OPENING

Solo Exhibition

21 May - 10 July, 2011

Installation, Sculpture, Performance, Video

ShanghART H Space, Shanghai

“Opening” focused on “aesthetic standards” through six kinds of gymnastic equipment - gymnastic stage, parallel bars, uneven bars, flying rings, balance beam and side horse,  juxtaposing various “criteria”. However, the most startling is the way the artist managed to control and create a provoking atmosphere through a live house show that was held in the exhibition space.

After the opening of “Opening”, one can now view two separate spaces with: a video of the lively “opening”, and an after-uproar venue, rational, and utterly classical. Marble pedestals, sculptures of young athletes and gymnastics equipment, all constitute different elements that embody “aesthetic standards” as we usually conceive them. What is interesting is that once presented, they don’t seem so “standard” anymore. The artist restructured classicism in an extreme way, but dispelled all the things around art performance; this series of installation understatedly describes today’s awkwardness on “standard”. This kind of understatement is then broken again by Zhang Ding who uses the word “Opening” as the title of this exhibition. In the society, openings are part of any event-related affairs, it is a social rule, or it is a habitual boring process with a nice show, and this illusory entertaining aspect precisely attracted the artist. In this planed, spectacular opening party, spectators participating to the violation of a cold exhibition became part of the work.