Yuz Museum Shanghai has made its new home alongside the winding waterfront in the ancient town of Panlong in Qingpu District, and is holding its inaugural exhibition "A Journey," featuring more than 40 representative artworks selected from the Yuz Foundation's collection, to mark its 10th anniversary.

The museum is built on a quadrangle of rivers, paddies, ponds and bamboo forests, with deconstructed and reorganized gable walls and double-slope roof in the style of traditional south China dwellings. Two sets of intertwining inter-bearing steel trusses support the interior and exterior of the museum, blending nature and man-made landscape, tradition and modernity.

With the change of geography and physical space, "home" becomes the initial concept for the exhibition. It's a symbol of an individual's spiritual belonging and support.

Selected from nearly 1,500 pieces of contemporary art collected by the Yuz Foundation, the exhibition features over 40 major works by Chinese and international artists, including paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs and videos.

The artists interpret and reimagine their "home" through ordinary objects, everyday experiences, individual memories or dreams, ongoing or repetitive personal practices, and reflections on historical and social issues. Meeting the artists at different stages of their lives, the exhibition invites the audience to think about "home" and "roots," exploring the relationship between the object and the self, tracing the flow of time and space.

A meandering stone path by Xu Bing welcomes visitors. He carved English "square words" – a form he invented in 1993 in the United States that combined English words and Chinese characters – onto 76 natural stones, which he linked together to form a pathway of the English translation of an ancient Su Dongpo poem that expressed his homesickness at the time.

Gao Lei's photographic works "The Sea" and "The Home" present a post-apocalyptic landscape of degraded grassland with a magnificent perspective in gray and yellow tones. He uses infrared film to capture the unique spectrum of light invisible to the naked eye, highlighting the natural textures and patterns of the landscape to create a dreamy effect and a moody atmosphere. After printing the images on canvas, hand coloring techniques were used to infuse the black and white images with color.

"The Sea" was photographed at the red beach of Liaohe Oilfield in northeastern China's Liaoning Province, and "The Home" captures the scene after the migration of herdsmen in the grasslands of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. However, the sea has dried up and the homeland is no more.

Italian artist Massimo Bartolini's bronze sculpture "Fuochino" (Little Fire) is reminiscent of a camp, perhaps the place or square where people gather. The fire serves as the center of the city, or the center for the loner in the desert.

The camp fire echoes with Harold Ancart's huge painting on a nearby wall, which presents a matchstick tilted on a horizontal surface. The green match head is rubbing against the striking pad on the side of the matchbox to splatter orange sparks. Against the black background, and with the colored debris floating in the air, the fleeting moment of striking a match in motion is frozen in eternity.

Ancart conducts an aesthetic study of its form and poetic properties to show the great tension between movement and stillness and the energy that is about to burst forth, thus paying tribute to the ordinary and unexceptional life.

Painter Wu Yiming's "Bonsai" in ink on rice paper and Julie Curtiss's figurative painting "Bouquet Final" are displayed in the same space, providing two different aesthetics.

In "Bonsai," Wu inherits the overlaying, straightforward and concise technique of traditional ink painting. His free and casual brushwork gives the painting a vividness, as if light changes between the ink and the blank space, rendering a subtle and hazy light.

"Bouquet Final" by Curtiss depicts a pot of lotus flowers. Through the juxtaposition of objects and shadows, the artist invites us to dive deeper into the layered, mercurial mind of her subjects, and encounter a reflection of our own subconscious.

French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel's installation work "Diary of Happiness" combines the forms of a Chinese screen and a traditional abacus, with each Murano glass bead representing each day of the year.

At the beginning of the year, all the beads are placed on the black side of the abacus frame, and it is people's job to move them to the white side. Othoniel deliberately preserves the imperfections in the glass forming process, making each bead a sight, as a metaphor for the impermanence and imperfection of each day. The beads record the passage of time, and also infuse people's memories of the past and their pursuit of a happy life.

Zhou Jie's installation "Wonderful Plan" uses stainless steel wire to weave sofas, slippers and plush toys, and hand-paints the walls and floors with acrylic paint, as if a warm and blurred filter, putting people in a dangerous and wonderful dream. Using a cold and damaging industrial material to restore the softness and warmth that are usually found in private spaces, Zhou shows her observations, doubts and reflections on people's general living environments and states of life.

Exhibition info:

Date: Through August 13 (closed on Mondays), 11am-7pm

Venue: Yuz Museum, Panlong Shanghai

Address: Bldg 8, 123 Panding Rd, Qingpu District

青浦区蟠鼎路123弄8号

Source: Ciry News Service