Image: Desmond Mah, I exist because you exist, 2022, NOwhere, 2023 (left)
English Translation
“Life Rehearsals”
Inside-Out Art Museum
No.50, Xingshikou Road, Haidian District, Beijing
2025.06.14 - 2025.10.19
“Lifelong Practice” exhibition site, 2025. Photo: Inside-Out Art Museum.
The exhibition “Life Rehearsals” at the Inside-Out Art Museum alleviated my recent sense of powerlessness. A few weeks ago, I read on e-flux, Isadora Neves Marques’s article, How to Be Responsible Irresponsibly: On Art Beyond Immediacy. In the article, she attributes the current progress and retreat of art in the face of political responsibility, and reduce that art is becoming an emotional moral fast-moving product: on the one hand, it is endowed with the expectation of social conscience, and on the other hand, it has to cater to the logic of the attention economy. In response, she suggests that we liberate the imagination and return to the tradition of art as a free dissenter. I agree with the point of view of the article, but in this highly emotional world, if our resistance always returns to the discourse and the theoretical level of reshaping the premise, my exhaustion is also extenuating.
Zhuang Wei, the horizon we can never touch, 2014, single-frequency image (color, sound), 14′19′′, courtesy of the artist and the Spike Gallery
The reason why “life rehearsals” can respond to my weakness is mainly because it is aware of the limits of words. The exhibition, which is related to the autism group, is derived from the public welfare project that the Inside-Out Art Museum has been promoting since 2010, but this year's presentation is closer to the general form of the exhibition. In general, the tone of the exhibition is to try to break the demarcation of the "people to group" on the sensory level. For example, the museum has another entrance on the first floor (but not called it barrier-free access), so that the audience does not have to climb the stairs in front of the main entrance of the museum; in addition to tents and rest areas, the exhibition hall can also borrow umbrellas and hand-held objects that are actually exhibits to ease the mood (Zhao Jianze, "When I Came", 2025; Siben Rosa, David Bernstein, "Objects You Can Hold", 2025). These works were originally made for specific groups, but when they were open to everyone, I found that they were not far from the small items of office decompression that have become popular in recent years. The exhibition has more ink on the description relationship than to give meaning. One of the contrasts that inspired me was Project YYIN’s “The Room” (2024) and Zhuang Wei’s “The Horizon We Can Never Touch” (2014): the former inviting actors to present their bodies in the theater, and the latter inviting men and women to accommodate each other’s height. This gives diversity a chance to defend itself—an idea that can be self-sufficient has been questioned in recent years because the system has turned its self-sufficiency into an impure show. Diversity is always required to be present, but such presence is forced to assume the obligation to repair.
The mountain is involved, the heart is beating, 2021-2022, single-frequency image (colour, sound), 38′22′′.
Think of it this way, once the work involves social expression, there is always some positive performance components. In contrast, the self-proclaimed weed group "cottage MFA" is much more open, and the members generously admit the failure of art in the workshop held by the spiritual health home (Fantasy and Delusion Conference, 2024), but have a little real sense of reality; or the hand-holding objects made by Siben Rosa for the grandfather of the aphasia in his later years, the communication with touch can be thicker than the words (objects to the grandfather, 2021/2025). In the same context, Little Mountain’s Heart Beat (2021-2022) shows us how to start a conversation in the face of inevitable failure. In this image of a psychiatrist reminiscing about his sister's life, the protagonist calmly infers the various moods that her sister may have committed suicide, and unconsciously injects warmth into the end of her life. He also noticed that crying at the funeral was a social emotional exercise. Because of this, the meaning of death is solidified, withdrawn, forgotten. Sometimes the calmest is the most tender.
So we went back to the emotions we talked about at the beginning. I suddenly realised that today’s emotions have been tacitly accepted as a system and not fully related to people, and the problem is that when we criticise the system, we often get only the echoes from the system.
Huang Bairan ARTFORUM.COM.CN
As the Chinese platform of the internationally renowned art magazine Artforum, Artforum Chinese has become an important window for understanding international art trends since its establishment in 2007 with its professional team of writers, and continues to provide rich and high-quality art information and independent art reviews for Chinese readers.
