AIKE DELLARCO is glad to announce the opening of its new space at WEST BUND in Shanghai with Li Ran solo show; after 8 years since the opening of its first venue in Shanghai, AIKE DELLARCO relocates into a former industrial building with an extension of around 400 square meters.
The inaugural exhibition, Li Ran solo show: “Same Old Crowd”, will open on 28th of May at 5 pm, and will continue until the 10th of July.
“Same Old Crowd” is the second solo show of the artist at AIKE DELLARCO, since the exhibition “Pretty Knowledge” in 2012.The exhibition will feature four new pieces; each one of them, from different perspectives, carries the traces of the artist’s recent trip of to Singapore. Through stills and moving images, sounds and motions, actual and abstract recollections from his trip, Li attempts to re-establish the logic and perception of a wanderer and observer, impersonating the role of a tourist.
“Same Old Crowd”, the four-channel video installation that titles the whole show, features 4 groups of characters, impersonated by non-professional actors, that interact with each other, interweaving onomatopoeic sounds and primitive gestures. This work echoes, to a certain extent, the ephemeral nature of relational dynamics within the contemporary art system. The two-screen video installation It is not Complicated, A Guide Book, combines a video taken by the artist as a tourist in Singapore with an extract from the Centre Pompidou’s museum guide, establishing a relationship between the process of observation and artistic production itself.
In Diagonally across ‘Planet’, an installation composed by stills extrapolated from a video, and Picnic at the Stadium, that takes the form of a short novel, Li Ran continues to use the identity of a tourist; with this practice the artist doesn't aim to avoid the intrinsic complexity of the reality, but rather to gain the prospective of a detached observer, and through the whole structure of the exhibition, to examine the process of observation itself.