SHANGLIANG 商 亮

Ode to the Unexpected

Jan 12 – Mar 2, 2024

Artists: Maggie Menghan Chen, Chen Ruofan, Chen Ying,Fu Site, Huang Long, Li Kejin, Qian Qian, Shang Liang, Shao Fengtian,Shi Yi, Tian Yi, Wang Ye

 

Madeln Gallery is pleased to present the group exhibition “Ode to the Unexpected” on January 12, 2024, featuring twelve artists working in installation, sculpture, painting, video, and handicraft.

It aims to investigate how a younger generation responds to their lived experiences laden with contingency and heterogeneity, and to kindle a reimagination of the contemporaneity inherent of art ecology and social reality alike.

The exhibition points to the self-questioning and self-criticizing impulse of the art institution, from which stems the shared spiritual cause of participating artists. While embracing chance, contingency, heterogeneity, and uncontrollability as inevitable components of our artistic and social existence, we sushimit therefom, composing an o deeticism or

contemporary experiences. Yet meanwhile, the “ode” is fraught with things unexpected, or rather, that itself is unexpected – in other words, the birth of art or sublimity in general is equally a contingency and resists any thorough institutionalization or rationalization.