The exhibition “World Picture: Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes” is held 9 years after Today Art Museum and the famous artist, Xu Bing’s last cooperation, which is also the latest testimony to his artistic development in the past decade after he returned to China.
Since Dragonfly Eyes came out, it has received intensive research and response at home and abroad. Just like Xu Bing’s consistent creation style, he maintains sensitivity to the times, daily life and materials. He communicates with viewers in his unique artistic language. The carrier of his works meets the daily experience of viewers and gives viewers a familiar sense of strangeness. Dragonfly Eyes is an experimental work of art, which is made up of ready-made surveillance images released in the cloud space in the past few years. On one hand, it continues the artist’s deep critique and reflection on social phenomena and technical landscapes in his creation; on the other hand, it brings viewers to a visually changing image labyrinth: it is a common encounter in which contemporary people mirror each other, and at the same time it radically reveals the essence of reality: “image is the world.”
The exhibition is jointly organized by Today Art Museum and Xu Bing Studio, and Mr. Dong Bingfeng is also invited to be the curator. In the second floor of the museum, a new “dragonfly theater” is created, and the document exhibition area is specially planned on the third floor of the museum. While focusing on the concept of the artist’s Dragonfly Eyes and the behind-the-scenes stories, the first attempt was made to exhibit with a relevance-based comparison. The whole exhibition seeks to establish a dialogue that combines documentation with visual display. Through theuse of nine “keywords,” the exhibition acquaints viewers with the creative logic of Dragonfly Eyes, and viewers can also comparatively learn the artistic methodology of the artist during his career for over forty years, thus gaining a rich and three-dimensional visual and ideological experience.
Alex Gao, Director of Today Art Museum
