Poems on the wall

Jun Mao Yunshu Zhong Xin Wang Ash Hempsall Ruyun Gao

Oct 24, 2014 ~ Nov 15

Mustard Seed Space is thrilled to announce that the experimental group show, Poems, On the Wall will be on scene from 24^th October 2014, in which, for the first time, the five artists work with poems as a visual medium. Originally, medium means an intermediate course of action that occupies a position or represents a condition midway between extremes. Here, the audience will find these artworks unique poems. Meanwhile, poems on the wall is going to become a new medium of art creation, just as other once-new mediums like oil on canvas, and to gain independent statues on the walls of museums and galleries. This exhibition dedicates to discuss poem as a visual representation of script, and its confrontation and coexistence with visual arts.

At the mean time, on 25^th October, the day after the opening, the curatorial team of Poems, On the Wall will present an extended show, 3 People in a Poem, at “The Gallery” during the West Bund Art Festival. In the afternoon, we will have the chance to see how the artist & poet, translator, curator work together behind the scene of an exhibition, how the show is produced and how they involve in other’s roles in an intermediate art space like “The Gallery”, an art project initiated by Chinese artist WANG Xin in 2013, showing those overlapping cases.

In ancient times, people farm and work, writing poem to sing, matching poem with painting. The convergence of poem, melody and painting can be dated to very early period of the human history. Reading a wonderful poem is like enjoying a quartet that could be heard, seen, smelt and touch between the lines. Hiding from the royal salon and sneaking into the secret places of bourgeoisies, ascending from a soul shy but proud, singing under the window of the beloved one, poem never running out of imagination nor support. Through creative visualization, inspiration from the nature and the rules of logic, poets gain deeper perception of the world.

In this show, ZHONG Yunshu applies the ancient three-character primer as her verse style and injects contemporarily to her work through deconstructing the basic patterns and separating the tones; GAO Ruyun presents groups of humorous pictures in a way that troubles people when they traditionally read the poem to explore the possibilities for poem to fight against the nothingness of time; new media artist WANG Xin puts web code into poems as meters and invites the audience to follow the drift away with the link inside of the bottle post and to enter that virtual sea formed by digital poems a thousand miles away; While MAO Jun presents his hundreds of years suitcase being turned inside out to discuss the “truth” of things; poet Ash Hempsall writes a poem as a “post-suicide note” to enter the last 48 hours of Vincent Van Gogh’s life.

These scripts and voices are forming another image, which bring life to the “October Revolution” on the wall, just like what Karl Krolow said:

The legend of walls

Has been used for creation

By children of 8-years old or the black hours.

And we walk over

To salute to our thinking.