See below

Zhao Yao

In Vitrines sur l’art of the Galeries Lafayette
From 06/07/2014 to 29/07/2014

In the framework of the partnership with the K11 Art Foundation and the Modules – Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent hors les murs

Zhao Yao’s work will be included in an upcoming exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in October 2014.

Zhao Yao (b. 1981, lives and works in Beijing) works in a multi-disciplinary practice that includes sculptures, paintings, objects, and performances, by forging a haptic dissonance between the everyday and the spiritual. Guiding and dislocating our perceptual movements from seeing to sensing and back again, his mixed-media sculptures are reminiscent of totems that are at once ancient, present, and futuristic, manifesting the material energies of yet-to-be-named rituals.

For the Vitrines sur l’art, Zhao Yao culls his imagistic materials from various locales of his surroundings. In the floor sculpture Now (2014), he migrates from the negative space created by the excess of spray paint on his studio floor, to drips of paint covering up the advertisement on plastic sheeting signage wrapped around construction sites in Beijing, to generic graphics from an iPad application, which he frequently employs to generate instantaneous kaleidoscopic images. Printed on flexible copper sheets, the laser-cut contours emit the ebb and flow of energy fields. The perceptual liquidity is brought into conversation as a sort of warp and weft of our contemporary condition.

Great Performance No. 4 (2014), a hanging pelt-like piece, consists of digital prints on fake leather, flanked and backed by fused layers of linen, denim, and artificial fur, creating layers of flatness in a sort of dissection. Zhao has searched on the Internet the type of images that bombard us in our everyday newsfeed, of a crowd gathering to protest the change of Cantonese to Mandarin on television in Guangdong Province and an empty street during an explosion of a barricade in Istanbul. Interested in the way language and ideologies propel us into action and conflict, Zhao uses abstraction to elicit us as witness with tactile precision.
Zhao Yao’s work will be included in an upcoming exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in October 2014.

Curator: Jo-ey Tang

As part of its mission in international prospecting and the development of the artistic scenes in France as well as abroad, the Palais de Tokyo has signed a long-term partnership with K11 Art Foundation. This partnership enables an in-depth exploration of the Chinese artistic scene, with an aim to discover new forms and languages outside the basis of the art market. A co-curated exhibition by Jo-ey Tang (Palais de Tokyo) and Wang Chunchen (Head of the Department of Curatorial Research of Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Museum, Beijing) will be held in the fall of 2014 at the Palais de Tokyo.

In the framework of the partnership with THE K11 Art Foundation AND les Modules – Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent hors les murs.