Artist: Nancy Lupo

Exhibition title: No Country for Old Men

Venue: Antenna Space, Shanghai, China

Date: January 12 – March 14, 2018

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

For the first exhibition of the year, we are proud to present Los-Angeles-based artist Nancy Lupo’s first solo exhibition in Asia, “No Country for Old Men.” The exhibition opens on January 12th and runs until March 14th, 2018.

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During a summer almost ten years ago, I became periodically obsessed with a set of public benches.

These benches have sat outside Shanghai Center and the Portman Ritz-Carlton Hotel on West Nanjing Road since the early 2000s. Two, three, or four in a group, they hug the trees by the pedestrian. They are hard not to notice. Their curved shape was probably intended to maximize utility at their time of making, but for the passers-by who feel tired and seduced to take a seat they also offer a promise of choice. You can either sit on the side facing the Shanghai Exhibition Center, or take the other side towards the hotel, which allows you to observe the tourists walking in and out of the luxury stores changing hosts at a speed parallel to seasons in fashion; it’s either neoclassicism or neo-futurism.

Throughout that summer, I meticulously calculated my daily calorie intake, took long walks around the French Concession every morning and afternoon, and piously returned to the City Shop located on the B1 Floor of Shanghai Center for lunch salads, which I always consumed while sitting on one of those benches. With every bite of arugula and celery, my brain translated the crunch of those fibers and the smell of their juices into a euphoric signal of well-being, which was then digested, blended, and confused with the physical sensation of the back of my thighs against the bench, the color of its pale white surface, and the feeling of sweat oozing from every pore of my skin in the hot air.

After the summer, I moved to the States for school, and the benches stayed there.

Of course, the physical and psychological experience I am recounting here had, to some extent, to do with what was essentially an episode of self-imposed diet. But that does not make the experience less valid—not in the least. It belongs to a spectrum of diets and disordered eating that perhaps no one living in today’s world is confident to say they are—and always will be—entirely immune to; health and well-being as a popular desire always gets exploited by the capitalist system before re-entering the market as seductive products and lifestyles. While that is all true, what really struck me in retrospect is how, in that summer marked by my feverish desire for physical transformation, the bench became something like an attachment. Facilitated by the smell, taste, and other sensations in those moments of intimacy, I came to embrace the bench as an object of desire which, through my return and attachment to it, offered me a sense of optimism in becoming what it promised.

As I returned to those benches for a visit the night I finished these lines, they had turned all rusty and were no longer in those groups as I remembered. I guess they too move in their own worlds, and at certain moments of chance, our worlds converge.

-Alvin Li

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Sailing to Byzantium

by William Butler Yeats

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing‐masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
(A poem pick by the artist)

Nancy Lupo(b. 1983, Flagstaff, AZ, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received a BFA from The Cooper Union and a MFA from Yale University School of Art. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013 and is a 2015 recipient of a RemaHortMann Emerging Artist Grant. Recent exhibitions include:No Country for Old Men, Antenna Space, Shanghai, China(2018).The Forecast, CroyNielsen, Germany, Berlin(2017);Camille Henrot: Days are Dogs, Palaisde Tokyo, France(2017); Kristina Kite, Los Angeles, CA(2017);Bench 2016, Dodge Caravan license plate 7KAA008, Los Angeles, CA(2016); Nancy Lupo:Parent and Parroting, Swiss Institute, New York, NY(2016);The Third Badger, 1857, Oslo, Norway (2015);Not S.A.D., Wallspace, New York, NY (2015);Taster’s Choice–curatedby Christopher Y. Lew, MOMA PS1, New York, NY(2014) andOld Zoo Food, LAXART, Los Angeles, CA (2014).

Nancy Lupo, No Country for Old Men, 2018, exhibition view, Antenna Space, Shanghai

Nancy Lupo, Bench, 2017 (pink, concave), 2018, Steel, rubber feet and Fluorocarbon Metallic paint, 190×90×64cm

Nancy Lupo, Untitled, 2018, cast iron and flashlights, 46×18.5×43.5cm (each)

Nancy Lupo, Balenciaga, 2018, 2 -10 gallon Rubbermaid Brute containers, Balenciaga dresses, chop frills, rainbow thread, cotton balls, gesso, 46×39.5×44.5cm, 49.5×44.5×45cm

Nancy Lupo, Popcorn Isn’t Cotton Balls Isn’t Breadcrumbs But Also Isn’t Not, 2018, 3653 “ribs” —steel, iron, aluminum, Magic Sculp, Magic-Smooth, foam core, gesso, bonsai wire, aircraft cable, 3d printed plastic, halloweenbones, Magic-Eraser, Model Magic, marshmallows, marshmallow root (dried, cut and sifted), squid ink pasta, twist-ties, hooks (elephant, other), ribbon, chocolate cake, cookies, local produce, rainbow string, paper soy sauce dishes, ear candles, brass cake mould and beeswax candle. See also: No.1376 West Nanjing Road, Shanghai BaiyulanPopulation Cultural Square (The opposite of Shanghai Railway Station), Bench 2017 (pink, concave), Bench 2017 (lilac, convex), Untitled, dimensions variable

Nancy Lupo, Preamble, 2017, Bronze, 12×8.5×8.5cm

Nancy Lupo, Bench 2017 (lilac, convex), 2018, Steel, rubber feet and Fluorocarbon Metallic paint, 180×80×64cm