water nor a conservative view that only emphasizes human society and its survival, but how we can reconstruct our comprehension of the future and countless possibilities between material ecology and human society. Practicing multiple visual narrative methods through long-term, site-specific art making, they build up a momentum for the alliance among all beings.
Their projects have been shown in exhibitions and screenings throughout Asia and Europe, including Green Snake: women-centred ecologies at Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2023-2024), documenta fifteen in Kassel (2022), Rethinking Nature at Madre Museum (2021-2022), the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020-2021), and COSMOPOLIS #2.0: Repenser l’humain in Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2019), Cosmopolis #1.5: Enlarged Intelligence (Chengdu, 2018). They have received awards including the 2024 Food Action Awards Honourable Mentions, the 2022 Jonathan KS Choi Foundation Contemporary Art Award, and the 2020 Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris. They were invited as UBC Distinguished Visual Artists at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2023. Their work was permanently acquired by the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. Their screenings include: La Casa Encendida, CA2M Museum, HANART TZ GALLERY, West Bund Museum, Centre Pompidou, CC Strombeek, Ateneo de Manila University Ateneo Art Gallery, lumbung Film (Gloria-Kino), OCAT Institute, Taipei Biennale Film Screening Section, etc.
