Curator: Tang Yifei
Artists: Bo Choy, Cao Shuyi,Li Yushi, Pei Yanqing, Ren Jialin, Yi To

Exhibition Dates: 2022.3.4- 2022.4.16

Venue: Hive Center for Contemporary Art（Beijing）
Address: E06, 798 Art District, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China

Hive Center for Contemporary Art is thrilled to announce the presentation of curator Tang Yifei’s latest project, Terrain of the Skin, from 4 March to 16 April, 2023, in Hall B and C. This group exhibition features the recent practice of six artists, Bo Choy, Cao Shuyi, Li Yushi, Pei Yanqing, Ren Jialin and Yi To, focusing on their involvement and intervention with biological bodies and their contexts, critically separating and deconstructing them from reality in a multitude of fiction from different perspectives, revealing a new consciousness of nature and cultural conceptions of the individual and their territory. In the context of this exhibition, “skin” becomes a microscopic collection of molecules/biological skin/social identity façades/geographical appearances, while “terrain” serves as its macroscopic mapping and ideology; these intersecting metaphors are also enigmatic connections that undermine established boundaries, retrospecting and projecting alternative spatio-temporal histories and kinship imaginations.

Donna Haraway suggests a similarity between micro-biological and geopolitical models in the biopolitics of the postmodern body, where the discourse of the recognition and segregation between the internal/external by the immune system subtly corresponds to the organism’s protective defence mechanisms and is associated with national/state borders. With the organic activity of the microbiological level projecting the belonging, possession, and control of the species over its habitat, how to reshape nature and escape this artificial ideology of linear development from scientific rationality is an attempt by the feminist perspective to unsettle, to oscillate, and thus to establish an intimacy and inclusion that could dissolve the boundaries and sustain. Beyond the intricate structures intertwined with long collective histories and fragmented personal memories, the artists’ uncanny imagination, which departs from the generated social field and the written biological experience to engage in extraneous complications, becomes a fictional anchor, approaching the untamed, dynamic flow of space-time. In this exhibition, Bo Choy restuctures unofficial folk narratives and mysticism; Can Shuyi reinvents a pluralistic, dynamic collection of biological bodies; Li Yushi deconstructs social gender roles and subjects of sex desire; Pei Yanqing establishes a new order of life between objects; Ren Jialin observes and interprets nature from a unique perspective; Yi To perceives the body as a vessel for the essence and laws of the world. It is about how, from the subtle myriad of ‘I’s’, a retrogressive and dangerous flight is contemplated to evoke the ‘we’ of a larger cognition and narrative.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Bo Choy (Born in Hong Kong, living and working in London, UK) received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Chelsea College of Art in 2016 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Slade School of Art in 2020. Bo Choy often uses writing, sound, costume and performance as a means of narrative to create films and performances. Fiction is an integral part of her work, weaving imaginary and extraordinary elements into a narrative that is otherwise rooted in the everyday. At the same time, she also appropriates and disassembles some themes from Eastern thought and folk traditions, such as post-colonial identity and memory (individual and collective); how the personal/familial past and present are embedded in the complex relations with the wider socio-politico-historical contexts. Apart from having affecting qualities, Bo Choy hopes that her work will open a space for questions and reflections on our relationship with the world at large.Bo Choy’s recent exhibitions, screenings and performances include: “High Res Worlds II”, Art Central 2022, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Hong Kong, China, 2022; “Bloomberg New Contemporaries”, South London Gallery, London, UK, 2021; “I Could Not Recall How I Got Gere”, Tabula Rasa Gallery, London, UK, 2021; “Kasseler DokFest”, Kassel, Germany, 2020; “Berlin International Zeichen der Nacht Film Festival”, Berlin, Germany, 2020.

