En Route by Yu Honglei

Curated by Domenico de Chirico

July 20 – August 9, 2016

YU Honglei

En Route, 2016

Duration: 16’00”, Format: double screen video, color, sound, Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

Yu Honglei’s En Route (2016) is a riff on the catalog of Lawrence Weiner’s Blue Moon Over, the conceptual guru’s project delving his text and schema into the realm of moving image. Yu sees its storyboard-liked layout as a dynamic lure for him to further develop Weiner’s pithy epigrams and graphics into a contemporary rendition. The artist provides with rich science fiction scenarios, through which embodying the intellectual travelogue Weiner’s pithy epigrams and graphics have signified: Heinz Mack’s travelogue in sending out the telecommunicating-signal from the desert, or the Afro-futuristic dance from Ivory Coast that happened to be akin to some of Yu’s sculptural imagery. Yu takes the chance speculating on these sentences, situating Weiner’s text-sculpture in an age of systemic overproduction of creativity. This skillful blending of the two different artistic regimes (say, the cold media of the conceptualism vis-à-vis the hot media of Yu’s visualization) provides an enchanting echoing womb that generates a new approach of reading Weiner’s conceptual oeuvre.

Yu Honglei, born in 1984, Inner Mongolia, Yu currently lives and works in Beijing.

His moving image and sculptural practice takes inspiration from a unique visual vernacular of online image database and visual cultures of Chinese cities. These sources are used by the artist and applied with the artist’s sculptural touch. What he is interested in is the plasticity of thought forms and the sensible entities it corresponds to. Such plasticity allows Yu to execute the cognitive leap between the visual currencies as employed by his works and their titles, allowing for a hermeneutic and polysemic output, which informs his highly personal artistic discourse.

His recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include: Carl Kostyal, London, September 2016; Swallow Century, Antenna Space, Shanghai, 2016; Sketch, Telescope, Beijing, 2015; Fat Mouse, Antenna Space, Shanghai, 2014; Everything Is Extremely Important: There Is Nothing That Will Not Come Back Again, Magician Space, Beijing, 2013. His recent group exhibitions include: Shifting Optics III, Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam, 2016; Des Hôtes: a Foreigner, a Human, an Unexpected Visitor, Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, 2015; 28 Chinese: Rubell Family Collection, San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas, 2015; The System of Objects, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, 2015.

Yu Honglei, En Route, 2016 (still from video)
Double-channel HD video, color, sound