Alllooksame/Tutttuguale? , Art from China, Japan and Korea

The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo continues its year dedicated to Asia with the group show Alllooksame? / Tutttuguale?, Art from China, Japan and Korea, at their centre for contemporary art in Turin. The exhibition, curated by Francesco Bonami, unites forty artists with Asian roots, seemingly bound together by history and language yet culturally and creatively frequently at variance from one another.

The title of the exhibition has been borrowed from the web site www.alllooksame.com, set up by a youngster in Japan, partly as a joke and partly to rejoice the stereotype of “diversity at any cost”, while also inevitably highlighting the contrasting characteristics of prejudice and racism.
Alllooksame? / Tutttuguale? humours the way Westerners may have difficulty in distinguishing the features, traditions and lifestyles of Chinese, Japanese and Korean people. Contrary to its title, the exhibition attempts to break through the generalist lines of thought about these countries and reveal new, multiple visions of three countries that have seen and are still seeing breathtaking change and development both socially and politically. The show aims to illustrate the contrasting and experimental sides of Asia and, especially in the light of the many exhibitions about China in recent years, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo hopes to provide a more complete picture of contemporary art in Asia through bodies of work by the new generation of artists from China, Japan and Korea – none of whom will have grown up with a feeling of inferiority towards the Western world that would have affected the people of these countries in the past. Together, the artists from these three countries are able to offer multiple views of the entire landscape in which they live, rather than a detailed one-sided one.

The fa？ade of the Fondazione’s centre in Turin will be part covered with a giant photograph, by the Chinese artist Jiang Zhi, of people on a beach shadowed by a luminous rainbow made up of brand names and product labels as a symbol of mass consumption. Again, on the exterior walls of the centre, visitors are greeted by a neon ideogram of the words China, Japan and Korea, created by the Chinese architect Ma Qingyung. This work has also been accepted as part of the circuit of the renowned international artists’ lights show Luci d’Artista, produced by the City of Turin.