Art Fairs
Shanghai Fair Embraces Regional Artists of Asia
Artworks by Wang Xieda and Geng Yini are among those at home at SH Contemporary.
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SHANGHAI — The seventh edition of the SH Contemporary art fair opened to VIP visitors on Thursday, September 11, with over 50 galleries exhibiting at the Shanghai Exhibition Center.
This year’s SH has a strong regional emphasis, with 50 percent of galleries coming from China, a quarter from Asia, and a quarter from farther abroad, according to fair director Guido Mologni.
ShanghART Gallery devoted its space to ink-on-paper artist Wu Yiming, whose narrow color selection and generous commitment to white space provided a visual rest from some of the fair’s louder works.
James Cohan Gallery showed similarly meditative work, including Wang Xieda’s assemblages. Though some of them resemble mobiles, the lightness is illusory; beneath their rice paper exteriors are steel cores.
Lu Chi’s colored glass interpretations of Taihu rockery were prominent both in FQ Projects’s booth and the fair’s entrance hall. (Lu’s sculptures were a welcome sight after one was smashed during the contemporaneous Art in the City fair at Shanghai’s K11 Art Center, cutting gallery director Michelle Ni in the process.)
BANK Gallery devoted its booth to Geng Yini, whose paintings and sculptures exhibit a dadaist sense of humor all too rare among young Chinese artists.
Photography gallery M97 presented works by Wang Ningde in which colored light filters were embedded horizontally in a vertical plane, allowing the light shining through them to form an image suggestive of minimalist painting.
M97 also showed works by the Hong Kong–based socially engaged German photographer Michael Wolf, whose works beautifully illuminate the city’s architectural oppression. They were among the fair’s special projects.
Other special projects in the fair included oversized ink on paper calligraphy by Zhang Hao, who is represented by Renke Art, and a silicone installation by Zhang Dali, depicting glum people covered in doves, and their white, blue, and black excrement.
SH Contemporary continues at the Shanghai Exhibition Center through Sunday, September 14.
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