Hive Center for Contemporary Art is honored to announce its first exhibition for 2016, Too Loud a Solitude: Stalkers of Chinese Contemporary Art, which will launch at 4:00p.m. on March 17 2016. The exhibition features the paintings, installations, photography and contemporary ink art of sixteen Chinese artists. Curated by Xia Jifeng, the exhibition will continue until April 17 2016.

At a time when noise and revelry have come to dominate the landscape of Chinese contemporary art, it seems almost presumptuous to revisit the notion of “solitude.” Yet, as time passes, it has become increasingly clear that the truly moving and compelling artistic creations have come from those artists who maintain their distance from the clamor. Such artists are islands unto themselves, maintaining a state of independent serenity removed from the external world as they stalk beneath the turbulent flows of the times. This solitude has nurtured keen insight and perceptivity, allowing them to clearly see the ills that beset our time. This solitude has also cultivated powerful creativity, which emerges before us as a unique prose with a highly personal aesthetic. In this listless, dizzying era, it is because we have these solitary stalkers that Chinese contemporary art has been able to produce more than just a shimmering exterior. Because of them, it possesses a solid inner core, an imposing weight. In a sense, their creations have transcended the superficial sociological level to create a force of resistance against the noise. To present their artworks together is to present an inspiring measure of the heights to which contemporary art may reach, and to sing a soothing requiem for this restless, unmoored era.

This exhibition invites sixteen artists from three generations of Chinese contemporary art: Shang Yang, Yu Youhan, Liang Shaoji, Liang Quan, Shen Qin, Duan Jianwei, Lu Nan, Liu Ye, Wu Yi, Ji Dachun, Wang Qing, Zhou Li, Xie Nanxing, Huang Yuxing, Tu Hongtao and Jin Shi. The title, Too Loud a Solitude, comes from the novel of the same name by Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997). Just as this great yet long-suffering Czech writer said, “I can be by myself because I’m never lonely; I’m simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.” Indeed, history always looks kindly on those solitary thinkers and practitioners in the times of noise and chaos, not the other way around.