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Zang Kunkun’s Solo Exhibition “Walking Here and Now” at Long Museum
Zang Kunkun: Walking Here and Now
Curator: Ruth Noack
Dates: 2023.4.28 – 2023.7.9
Venue: Long Museum (West Bund)
From April 28 to July 9, artist Zang Kunkun’s solo exhibition Zang Kunkun-Walking Here and Now will be on view at Long Museum (West Bund), Shanghai. Curated by German curator and art historian Ruth Noack, the exhibition is a compilation of six series that the artist has initiated since 2009.
Zang Kunkun’s work has long revolved around the templating, vacuous landscapes of the contemporary city. Adopting public images and objects as his artistic vocabulary, he repeatedly reorganizes their forms as a linguistic manipulate, by removing commercial posters, billboards, fitness equipment or garbage cans from their everyday meanings, in order to rethink socially constructed taste and value systems.
In the exhibition, the curator strings six series with visual clues in the images and concepts of Zang Kunkun’s in-depth works on symbolic forms; the succession of this path differs from the time sequence, pointing out Zang Kunkun’s concerns on the formal and social levels in the evolution of the image structure and symbolic signifier.
In the rapidly developing urban daily life of China, Zang Kunkun tries to deconstruct the symbols in reality by using artistic language. He ponders ideology, cultural cognition, consumerism, and alienation in a playful and teasing way, reveals the Chinese urban landscape as a slice of the world, and contemplates the public meaning of images and symbols.