Cao Shuyi (born in 1990，living and working in New York, USA) received a bachelor’s degree in law from Fudan University in 2013, a master’s degree in management from Fudan University in 2016, and a master’s degree in fine arts from Parsons School of Design in 2018. Through speculative archaeology and ecological science fiction, Cao explores the alchemy of creation and knowledge, and the pluralistic relationship between technology, mythology and cosmology. Her multi-media installations combine inorganic and organic materials, natural and artificial processes, and combine digital technology, video and sound with handmade sculptures to embody the heterogeneous recombination of material temporality. Shuyi’s important solo exhibitions include: “Shadow Metabolism”, Hazel and Robert Siegel Gallery, Pratt Institute, New York, USA, 2022. Her recent group exhibitions include: “The Language of Mushrooms”，Kunming，China, 2022; “Darwin’s Paradox: A Decade of Bio Art”, School of Visual Arts, New York, USA, 2022; “Chthonic Spoil”，Walter Phillips Gallery，Banff，Canada，2022.

Li Yushi is a Chinese artist based in London, working primarily in photography. She is finishing her PhD in Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Li was selected as one of the artists for the Foam Talent 2022 and nominated as one of the 100 RPS Hundred Heroines in 2019. Her work has been featured on different international publications, such as The Guardian, Zeit Magazine and Libération. Li has shown her work in different countries, including solo shows in London, Oslo and Shanghai and her recent group exhibition at Fotografiska in New York. Her work mainly engages with the question of the gaze in relation to gender, desire and sexuality, culminating in the investigation of the male representation as an erotic subject in light of digital social networks.

Pei Yanqing (born in Foshan, living and working in New York, USA) graduated with her BFA and MFA in Chinese Painting in 2014 and 2017, from China Academy of Art, and her MFA in Painting and Drawing in 2021, from Pratt Institute. Pei Yanqing’s works with the idea that everything exists as one simultaneously while being connected to something else independently in her paintings. Her practice is an exploration of the intimate symbiotic relationship between human beings and their surroundings with the focus on nature, as well as imaginations of poetic spaces derived from narrative contexts composed of Chinese ideographic characters. Pei’s pictorial vision is a chaotic yet harmonious representation of human communication, both with each other and the world around us. Pei’s recent exhibitions include:”Surface Scope”，Carrie Able Gallery，New York，USA，2022；”The Other Art Fair Brooklyn，Agger Fish Building”，Brooklyn Navy Yard，New York，USA，2022; “Liminality：2022 Visual Art Exhibition of Asian Artists in America”，Liminality Art Space，New York，USA，2022；”The Next：International Juried Exhibition”，Li Tang Gallery，New York，USA，2022；”Shin Haus：Armory Week”，Shin Gallery，New York，2021.

Ren Jialin(b.1993, living and working in Vancouver, Canada) finished her BFA and MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 and 2022. Ren’s paintings reveal complex emotions, between familiarity and strangeness, between the quotidian and the fantastical, and between representation and abstraction. These schisms also evoke the interrelationship between self-doubt and confidence. She entwines these opposing sentiments by depicting and exaggerating the ordinary and the overlooked, employing plants to engender familiarity and imaginary spaces. The limited description of the space and the distorted scale of common objects engage the viewer psychologically, questioning the authenticity of conventional time and space. Ren Jialin’s important solo exhibitions include: “Vanilla, Cloud and Pear”, Common Place, Beijing, China, 2022. Her recent group exhibitions include: “Glimmer Shrine,”, Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong, China, 2022; “Exit Counseling”, The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, USA, 2022; and “Conceive”, Latitude Gallery, New York, USA, 2022.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Tang Yifei, curating and writing. Born in 1997, she graduated from Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art in 2021. Curated KAITO Itsuki: Blacken, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2022; Love This Pain, Institute for Provocation, Beijing, 2021-2022; People’s Park Plinth, Furtherfield, London, 2021. Press have appeared in Heichi Magazine. Recently focus on the mechanism of contemporary art under transcultural politics and a global scope, within alternative narratives that are nomadic to geography and history.