Xi’an Art Museum is one of the largest Chinese museums dedicated to art. Recently established, it attracts yearly around 800,000 visitors. The museum encompasses 17,000 square meters and includes two exhibition galleries. The Xi’an Art Museum’s mission is to introduce international contemporary art to the Chinese public.The exhibition New Silk Road at the Xi’an Art Museum in China creates a platform enabling the re-imagination of the Silk Road.
Exhibition
The 4 Session of the Silk Road International Art Festival
16 September-3 October 2017
10.00-17.00
@ Xi’an Art Museum
Xi’an, Shaanxi
P.R. China
Forum
10 September 2017
14.00-17.00
@ Xi’an Art Museum
Xi’an, Shaanxi
P.R. China
“In a Silk Road journey, there are mirage and phantasm of temporal infrastructure and city. Outside the trading district of Dunhuang, there is snow and storm, thunder and lightning, together with the Gobi Desert. In the course of cultural tours, there are worlds of risk and uncertainties, imagination and possibilities. Voyagers have to invent means to manage border-crossing and space-time travels. Excursionists have to come across innumerable adventurers and culture workers from around the many mega cities and big towns, posts and stations. Gathering for discussions, discourse, share, trade and interchange of ideas and goods are rampant.
The Chinese and visiting literati artists, travelled their ideas along the bizarre, colourful, delirious Silk Road, encountered more glocal inter-culturing experiences, and confronted more cultural differences. In the course of exchange, ideas were generated and developed, intertwined and intersected.”
The annual Silk Road International Festival is an international festival which is hosted by the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China and Shanxi Provincial People’s Government and organized by the Department of Culture of Shaanxi Province. As an important part of the festival, the International Art Exhibition has been successfully held three times since 2014. The number of participating countries has increased significantly from around 10 to 81 since 2014, and there were 190 artists from 81 countries participating in the Third Silk Road International Art Exhibition in 2016.
Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China, Shaanxi Provincial People’s Government
CLASH
CLASH is a sculpture and an spatial social tool enabling such a re-imagination. It consists of a social space and of a shelter simultaneously protecting and threatening it.
CLASH contains a (symbolic) table with tables, a place to meet, to sit, to exchange and to play as well as a shelter that functions also as a landmark of CLASH.
CLASH refers to the clash of the encountering systems and functions as a social tool for bargaining, exchange and cross-fertilization. CLASH is made out of elements that are to be transformed and expanded by visitors, tourists, artists, and inhabitants of Xi’an. The futuristic and utopian installation CLASH embraces a social space and a shelter.
The installation CLASH is presented as a participatory open space for the public to communicate and acknowledge the visiting culture which can stimulate the host culture to respond: with actions of adaptation and appropriation, with conflict and complexity where stabilizers and dynamics, continuities and discontinuities, and harmonic-flow and fault-lines of cultural development are synchronically embodied as integral parts of our daily operation and experience. This is a CLASH, a creative cultural collision.
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