Advent: Inventing Landscape, Producing the Earth

In late October 2019, “Advent” the first contemporary art exhibition ever held in Qianshao Bay, will open. The exhibition will gather thirty-one famous contemporary artists from China and abroad. More than forty paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, land artworks will be presented in the Contemporary Art Center and landscapes of Qianshao Bay.

Within this high-tech era we are now able to accumulate materials and tools in abundance, yet we still yearn for a safe habitat, worrying and questioning ourselves “will the world be fine?” Facing fierce urbanization and rural construction, the globalization of China’s urban and rural areas is accelerating vertiginously, and it is therefore time that we ask ourselves from the perspective of a village: how do we build an ecosystem starting from a village? What kind of Earth do we need? What kind of future do we want to create? In Qianshao Bay – this new land offered by nature – artists will invent landscapes and produce the Earth through their works, integrating Qianshao Bay’s new ecosystem to their reflexion and realize a certain future, it will be an art-ecosystem action compelled by the future.

The exhibition will fully explore the various aspects of this rich ecosystem located on Chongming Island, in the Yangtze River estuary, including: the new territory of the estuary, the history related to this sci-fi environment, land exploitation in socialism history, collective agricultural life and the national ecosystem model teaching of this new era as well as its opening to the world, among others. The exhibition will survey the undefined nature of this ecosystem, and will strive to turn it into an ecosystem theater, placed in front of the people of the country, inviting everyone to see what kind of ecosystem programs can be achieved, and attempt to involve everyone’s ecosystems. This contemporary art-ecosystem exhibition will constitute a demonstration for each individual own’s ecosystem theater model. Philosopher Lu Xinghua describes this art-ecosystem show in these words: “the exhibition imagines that a contemporary art viewer suddenly arrives in Qianshao village, at the frontier of Chongming Island and finds out that he/she is in an ecosystem theater, and that he/she is the protagonist and has to pursue his/her acting⋯”.