Ophiolite
The 2nd Edition of “Choi Foundation Contemporary Art Award” Exhibition
June 22nd to October 22nd, 2023
The highly anticipated exhibition, Ophiolite, officially opens at the Choi Centre · Cloud House. Co-presented by Jonathan K.S. Choi Foundation and the French Embassy in China, the exhibition will be opened until September 17th.
The exhibition is a showcase of winners of the 2nd edition of “Choi Foundation Contemporary Art Award”, highlighting the collaborative efforts between the Choi Foundation, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice, and the Inside-Out Art Museum in Beijing. Ms. Carol Yinghua Lu, the Director of the Inside-Out Art Museum acts as the curator of the exhibition.
As a core partnership between the Choi Foundation and the French Embassy in China, the “Choi Foundation Contemporary Art Award” plays a transformative role in shaping the shared future of art and culture. This year, as a part of the Croisements Festival, the “Choi Foundation Contemporary Art Award” focuses on the exploration of the intertwined relationship between the eco-environment and contemporary artistic expressions from a broader perspective.
The featured artists in Ophiolite are the winners of “2022 Choi Foundation Contemporary Art Award”— Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun, an artist duo from Chengdu, China, and Adrien Missika, a French artist based in Berlin. These exceptional artists have long been immersing themselves in artistic practices centered around ecological issues, approaching and interpreting the ecological objects and contexts that interest them from a humble, serious, friendly, and poetic perspective.
The exhibition featured several pieces of artworks from each artist, representing their unique creative trajectories. By inviting the audience to explore water systems, plants, and the hidden realm of Ophiolite within the composition of the world, Ophiolite encourages deeper investigation and understanding of the connection and interrelation between humans and the surrounding environment, meanwhile providing a reference for how we can interact with others and with the unknown, thus finally prompting the visitors to search for the various magical codes that connect us to the world we inhabit.
Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun
Artists Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun currently live and work in Chengdu. Their art practices are research-based and process-oriented, highlighting the reciprocal collaboration between the artists and their partners. Dedicated to the dialogical relationship between the realities and the survival of myriad things, their practices grow from a space of entanglement in-between the material ecology of waters and the current socio-environmental realities of mankind. Tapping into this space largely untouched by existent inquiries, they explore the vicissitude of ecologies and the re-imaginaries of the future. The entanglement space indicates neither a reactionary and passive way to protect water nor a conservative view that only emphasizes human society and its survival, but how we can reconstruct our comprehension of the future and countless possibilities between material ecology and human society. Practicing multiple visual narrative methods through long-term, site-specific art making, they build up a momentum for the alliance among all beings.
Their projects have been presented in exhibitions and screenings throughout Asia and Europe, including documenta fifteen in Kassel (2022), Rethinking Nature at Madre Museum (2021-2022), the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020-2021), and COSMOPOLIS #2.0: Repenser l’humain in Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2019).
Adrien Missika
The work of Adrien Missika humorously investigates the natural and the cultural. Using epistemology as a base for research, his conceptual approach drifts into poetic and hypothetical narratives.Through a variety of media, from video, photography, sculpture to installation and action, the work digs into the wide range of natural and environmental sciences, such as biology, landscape architecture and geography to name a few. Overcoming the logic of capitalism, Missika's artistic practice nurtures a space for possible worlds. Adrien Missika (b.1981, Paris) studied at Ecole Cantonale d'art de Lausanne (Ecal). He was a co-founder of Galerie 1M3, Lausanne, (2006-2014), founder and art director of Belo Campo, Lisbon, (2017- present). He currently lives in Berlin. His projects have been shown in exhibitions including Pflegehinweise, Kunstfenster Gnas in Austria (2022), Cura, Matsutake Gallery, Yvon Lambert Bookshop in Paris, France (2019), Aquí Allá Ahí, Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City, Mexico (2018) and Il Palazzo Delle Api, Fondazione la Raia, Gavi in Italy (2018).
Artists Winners of the 2nd Choi Foundation Contemporary Art Award
Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun 曹明浩、陈建军 (China)
Adrien Missika 阿德里安·米西卡 (France)
Curator: Carol Yinghua Lu 卢迎华
Assistant Curator: Zhang Yichuan 张艺川
Organized By: Jonathan K.S. Choi Foundation, Ambassade de France en Chine
Image courtesy of Choi Centre · Cloud House
