Over the past few years, people have been heading outdoors more often, exploring their interactions with the outside world in a new light. This exhibition aims to rekindle the practice of painting from nature, an activity open to everyone, but also a creative method that has grown increasingly rigid—as artistic praxis, and as a strategy of response, it catalyzes individual creativity and the potential to confront reality.
Setting out from the two Aranya communities at Beidaihe and Jinshanling, this exhibition gathers more than 50 works spanning a range of mediums from painting to paper, video, sculpture, sound, and installation. Remarkably, 10 artists and 4 artist groups were commissioned to create new works this time. They have all physically come to this seemingly ordinary place on the edge of the north China plains, drawing from their keen insights and powerful vitality to break outwards and penetrate inwards, with the goal of expanding notions and mediums of painting from life, and the contemporary relevance of this framework for action.
Here, painting from life is more than just a form of technical training; it is an act of creation that transforms embodied experience, the spiritual practice of the construction of subjectivity, an endeavor at once quotidian and courageous.
This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, together with artist Chen Xiaoyi and Curatorial Assistant Gao Liangjiao.
Chen Ruofan
Botanical Bank: 54 Objects Transplanted
2023
Stainless steel, LED, video
400 × 400 × 400 cm
55:92 min.
Commissioned and produced by aranya plein air art project 2023
Installation view, aranya plein air art project
July 7th to October 29th, 2023
Photography Sun Shi
Courtesy of aranya plein air art project
Robert Mapplethorpe
Self Portrait
1981
Silver gelatin print
58.5 × 61 × 3.2 cm (framed)
Installation view, aranya plein air art project
July 7th to October 29th, 2023
Photography Sun Shi
Courtesy of aranya plein air art project
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London · Paris · Salzburg · Seoul
Haegue Yang
Migratory DMZ Birds on Asymmetric Lens - Duiitt Duiitt Vessel (Gray-Backed Thrush)
2020
Soapstone, 3D printed resin
158 × 89 × 147 cm
Installation view, aranya plein art project
July 7th to October 29th, 2023
Photography Sun Shi
Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
and aranya plein air art project
Christine Sun Kim
A Permanent Tourist In A Foreign Language
2023
Inkjet printing on stainless-steel sign post
225 × 150 cm × 7 parts
Commissioned and produced by aranya plein air art project 2023
Installation view, aranya plein air art project
July 7th to October 29th, 2023
Photography Sun Shi
Courtesy of aranya plein air art project