ARR Gallery is delighted to announce the first group exhibition of new space, Arrival, which will take place on September 22, 2023. The exhibition will feature 31 pieces by 27 artists. These artists, at various times, have made Hangzhou a hub for their artistic creation and expression. The diverse artistic ecosystems they present within the same domain are the central themes the exhibition aims to showcase and explore. The exhibition will open until October 31, 2023.
As the title suggests,Arrival refers to the act of us leaving one area and transitioning to another, or moving from one time point to another. It anticipates the stimulation and displacement that occur when the subject's inner and outer realms converge, creating a new "polyphony." Arrival is not confined to timelines and geographical locations; it can manifest in various psychological and spiritual ecosystems.
We can envision shared life on the Earth's surface as being synchronous—coexisting at the same time. This is one of the "illusions" Roland Barthes spoke of—the power of shared existence, contemporaneity, and territoriality. It's termed an illusion because this sensation does not belong to any method or culture; it's an imaginative entity, a force that an individual can directly engage with or invoke. The illusion can pertain to the community or the idiorrythmie of an individual. Experiencing "shared life" as an illusion is because the psychological and spiritual experiences and outputs are not a stable and continuous process. At times, we arrive at a frenzy of personal experience, and at other times, we reach a calm of collective sense.
When we enter an area, we may enter a sense of communal illusion, but this feeling is accompanied by the heterogeneity of individual sensations. Thus, there exists an "ecology of illusion": the illusions of self, heterogeneous subjects, and the collective interact, forming interdependent layers that are complex and changing, leading to an discord between emotion and aesthetics. We can identify multiple illusions in this area: In addition to the literati temperament flourishing in the unique geographical and historical context of Hangzhou, there is a psychological state intertwined with romanticism, modernism, and Eastern spirit. There are also psychological images sparked by the palpable sense of societal renewal, the exploration of self-collective illusions in younger ecological positions.
Regions on the Earth's surface are interconnected, and so are the spiritual subjects—this implies the occurrence of ecology. Shared life is not only a spatial fact but also a temporal one, yet ecology encompasses not only continuity but also intermittence. The shaping of a new ecology may lie in a very small event: for instance, an artist may suddenly change the way they perceive life and art. As Stiegler mentioned, "Manet broke with tradition, creating a pinnacle moment of sensation." This strange point in the ecology disrupts the continuity of a smooth life and forms multiple paths of illusion.
Entering an illusion rather than aesthetics allows individuals to recalibrate their emotional dimensions. Hence, we evoke a region here and invite everyone to "arrive." Here, all images, subjects, and illusions can arrive on an equal footing, traversing the intertwining of the personal and historical, refracting and connecting with each other.
