CHONGQING (CQNEWS) -- Have you ever seen an art exhibition without oil paintings or sculptures, but large-scale video installations and digital collages? Recently, the Utopia: Narrative and Rhetoric － AES+F Solo Exhibition hosted by the Art Museum of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute was exhibited at the Art Museum of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. This exhibition mainly presents two art projects composed of large-scale video installations and digital collages － Sacred Allegory and Upside Down. These two large-scale works were exhibited at the La Biennale di Venezia and won many awards.

According to Yang Biao, Curator of the exhibition, this form of large-scale video installations and digital collages would create an “immersive” experience for the audience. It was this sense of experience that made it easier to convey the essence and core of the work to visitors.

Sacred Allegory was inspired by a painting of the same name by Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini. It depicted a surreal world suspended in time, in which passengers were trapped in a future airport. They unconsciously entered each other’s dreams. According to Yang Biao, this work is not only a tribute and reference to the classics of art history, it adopted the airport, a field full of cultural convergence and frequent reprinting of logistics, to collectively present their attitude towards reality as individual artists.

Different from the former, Upside Down came from multiple sources. The work was based on Western medieval prints as the story, and it also incorporated Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassicism. The relationship between the characters and the structure of the scene in the work were carefully organized and planned by the artist. The issues involved in the artist’s concern were also multifaceted. The artist exchanged the actual identity and role in the work. The reality, which should be taken for granted, was alienated in the space of illusion after replacement, which caused and resonated.

According to Art Gallery of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, these two groups of works were created by an art group called AES+F, which was composed of four Russian artists. Their practice spanned traditional media and emerging technologies. Their works were characterized by highly conceptualized rhetoric, reflecting the media flow of the contemporary world through the prism of historical classics. They called their most representative practice method “social psychoanalysis”.

“We hope to gradually extend the visual horizon of teachers, students and Chongqing visitors through this series of multi-media and cross-cultural art forms, so as to provide an international field and more possibilities for the dialogue between art and culture,” Yang Biao said.

The exhibition period is from September 24 to October 22, 2020. Except when the museum is closed on Mondays, you can get tickets for the exhibition for free through your ID card.