Vitalisms is an exhibition-as-experiment initiating a long-term research and education project on the "historicity" and "value" of contemporary painting in China. We begin our research by gathering a group of artists, born in the 1980s and 90s in China and mostly educated in Chinese art academies, and by focusing on figurative paintings made in the past five years (i.e., since 2020). We experiment with their presentation in a shared space and time, to ask:
How are they situated in history? What could they tell us about the time and place in which they were made? Could we anticipate their historicization as documents of personal and/or collective memory in the future? In what ways could they become a counter-hegemonic archive?
The title of this exhibition, Vitalisms, derives from art critic and historian Isabelle Graw’s theory of painting’s particularity not as a medium, but rather as a type of sign production that is experienced as deeply visceral and highly personalized. A painting’s pictorial signs point first to their material and corporeal form, which then can be read as traces of activity and felt as “haptic events” on their surface – and it is from here which “vitalistic fantasies” emerge. Throughout painting’s history, various vitalistic fantasies have been projected onto the painting as a material object: an image of liveliness, an agent with divine power to bring dead matter to life, an artifact of the artist’s life and presence, and a living subject itself.
Could we possibly extend these vitalistic fantasies to think further of paintings as a reflecting subject – a knowing and thinking agent capable of effecting change in our modes of understanding the world? Could painting, when made and understood as socially and historically contingent, also act upon the world itself?
With the launch of Vitalisms, when we ask about the historicity of painting, we are not asking about the historical accuracy of a painting in terms of what it depicts, i.e., “what really happened?” as an ontological question. The accuracy of history is one that can never be answered as we cannot directly observe the past. We can only indirectly observe the effects of the past, including paintings as cultural artifacts. Endowed with life, whether projected upon it as fantasy or immanent to its material being, paintings speak to us and act upon the world. Paintings represent and make shifts in our modes of understanding the world. Our question is an epistemological one, “how do we know what really happened?”
April 1, 2025
