September 20, 2024-January 19, 2025
Inside-Out Art Museum 2F 1-3F
Ticket Price：20 yuan
Group visitors (Above 10 visitors) with reservation to visit at the appointed time.
Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum is pleased to present Improvisation, a group exhibition that considers the importance of improvisation in art and life, from actions and performances of the 1980s and 1990s to practices of today. Improvisation is one of the characteristics of art, a method of artistic practice. It emphasizes the unpreparedness, the uncontrollability, actions prompted by external stimuluses or internal impulses, the coming of the moment, instantly, quickly, using all that is at hand to create. Among the unchanging principles of creativity, improvisation is arguably the most closely associated with creativity.
Improvisation is a self-generated and spontaneous process, a self-directed and self-reflective process, with deliberate interruptions, disruptions and overflows, containing unsettling and discordant tensions. Improvisation becomes art in large part by setting specific constraints and arranging the process of creativity itself. Just as art requires improvisation to become original, unique, and coherent, improvisation both contains and transcends constraints. This is essentially creative autonomy. The idea of improvisation as the final form of creativity, which means that change itself and the process of creating itself is creativity, is what we can learn from improvisation.
Improvisation is wary of rules, institutions, dogmas, and thoughts that are overly systematic and even ossified, constantly looking for chances to disrupt sequences and connections. Meanwhile, improvisation, as an integral part of the order, enters into a paradoxical and alienated relationship with the existing order, a form of self-imposed exile. Improvisation is a unique expression of the way artists break away from stable structures, a manifestation of their power of subjectivity. In this sense, improvisation contributes to an intrinsic impetus of art and art history.
In 1992, as China’s market economy took off, cultural economy and cultural industry began influencing and regulating the orientation of art and cultural practices. Unprecedented anxiety, depression, and even emptiness occupied the mind of the literary and artistic community. At this time, performance art in the Beijing East Village, which paralleled the rock ‘n’ roll scene in Beijing, was a demonstration of a collective restlessness after a long period of inhibition, and of the awakening of artists’ individual consciousness.
From the 1990s to the present, industrialization and capitalization of art have become a dominant trend in the art world. Various elements, including forms, concepts, ideas, institutions, issues, etc., once emerged at different times to solve the problem of ossification in art, have gradually been reduced to self-constraints, lacking the flexibility and agility to address specific issues, and the initiative to make spontaneous adjustments accordingly. This makes us realize that the urgency of talking about creativity today. The aim lies in awakening the vitality of art itself to fight against its atrophy.
We call for improvisation as a creative consciousness. Improvisation offers us a perspective to understand the world, exploring the infinite vitality raised from sporadic, unexpected, nomadic, chaotic, and unpredictable forms of organization. Improvisation is not merely one of the values of art, but can also be regarded as a value of life. One might even say that improvisation is a way of creating the world. As a way of thinking, it allows us to remain acutely aware of changes, rather than being fearful or flinching. Anything unexpected, whether it be natural catastrophe, war, or pandemic, can throw us into unprecedented chaos, which, however, may be necessary for the development of life. And at this point, improvisation can probably be a more proactive response compared to passive coping. Improvisation is both an acquirable ability and a way of being of the world. It keeps the universe from falling into an inert equilibrium, and the society from ending up dull and boring. In this sense, improvisation represents the awakening of individual consciousness. And the will towards improvisation is something we must not carelessly discard.
Curator
Carol Yinghua Lu
Carol Yinghua Lu is a PhD scholar at the University of Melbourne and director of the Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum. She is a contributing editor at Frieze. Lu was on the jury for the Golden Lion Award at the 2011 Venice Biennale and on the jury for the Filipino National Pavilion of 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. She was the co-artistic director of the 2012 Gwangju Biennale and co-curator of the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale in 2012. From 2012 to 2015, she was the artistic director and chief curator of OCAT Shenzhen. She was the first visiting fellow in the Asia-Pacific Fellowship program at the Tate Research Centre in 2013. She is one of the first four ARIAH (Association of Research Institute in Art History) East Asia Fellows 2017 at Bard Graduate Center. In 2019, she was on the jury for the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award, Hugo Boss Asia and Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.
Assistant Curators
Na Rongkun
Na Rongkun is curatorial assistant of Inside-Out Art Museum,graduated from the Painting Department of the School of Fine Arts at Tsinghua University with a bachelor’s and master’s degree. Her research and creative processes are centered on the ignored and suspended fragments that emerge from everyday interactions. She curated exhibitions such as How Can I Rid My Mind of Her:‘Mother’in Zhao Wenliang’s Paintings, Road to Enigma and Profundity: Guangshe and the Artistic Turn of Photography in the Early 20th Century, and the Inside-Out Practice of Waste Time to Do Things; executive edited the research achievement Infinite Realism: Humanism in Chinese Photography from 1920s to 1980s and How Can I Rid My Mind of Her.
Zhu Sining
Sining Zhu, (Beijing, China) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, video, performance, sound, and multimedia. She got her BFA degree from the School of Visual Art in New York. And pursuing an MFA in Fine Arts at the California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles. Her practice focuses on the complicated relationship and cognition of identity between the self and others and the interaction and separation of the individual and the group. Her enthusiastic roots in research and collective behavior, which she uses to explore contemporary art practice and reveal indisputable facts and hidden delicate sorrow in the social environment. By overlaying everyday, personal, reminiscent objects and accumulating new contexts and meanings to awaken collective resonance. She has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Japan, Beijing and so on.
Exhibition Guide
Exhibition Date
September 20, 2024-January 19, 2025
Exhibition Time
Wed.-Fri. 11:00-18:00
Sat.-Sun. 10:00-18:00
Last Entry
17:30
Exhibition Location
Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, No.50 Xingshikou Road, Haidian District, Beijing
Ticket Price
Regular Ticket: 20 RMB per person
Concession: 10 RMB per person
Concessions applied to the following audience members:
Students and teachers, with student ID and teacher ID.
Language
Chinese, English
Barrier-free Access
We provide barrier-free access. Please make an appointment by telephone in advance. Tel: (010) 62730230
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