【OCAT上海馆 | 新展介绍】朴庆根&奥利弗·拉瑞克双个展

韩国艺术家朴庆根在OCAT上海馆的展览“当老虎还在抽烟的时代”¹ 将围绕自我的形塑展开，带领观者在不断反思、推倒和重建的过程中，一同探索“自我”与“他者”彼此缠绕的关系，亦展开对现代人自我认知焦虑和身份议题的多角度探讨。

展览将展出朴庆根数件重要的影像及装置作品。进入展厅首先会看到的是朴庆根的全新创作“动·物”系列（2021）。这一系列作品试图通过对动物的观察和想像过程来拆解自我认知的形塑过程，以及重新审视人类在自然界的定位。他利用那种用以判定颜色信息的波形信号，让拍摄到的猛兽的身体色彩和亮度不断在XY轴上下波动，使观者看到分解的、流动的，甚至错位的行动生命体，从而返身代入对人类自身的重新想像。作品《天国的阶梯》（2016）转而回到人类社会的语境，从更私人的角度，探索个人与他者、集体的关系如何受到社会体系、传统、流行文化等等的影响以及这种影响的内化和自我的迷失。早年的重要作品《清溪川的杂音》（2010）和《1.6秒》（2016）则从不同角度想象着人与工业生产的关系。前者通过展现韩国工商业聚集地，即首尔清溪川一带的日常居民生活，委婉地剖析出韩国近现代工业的发展，重新审视现代化进程中人们对工业所代表着的集体性的宏大事业的崇拜。后者则由高度机械化工厂流水线为主体，想象人与机器之间的彼此观看和人在现代化生产生活环境中的自我定位。

从钢铁丛林里的诸多议题，到看似更为单纯的对动物的视觉异化呈现，朴庆根始终在从各种角度和方式，向观者，更向自己反复追问人性最为本质的问题：我如何成为我？我真的有主体意识吗？

策展人 王慰慰

展览“外骨骼”是奥地利艺术家奥利弗·拉瑞克（Oliver Laric）在中国的首次机构个展，并将首次呈现艺术家在2014年至2021年里创作完成的动画影像三部曲。这三部影片的渐进过程，也同样可以被理解为动漫文化及其技术手段和可能性在一个更宏观框架中的衰落。伴随影片一同展出的是五件雕塑作品，由艺术家对博物馆馆藏雕塑进行3D扫描及摄影测量而创作，强调了拉瑞克一直以来的创作理念，即所谓的“新”通常有关于既存事物的延续过程。

自2013年开始创作这一类型作品以来，拉瑞克已经发展出大约20种雕塑形式，本次展览所展出的五件雕塑作品也来自于其中。自2012年以来，这些模型都可以在拉瑞克的个人网站 ² 上免费下载。其所使用的雕塑原型一直被认为是开放和可编辑的源材料，将欧洲自然主义雕塑与古埃及、希腊或罗马的范式联系起来。通过强调每件雕塑的临时状态，拉瑞克亦将他对各种意识观念和社会系统的兴趣都容纳其中。这些雕塑形式共同构建出一种语汇，使艺术家不仅得以质疑雕塑作为稳固的事物这一概念，更强调了变化和流动作为全球性跨文化实践运作的永恒驱动力如何逆流于自然和文化之间的边界。

展览标题“外骨骼”指涉了拉瑞克的雕塑制作中所涉及的从表面出发的扫描过程，是作为雕塑一部分的盔甲的外壳结构，以及在其影像作品中反复出现的昆虫或动物的保护壳。“外骨骼”在哲学意义上代表着内部与外部、生与死之间的门槛，亦在另一个层面上隐喻形式与内容之间的边界。因此，这个词也指向了展览本身的制作过程，它强调了变化和流动的概念，以颠覆由人类定义的区别，如自然和文化。最终，展览发展出其特定的外部与内部形式，经由一个合作产生的“外骨骼”抵达其终点。

策展人 马丁·格尔曼

Korean artist Kelvin Kyung Kun Park's exhibition "When Tigers Used to Smoke"¹ at OCAT Shanghai, unfolds around the shaping of the self, taking viewers to explore the intertwined relationship between self and other in the process of continuous reflection, reversal, and reconstruction, to address anxieties of self-knowledge and identity crisis from multiple perspectives.

The exhibition will feature several important video and installation works by Kelvin Kyung Kun Park. The exhibition starts with his latest series, "Animal" (2021), in which Park attempts to dismantle the shaping process of self-perception through observing and imagining animals in action, hence re-examining the position of humans in the natural world. By applying Waveform Signal used to determine color information so that the color and brightness of the captured beasts' bodies constantly fluctuate up and down on the XY axis, allowing the viewer to see the dismantled, fluid, and even dislocated living beings in action, thereby to re-imagine humanity in that context. The work Stairway to Heaven (2016) turns to a more personal view, exploring how politics, tradition, pop culture influence the individual's relationship with the other and the collective, and so on, as well as how such influences internalize and disorients the self. Other important works from his early years, Cheonggyecheon Medley (2010) and 1.6 Sec (2016) both subject to imagine the relationship between human and industrial production from different perspective. The former dipicts the daily life of the residents in the area of Cheonggyecheon Seoul, where Korean industry and commerce gather. It is a euphemism for the development of modern Korean industry, revisiting the cult of collective grandeur that industry once represented in the modernization process from the perspective of digital images. The latter portrays a highly mechanized factory assembly line, imagining the mutual gaze between man and machine and man's self-perception in the modern production and living environment. 

From the issues in the steel jungle to the seemingly simple visual alienation of animals, Park always asks the viewer, and more importantly himself, the essential question of human nature from various perspectives and approaches: How do I become me? Do I really have a sense of subjectivity? 

Curator Wang Weiwei

For Austrian artist Oliver Laric's exhibition entitled, "Exoskeleton" at OCAT Shanghai, his first institutional solo show in China, a trilogy of recent animation films completed between 2014 and 2021 will be presented together for the first time. Their consecutive development can be construed as a declension of cultural and technical means in animation production gradually building on each other in a broad framework. The films will be shown along with a set of five sculptures based on 3D-scans and photogrammetry of existing sculptures from museum collections, to underscore Laric's premise that new is a continuation of what already exists.

After he started with this body of work around 2013, he set to derive appr. 20 sculptural forms, of which, this exhibition shows five essential examples. These pieces are also available for free downloads on his personal website since 2012. Conceived as open and editable source material, the forms Laric adopted bridge and connect European naturalist sculpture with ancient precedents from Egyptian, Greek, or Roman origins. By highlighting the provisional status of every sculpture, Laric opens the realm of discussion to all sorts of ideologies and political interests. These sculptures form a vocabulary by which the artist questions the notion of stability particular to this medium, and accentuates ideas of impermanence and fluidity as global and intercultural driving forces undermining distinctions between nature and culture.

The exhibition title "Exoskeleton" refers to the surface-oriented scanning process in which Laric’s objects are produced, the shell structures of armour suits in his sculptures, and the protective shields of insects or animals, depicted repeatedly in his videos. An exoskeleton marks a threshold between inside and outside, life and death, on a philosophical level, between form and content. This term also seems appropriate to describe the production process of this exhibition, which  arrives at an end through the collaboratively produced "Exoskeleton" from which the show would develop its specific external and internal form.

Curator Martin Germann