Yu Guo was born in Tongjiang, Sichuan in 1983, he graduated from Department of Oil Painting of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2016, currently lives and works in Chongqing. Yu  Guo’s art practice involves painting, video and writing. Base on the space practice, Yu Guo emphasizes the combination of body and media materials to keep the minutes of the creation process. Recently his works focused on the interweaving of images with texts, as well as the interplay between visible and invisible of social fact.

Solo Exhibitions

2019 [ Rocks in Shallow Water],cypress, Chengdu, China

2016 [STEADICAM], Organhaus, Chongqing, China

Group Exhibitions

2021[Thus,the city between twilight and dawn is wilderness],Yellowbox art museum, Shanghai,

China

2021 [STUDY], HABITAT, Shanghai, China

2020[Diagonal],Magician space, Beijing, China

2019[A Geography of Resistance],Taikang space, Beijing, China

2019[Cosmopolis #2],Centre Pompidou,Paris,France

2019[Here we live],KADIST, San Francisco, America

2018[ Cosmopolis #1.5: Enlarged Intelligence],Chengdu, China

2018[CHONGQING FOREST A SAMPLE OF THE ASIAN ETHICAL URBAN],Chongqing, China

2018[THE PRECARIOUSNESS],HYUNDAI MOTORSTUDIO, Beijing, China

2017[The dilemmas of painting], A+ Contemporary, Beijing, China 

2017[A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth glancing at ],

Beijing Commune, Beijing, China

2016 [LANDSCAPE HOTEL ASIA], Gallery Soap, Kitakyushu, Japan

2015 [Hinterland Project], Times Museum, Guangzhou, China

2014 [Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still], Bank, Shanghai, China

2014 [UP-YOUTH China Young Artists Exhibition], Times Museum, Beijing, China

2014 [Red Line], Organhaus/Gallery Soap, Kitakyushu, Japan

2014 [Approach to Realities], Kunstraum Landeshauptstadt Dusseldorf, Dusseldorf, Germany

Fan Xi: Within 5m

CLC Gallery Venture / C5CNM

05.09 - 06.27, 2021

Opening: 2021.05.09, 16:00PM

C5CNM is pleased to co-present with CLC Gallery Venture -Fan Xi’s exhibition Within 5m, showcasing a number of recent photographic and cinematic works by the artist. In her long-term practice, Fan Xi explored the profound impact of spatial and psychological distance and the act of distancing on sensorial experience. Working in photography, film, sculpture and installation, she examines the interwoven relationships between everyday experience, the production of fictions, and heterogeneous times.

In the summer of 2019, Fan Xi participated in the offshore residency program on the island of Pulau Dinawan, Malaysia. In 2020 she included two video works shot on the island in the exhibition When to sail? at the Guangdong Museum of Art, 17’17’’, and L. L tells a quixotic story; the protagonist L is to build a house above the sea, and eventually has it washed away by waves. L is not just a person, but an ensemble of four individuals’ experiences. For the artist, touches and contacts that only take place occasionally, arbitrarily and unnoticeably are the only thing that is tangible and real in L’s life; this species of barely noticeable touch, is also the artist’s preeminent gesture, as she treats and nurtures images, scenes and natural environments. By re-mixing the soundtracks of the two video works and by partially re-staging the pseudo-natural atmosphere of the When to sail? exhibition, Within 5m demonstrates the diversity of Fan Xi’s practice since 2014. Its de-totalized, wild fashion points disclose the significance of distance of excess, weak touch, and temporal heterogeneity, at a time that is sabotaged by the conspiracy of nature and spirituality.

Fan Xi graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2009 and currently lives and works in Beijing. Recent exhibitions include: “When to sail?”, Guangdong Museum Of Art, Guangzhou (2020); “L’s living room”, Konfuzius-Institut Nurnberg-Erlangen, Nurnberg (2020); “PEER TO PEER”, Shanghai Center of Photography, Shanghai (2019); “PEER TO PEER”, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool (2019); “A Composite Leviathan”, Luring Augustine, New York, Bridge Projects, Los Angeles (2019/2020); “Have a Nice DAY!”, Room 105, Baishu Hutong, Dongcheng District, Beijing (2018); “After Sunset”, Gallery Liusa Wang, Paris (2018); “The Same But Also Changed”, Shanghai Exhibition Center, Shanghai (2018); “Le déplacement ”, Gallery Liusa Wang, Paris (2018); “Bad New Days Ahead”, Tai Kang Space, Beijing (2017); “Reduction of Image”, Yang Gallery, Beijing (2016); “Through the Body: Lens-based works by Contemporary Chinese Women Artists Through the Body: Lens-based works by Contemporary Chinese Women Artists”, the University of Toronto Art Centre, Toronto, (2014); “The Black Dwarf/Part 2”, Star Gallery, Beijing (2014) and “The Black Dwarf/Part 1”, Star Gallery, Beijing (2013).

