西岸 | BEST BUND

As part of the first edition of Condo Complex in Shanghai, a gallery swap between locally-based galleries and international partners, Don Gallery and Ghebaly Gallery from Los Angeles co-host the dialogue between Chinese artist HU Weiyi and Mexican artist Yoshua OKÓN about their video works. As keen observers of human behavior, they both explore how a body technique seemingly abnormal establishes a personal territory. Presenting an anthropological approach via camera, they experiment with the unstable relationship between performance, acting and action.

For the first exhibition in China, Yoshua OKÓN builds a portrait of a particularly American relationship to history, one full of gaps and myth. An cultural organizer deeply engaged with notions of transnationalism and the localized effects of global forces, OKÓN deploys playfulness and critique in equal measure creating an unwieldy mirror for seeing the ways unpleasant histories can be lodged invisibly in contemporary daily life. He is known for weaving together documentary and fiction, also very often drawing out reenactments and collaborations from his subjects.

An artist-curator from a younger generation born out of rapid social development, HU Weiyi articulates discursive events where his imagination upon liberation, freedom and revolution is exercised as symbolic gestures. As a response to OKÓN’s practice, HU retraces his own steps to street theater and many of the habits of immediate confrontation against the peace time. The pivotal role of occupation in this vein is registered as a reciprocal experience for a record of his exchange with the extinguished past.

HU Weiyi was born in Shanghai in 1990 where he currently lives. He graduated from the Department of Public Art and the School of Inter-media Art in China Academy of Art respectively in 2013 and 2016. He is good at observing the relationship between randomness and nature, and reversing it into a subjective expression. While presupposing the audience’s trajectory, he further masters the spatial, the conceptual, and the external extension of information. In 2014, HU Weiyi won Huayu Youth Award for his work Flirt. His recent solo exhibitions include “Imagination is Reality” (duo with HU Jieming, ShanghART, Singapore, 2018), “Daily Routine” (Don Gallery, Shanghai, 2017), “HU Weiyi” (organized by A+ Contemporary, Asia Art Center Taipei II, Taipei, 2015), “No Express” (UCCA, Beijng, 2015) and “Flirt” (M50 Art Space, Shanghai, China). His works have also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including “Turning Point – 40 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art” (Long Museum, Shanghai, 2018), “Shanghai Dandy” (Don Gallery, Shanghai, 2017), “Shanghai Galaxy II” (Yuz Museum, Shanghai, 2017), “Body Media II” (Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2017), “Hinter jedem Berg steht noch ein Berg” (Helmhaus Zürich, Zürich, 2016), “Home Cinema” (OCT Art & Design Gallery, Shenzhen, 2016), “True Landscapes and Landscaped Gardens” (Times Museum, Guangzhou, 2016), “WE: A Community of Chinese Contemporary Artists” (chi K11 art museum, Shanghai, 2016), etc.

Yoshua OKÓN was born in Mexico City in 1970 where he currently lives. He received an MFA from UCLA with a Fulbright scholarship (2012). His work, like a series of near-sociological experiments executed for the camera, blends staged situations, documentation and improvisation and questions habitual perceptions of reality and truth, selfhood and morality. His solo shows exhibitions include “Yoshua OKÓN” (Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, 2018), “In the Land of Ownership” (Asakusa, Tokyo, 2016), “Salò Island” (UCI Contemporary Arts Center, Irvine, 2014), , “Poulpe” (Mor Charpentier, Paris, 2012), “Piovra” (Kaufmann Repetto, Milan, 2011), “Octopus” (Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2013; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2011; SUBTITLE, Städtische Kunsthalle, Munich, 2008), etc. His group exhibitions include “What People Do for Money: Some Joint Ventures” (Manifesta 11, Zurich, 2016), “Burning Down the House” (The 10th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, 2014), “Antes de la resaca” (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, 2011), “Incongruous” (Musèe Cantonal des Beux-Arts, Lausanne, 2011), “The Mole´s Horizon” (Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, 2010), “The Third Shore of the River” (The 6th Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre, 2007); “Amateurs” (CCA Wattis, San Francisco 2008), “Laughing in a Foreign Language” (Hayward Gallery, London, 2008), “Adaptive Behavior” (New Museum, New York, 2004) and “Mexico City: an exhibition about the exchange rates between bodies and values” (MoMA PS1, New York, 2002; Kunstwerke, Berlin, 2002). His work is included in the collections of Tate Modern, Hammer Museum, LACMA, La Colección Jumex and MUAC, amongst others.