Exhibition text and related events (PDF)
Press Images (ZIP)
A Taste for Absence, Flash Art (05/2017)
A Dangerous Afternoon, Mousse Magazine (06/2017)
In Basel zeigt sich Yan Xing furchtlos und gefühlvoll, Monopol (06/2017)
Kunst, Stroytelling und Präzision in der Kunsthalle, Radio X (06/2017)
Kunsthalle Basel presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland of Yan Xing, born in 1986 in Chongqing, China, and living and working in Beijing and Los Angeles. Yan Xing’s practice involves sculpture, video, photography, installation, and performance. Often there are elaborate, fantastical backstories to his projects, and this one will be no exception. For the artist’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, he presents a newly commissioned installation that acts as a fictive exhibition by a fictive curator whose fantasy life is the libidinal undercurrent to the project.
The installation’s various components, including a film, photographs, performance, and other elements conspire to convey the backstory of the fictive curator without necessarily explaining it explicitly. Like nearly all of Yan Xing’s oeuvre, this project is informed by a mix of art historical research, autobiographical narratives, aesthetic critique, and sheer confabulation. Fact and speculation, the public and private spheres, the art object and display structures touch and blur in a project that choreographs “history” and the viewer equally.