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THE ELEPHANT OF FREEDOM
XU BACHENG SOLO PROJECT -
Arario Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in ART021 Shanghai 2021 with artist Xu Bacheng’s special solo project, The Elephant of Freedom at booth W17. The booth will feature the artist’s recent artworks in a variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, installation and video. This is the artist’s third major show with Arario Gallery, after the 2019 solo exhibition The Island of Immortality at Arario Gallery Shanghai and his solo booth at the 2020 Nanjing Art Fair International.
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XU Bacheng永生之象 The Elephant of Immortality, 2021布面油画 Oil on canvas300 x 1,000 cm
The Elephant of Immortality
Born in China in the 1980s, Xu Bacheng grew up in an environment that emphasized collectivism over individualism. However, Xu believes that the creativity of any collective consists of the creativity of countless individuals within it, and the source of individual creativity essentially comes from individual freedom. For Xu, creativity is the fruit of whimsical ideas, the Chinese phrase for which is “Tian Ma Xing Kong” (literally meaning flying horse in the sky), a word Xu Bacheng appropriated and turned into “Tian Xiang Xing Kong” (literally meaning flying elephant in the sky). In the act of quoting the phrase, he replaced the “Ma” with “Xiang,” a recurring motif that has been central to his art since 2020.
The Elephant of Immortality is a large-scale, multi-panel oil painting series consisting of five consecutive 300 x 200 cm canvases. Together, the five panels construct a panorama of a bizarre, surreal, and unsettling world: mushroom clouds ejected from mushroom-topped buildings; an orchestra immersed in their musical performance among the chaotic surroundings; a boat full of passengers sailing towards nowhere like a distopian Noah's Ark; and the two elephants at the very end, posing blithely as if they are unaware of and detached from all earthly burdens. Xu Bacheng created this painting for his eponymous milestone exhibition at Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum earlier this year. It is the biggest retrospective of the artist's career thus far. Using the title as a central clue, Xu also directed his first feature length film The Elephant of Immortality (1h 32min). While working around one theme with different media, Xu appropriated many of the film's props and sets into the painting, thus providing the audience a comprehensive, cinematographic journey.
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Revelation
Miniature Oil Painting Series -
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REVELATION
Drawing Series -
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ART021 SHANGHAI CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR: Shanghai Exhibition Center, Shanghai, China
Past viewing_room