Hu, Yun, artist. art

Hu Yun: Mount Analogue.

[Place of publication not identified] : Rockbund Art Museum, 2024.

1 online resource

"Hu Yun's first solo museum exhibition in China, Mount Analogue, marks both a mid-career retrospective and a site-responsive intervention. It is situated within the edifice presently housing the Rockbund Art Museum, which in 1933 served as the location for China's first natural history museum - the Royal Asiatic Society Museum. Mount Analogue intricately interlaces historical events, personal narratives, and natural elements, aimed at interrogating historical accounts that oscillate between the visible and the invisible, stimulating introspection. The exhibition's title is a homage to an incomplete adventure novel by René Daumal, a 20th-century French polymath. Daumal's narrative chronicles a group of adventurers questing for a mystical mountain accessible only through an elevated spiritual state. This mountain serves as a metaphorical conduit between the terrestrial and the celestial realms. Through the protagonists' odyssey, their tribulations, and the spiritual and philosophical epiphanies they encounter, the novel probes the interstices between reality and transcendence, the corporeal and the metaphysical, and the perceptible and the imperceptible. The exhibition layout mirrors Hu Yun's artistic ethos, positioning the entrance at the long-neglected "back door" of the 1933 museum. Deliberately fragmented and reconstituted, artworks spanning the past decade are scattered across the museum's fourth, fifth, and sixth floors, as well as the interconnecting staircases. Evocative of the aftermath of a big bang, 22 pieces are intentionally disarranged, challenging linear historical narratives. For Hu Yun, historical accounts are endlessly substitutable, mirroring the iterative nature of his own creative process. Mount Analogue embraces the fluidity of established histories, serving as a tribute to materials, imagery, voices, and texts that fortuitously eluded processes of accumulation, classification, and categorization. Upon entering the gallery, visitors embark on a self-guided expedition through historical narratives. Recognizing that historical understanding is inherently subjective, each perspective is deemed equally valid, debunking the notion of an "objective" historical truth. By incessantly tracing, scrutinizing, collecting, editing, and re-editing both tangible and intangible materials, viewers are encouraged to engage in contemplation about faith, historical narratives, adventure, systems of knowledge, and self-discovery within the intermediary zone between reality and imagination."-- provided by distributor.

Art and literature.
Cosmology.
Ethnological museums and collections.
Historiography.
Art et littérature.
Cosmologie.
Ethnologie Musées et collections.
Historiographie.
cosmology.
historiography.

exhibition catalogs.
Ephemera
Exhibition catalogs
Catalogues d'exposition.

Zhu-Nowell, X, curator, editor.
Xu, Tiantian, curator, editor.
Library Stack, distributor.