Solo Show YAO Qingmei: Mole Centre Pompidou X West Bund Museum Project 29 April - 3 September 2023
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.
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.
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.