WORKS

ARTISTS

The door is closed, so tightly like the eyelid of a soundly sleeping man. The closure of the door let the opening return to the state of a wall. There’s no smell at all, as if we were marching in the desert with everything in front of us turning into a dead zone. To enter GALLERY FUNC one has to go through at least two “doors”: the first requires a password gained beforehand to get into the building; and to go through the second, one needs to ring the doorbell and ask the doorman to open the door. It’s not a design by the gallery but reflects that the building was initially built for private rather than public use. The presence of the gallery has transformed the nature of the building, creating subtly new meanings from within. To the visitors, the way to enter the gallery space enriches their psychological experience, and to some extent, even changes the pattern of relations, making the exhibition all the more subjective.

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Door is a wall in a different form, which allows us to enter a building without destroying its walls and gives us the opportunity to reconstruct it. According to Latour’s theories, doors together with hinges, as potential of actors, impose restrictions upon our actions and stipulate that we have to pass at a certain speed and only through a particular and fixed hole. In Open the Door, there’re more than two doors waiting to be open. When visitors open the door inside the space, the door hinge will automatically spring back (please watch out) and the door will return back to the closed state as if it were a wall. Hence, the door’s role shifts constantly between “wall” and “hole”, letting viewers to carve out their own viewing space. In Les Amusements Naturels, Pierre Albert-Birot wrote a short poem: “An open door, we enter. A closed door, a den. The world pulse beats beyond my door.” In this context, we may change it a little bit and say “The art pulse beats inside my door”.

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Playing with the door, the exhibition creates a three-layered experience: the first is a public space, the experience of a gallery; the second is a private space, the experience of the original residential structure; and the third is a hidden space, the “absent” occupants of this residence– with a “lobby” with a real reception desk and two artists’ rooms. Through this three-layered experience, the exhibition evokes the crisis of wandering public memory and the psychological space in which we are alienated. In the exhibition, Joy LI searches for the temptation and power embedded in commodities and public objects; in the materialistic world of commodities, "a fake butterfly kills a swarm of real butterflies", and real ants crawl towards fake cherries. ZHAI Yuhui's visual language in the form of "landscape" corresponds more directly to this world as a pictorial fictional approach, where the small space is occupied by huge cardboard boxes, and the collision of lightweight and easy-to-access materials with monumental images alienates the sensory experience. DONG Longyue's parody and portrayal of the ancient horseshoe crab epeatedly uses its dome shape and its varitaions to refer to the dual issue of connection, using the dome and trail of the horseshoe crab as a scale. They expound upon a broader narrative inside the doors to wake us from our silence and their presence confronts us with an action agenda and a rescue mission. Open the door and dive in.

                                                                                                                        Text: WONG Tone

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DONG Longyue graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts MFA program in the study of moving image and painting in 2020, lives and works in Shanghai. In his art practice, he deals with visible and invisible shapes from the perspective of language, and attempts to carry out the creative practices of writing, performance, video, installation and other artistic media through the rules of his specific structural game.

Recent exhibitions include “We the singular in multiple ghosts. I the multiple as part of whole.”, Institute of Contemporary Arts at NYU Shanghai, 2023; “RAM Highlights: The Good Life (tgl)” , Rockbund Art Museum Shanghai, 2022; “The Dwelling Place of the Other in Me”, the Power Station of Art Shanghai, 2022; “the Archiving the Spaces of Anxiety—— From the Burrow to the Peach Colony”, OCAT Institute, 2021; “Meeting Point III: The Unanswered Question”, AM Art Space, 2021.

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About the artists

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Joy LI was born in 1999 in Gansu, China. She currently lives and works in Shenzhen, China. She obtained her BFA degree in Interdisciplinary Sculpture with a Theater minor at Maryland Institute College of Art in 2021. She will be receiving her MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 2026. Her works include sculpture, performance art, theater, video, and music, exploring the tension of interactions between objects, emotions, and relationships. In her works, she reinterprets objects and bodies to magnify the allure and danger inherent in everyday items, allowing the audience to re-experience and interact familiar things in unfamiliar ways.

Her recent solo exhibitions include: “Green Water”, 2023, LINSEED, Shanghai; “Golden Lines and White Lightings”, 2023, Aranya, Chengde; “Salomé”, 2022, 33ml OFFSPACE, Shanghai; “Collective Dreaming”, 2020, BBOX, Baltimore; “26th Benefit Fashion Show: Catalyst", 2019, Falvey Hall, Baltimore; “The Skin of a Human Being”, 2019, Gateway Gallery 1, Baltimore; “You’ll Never Meet Mac DeMarco”,  2018, BBOX, Baltimore. Her selected group exhibitions include: “At the beginning, you find nothing there 24, Petitree, Shenzhen; “Embodies Rituals”, 2024, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou; “After Human: Marks of the Beasts”, 2024,  Tomorrow Maybe, Hong Kong; “The Nostalgic Collection”, 2024, Tree Art Museum, Beijing; “Tie Up”, 2023, Mugyewon, LINSEED, Seoul; “LAB 2: Co-Working Space”, 2022, LIU HAISU Art Museum, Shanghai; “Art Nova 100”, 2021, Guardian Art Center, Beijing; “A Hunger Artist”, 2021, Élysée, Shanghai; “Rabbit Hole”, 2021, Arkila Art Center, Shanghai; “The Crowd”, 2021, Jin Chen Yi Fei Ming Art Gallery, Shanghai; “Absence/Attendance”, 2021, Himalayas Museum, Shanghai; “Communication Strategies: From Checkers to complex systems”, 2021, Time Art Museum, Chengdu; “Redirecting”, 2021, Tree Art Museum, Beijing; “Identity:Smashing Labels”, 2019, Main 0 Gallery, Baltimore; “Humanscape”, 2019, Fox Building, Baltimore; “Coordinates”, 2019, Piano Gallery, Baltimore.

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ZHAI Yuhui, Born in 1996 in Henan Province, he now lives and works in Hangzhou. In 2020, he was recommended to the Cross-border Sculpture Studio of China Academy of Art, and received his master's degree in 2023. In 2021, he became a member of the Copper Yard T-project, and the characteristics of the work of the space field group also inspired him. Today, his work presents a special structural state, in which materials, working methods, and metaphors of images are condensed, and finally form a perceptual world parallel to reality. In this way, he embodied his concern for a wide range of social issues.

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About the curator

WONG Tone, born in 1997, graduated from the China Academy of Art and majored in Public Art, and works and lives in Shanghai and Shenzhen. She founds and runs the artist curatorial organization 214agency, pioneering in merging vibrant artists into versatile spaces and venues, and integrating art resources into a commercially friendly portfolio.