Original post: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/LWJ9md9jtSSXHSsPz98Guw
“Life Rehearsals”
Inside-Out Art Museum
No.50, Xingshikou Road, Haidian District, Beijing
2025.06.14 - 2025.10.19
“Lifelong Practice” exhibition site, 2025. Photo: Inside-Out Art Museum.
The exhibition “Life Rehearsals” at the Inside-Out Art Museum alleviated my recent sense of powerlessness. A few weeks ago, I read on e-flux, Isadora Neves Marques’s article, How to Be Responsible Irresponsibly: On Art Beyond Immediacy. In the article, she attributes the current progress and retreat of art in the face of political responsibility, and reduce that art is becoming an emotional moral fast-moving product: on the one hand, it is endowed with the expectation of social conscience, and on the other hand, it has to cater to the logic of the attention economy. In response, she suggests that we liberate the imagination and return to the tradition of art as a free dissenter. I agree with the point of view of the article, but in this highly emotional world, if our resistance always returns to the discourse and the theoretical level of reshaping the premise, my exhaustion is also extenuating.
Zhuang Wei, the horizon we can never touch, 2014, single-frequency image (color, sound), 14′19′′, courtesy of the artist and the Spike Gallery
The reason why “life rehearsals” can respond to my weakness is mainly because it is aware of the limits of words. The exhibition, which is related to the autism group, is derived from the public welfare project that the Inside-Out Art Museum has been promoting since 2010, but this year's presentation is closer to the general form of the exhibition. In general, the tone of the exhibition is to try to break the demarcation of the "people to group" on the sensory level. For example, the museum has another entrance on the first floor (but not called it barrier-free access), so that the audience does not have to climb the stairs in front of the main entrance of the museum; in addition to tents and rest areas, the exhibition hall can also borrow umbrellas and hand-held objects that are actually exhibits to ease the mood (Zhao Jianze, "When I Came", 2025; Siben Rosa, David Bernstein, "Objects You Can Hold", 2025). These works were originally made for specific groups, but when they were open to everyone, I found that they were not far from the small items of office decompression that have become popular in recent years. The exhibition has more ink on the description relationship than to give meaning. One of the contrasts that inspired me was Project YYIN’s “The Room” (2024) and Zhuang Wei’s “The Horizon We Can Never Touch” (2014): the former inviting actors to present their bodies in the theater, and the latter inviting men and women to accommodate each other’s height. This gives diversity a chance to defend itself—an idea that can be self-sufficient has been questioned in recent years because the system has turned its self-sufficiency into an impure show. Diversity is always required to be present, but such presence is forced to assume the obligation to repair.
The mountain is involved, the heart is beating, 2021-2022, single-frequency image (colour, sound), 38′22′′.
Think of it this way, once the work involves social expression, there is always some positive performance components. In contrast, the self-proclaimed weed group "cottage MFA" is much more open, and the members generously admit the failure of art in the workshop held by the spiritual health home (Fantasy and Delusion Conference, 2024), but have a little real sense of reality; or the hand-holding objects made by Siben Rosa for the grandfather of the aphasia in his later years, the communication with touch can be thicker than the words (objects to the grandfather, 2021/2025). In the same context, Little Mountain’s Heart Beat (2021-2022) shows us how to start a conversation in the face of inevitable failure. In this image of a psychiatrist reminiscing about his sister's life, the protagonist calmly infers the various moods that her sister may have committed suicide, and unconsciously injects warmth into the end of her life. He also noticed that crying at the funeral was a social emotional exercise. Because of this, the meaning of death is solidified, withdrawn, forgotten. Sometimes the calmest is the most tender.
So we went back to the emotions we talked about at the beginning. I suddenly realised that today’s emotions have been tacitly accepted as a system and not fully related to people, and the problem is that when we criticise the system, we often get only the echoes from the system.
Huang Bairan ARTFORUM.COM.CN
As the Chinese platform of the internationally renowned art magazine Artforum, Artforum Chinese has become an important window for understanding international art trends since its establishment in 2007 with its professional team of writers, and continues to provide rich and high-quality art information and independent art reviews for Chinese readers.
Original post: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/LWJ9md9jtSSXHSsPz98Guw