Capsule Shanghai is pleased to present “Eternal Return”, emerging artist Gao Yuan’s first solo exhibition in Shanghai. The exhibition runs from March 11 to April 30, 2017. The exhibit comprises two parts: an animation created by Gao Yuan called Lunar Dial and a selection of paintings realized over a time frame of six years that the artist used as backgrounds in her animation.
Lunar Dial received critical acclaim at the Short Film section of the 2017 International Film Festival Rotterdam and will be screened at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in April 2017. The film is a montage of paintings and drawings that create a suspenseful temporal “wormhole”. The artist excels at employing a cyclical narrative format, deftly incorporating visual, form, concept and metaphor. Themes include flowing water (water sounds, water droplets, a photograph of the ocean taken on a mobile phone and so forth), various lighting (moonlight, an incandescent light bulb, traffic lights, street lamps and a flashlight), and artifacts of knowledge (a human anatomy poster, library, flipping pages of a book and worn book covers). Through the balance of the duration, sequence and image of different themes, the artist exhibits a mastery of animation and montage that represents a peculiar view of time (the exhibition name “Eternal Return” refers to this)—the “present” continuously revisits both past and future.