Jin Ningning: I hate you
03/03-03/28, 2021

   For well-established or exceptional reasons, complying with health and safety regulations, giraffe does not sing outside of the tube, her colleagues laughing at and commending her behind her back, and only give her massages behind her back; front is not acceptable. Lightings, fish market auctions, wigs, twigs, yodels, wicked tricks or any other type of culinary technique that raises a grinning person’s hand - finger on the trigger - just won’t do: front or fronting is not acceptable. At the very least, the projectiles have to be smashed, the smashed have to be grinding their tooth, turd pudding, pushpins, have to be, in other words, smashed the page five hundred in the seventh edition of the almanac published three months ago, some black sap pours, and along with it some red beard.

   Similarly, the unhealthy measurement, via watch, of the distance between the boot and the heart abruptly shuts the Plantago’s eye and dilates its mouths, covering mouths and hands, and eyes, come waves of smelly tox? My smelly tox is your mailbox; there is a shocking decease of crimes in the urban areas in Japan over the years, fake keys are none other than the purple orange hat vehemently sought after by bluegrass as it in an unique fashion propagates white suprematism. Run, off you go! There is an outside! It’s right below! Don’t go where!

   Or any facet, any facade - she as a designer used to work during a two-months long summer holiday ripping off ugly faces for the clients, or cyberpunk: bug yellow. You have not betrayed you, neither have I, concealing mutually slippers bad bell never toll anymore. Letters in the fluffy ear, punishments in the unwanted softness, make it quick. Melancholy cuts the chat short. First draft’s the best draft what week day weak day is it make bows pow wow Marie Antoinette’s your mother rhyme’s fluffy dress cover.

   The huge chest makes one run the way horrified at the tomorrow contained within, Hamada knows nothing, kept tight inside, kept tight inside the moe rotten chest. Or outside.

   Just like “I hate you”, “I love you” is overwhelming, not acceptable: not only is the one uttering it burdened with courage, the one on the no less jeopardised receiving end has to unwillingly, willy-nilly suffer from it, and continue to do so in the following days. Flipping it: just like “I love you”, “I hate you” is simply too casual, trivial and weightless, back and forth. Not swallowing it seems to be the best or only option.

   Naturally, the dolls’ couches are for the dolls, although there are no dolls here, but more than a dozen of clouds of emptiness. This is not only because that the dolls are found, not hand made - which is to say, unlike the hand made seats and thrones, the dolls are unique, singular, irreplaceable, and are mine; dolls are absent, also because they ought to be. They are meant to be absent here, meant not to be seated permanently; they have already for a short while experienced the un-monumental, sunken comfort on Instagram and WeChat. The couches are not unlike the man who carries his own faeces: becomes uroboric when the deliberately delayed, brief and intense release happens, becomes its own toilet - a deliberately delayed, prolonged and furious object-becoming schedule. Therefore, there exists indeed another, better solution: not showing up on the occasion of the “I hate you.”

   About a year ago, Jin Ningning constructed the C5CNM; today, Jin brings in some un-furnitures - trash - hires a band, and serves hot beverages, and demonstrates a belated hospitality. I can and perhaps indeed should hate the constructive assignments, those who break into the space that was my own, the feasts thrown in their names, and the following, repeatedly staged void, or anything else. Kristeva:”Fear then cements its enclosure around the phobic ego; a prison is built, dividing the world of others, which in reality will never come about except as a fleeting, hallucinatory, ghostly world in my foggy, fugitive, shadowed speech. Or, finally, it could be that the inaugural abjection of the subject ends in paranoid hatred: the most redoubtable, most deadly of all.” Elsewhere, Kristeva speaks of hatred and defence mechanism: when facing an other that is apparently dangerous, I demonstrate myself as a threat (“I hate you”), and only as such do I exist; today, as uncertainty unfolds, you should really think about defending, protecting yourself as well.

Friendship First, Competition Second

C5CNM is pleased to announce the opening of artist Xin Yunpeng's solo project "Friendship First, Competition Second". The reception will be held on July 2, after 6pm. The exhibition will last until August 2.

If we apply this directive to the art context, then it goes, politics first, art second. Today, it is the Americans whose art claims politics first, but it is us in actuality, who know politics first, when we cannot speak about participation openly.

Artist Xin Yunpeng asked me to play myself in his timely work. In order not to break character, my option now (in this text) is to avoid explaining the art work from the role of a curator. Instead, I’m put in the position of confessing my own feelings and concerns about the current state of international relations as a Chinese American living in China. 

I do not perceive using the meme “Friendship First, Competition Second” is merely a taunt against the Ping-Pong Diplomacy of China and U.S. in the 70s, even though the voice in my head did assume an exaggerated Peking accent, concealing the urgency of the reminder, perhaps because of the serious intentions of the message. 

When translating this title, the artist and I encountered a minor difficulty: the game is not in the hands of the players. Only someone who grew up in China’s mainland could “hear” it, for it was meant only to our side then, and it is even harder to convey the irony I feel about it now. It seems to have been pre-determined in the beginning, though average people were included in the benefiting side by given that grace, namely the last 50 years’ contact with the world, but ultimately people were denied the right to, or never meant to, participate in the decision of their own future.

Zhou Yi

Supported by De Sarthe Gallery