Cui Jie / Chen Wei / Chen Yujun / Gong Jian / Gao Weigang / Ni Youyu / Wu Di /

Wang Ningde / Wang Xingwei / Yuan Yuan / Zeng Fanzhi /Zhang Enli / Zhang Ruyi

Outside/In presents a series of interiors and exteriors from the collection. It plays with contrast—opulent living spaces and spare temporary accommodations, lush dreamscapes and barren city streets; the cold facsimile of a desert plant, to thick vegetation vying for dominance and natural ascendancy. This exhibition focuses on a generation of emerging Chinese artists who have thrived and continue to gain a growing transnational presence, further reshaping the nation’s cultural vision and contemporary identity that has firmly positioned itself within the larger international discourse.

In a world where borders have become increasingly porous, blurred by technology or enhanced by instantaneous worldwide communication and rapid travel, we move easily from one place to the next without second thought. We might find ourselves on the streets of Shanghai, as depicted in Cui Jie’s eerie, depopulated painting Shanghai Huaqiao Building (2014), or on a high-speed pleasure cruise along the Yangtze River as in Gong Jian’s Yangtze River II (2008). Or perhaps we encounter those more intimate and private spaces as in Yuan Yuan’s methodically painted oil on canvas Helen’s Bathtub (2010), where we might find ourselves performing our daily ablutions, luxuriating in a lavishly tiled, ruby red room.

Then there are those otherworldly spaces as seen in Wei Jia’s turbulent and surreal dreamscape, Light in the Cloud (2014), where a solitary figure emerges from a mysterious forest, like something straight from the pages of an apocalyptic fairy tale. Trompe l’oeil also comes into play in the paintings by Chen Yujun from his 2015 series Temporary Home and in Ni Youyu’s Transparent Monument 6, also from the same year, where a palpable illusion of three-dimensional space shifts dramatically between Chen’s lonely interior of an abandoned home, inviting us to step inside, and in Ni’s glass enclosed aviary filled with birds, reminding us how our frame of reference is often or unconsciously from the outside looking in. The antithesis of these two works, but no less a play on the illusion of volume and spatial depth, can be found in Zhang Enli’s New Style Furniture (2007) confronting the banality of a common office cabinet. Its contents unknown, becomes seemingly irrelevant, but the pressing mystery of what’s actually inside seems to capture our attention.

Two sculptural works by Zhang Ruyi and Gao Weigang bring us full circle to the show’s premise while bringing a sense of physicality to the ways in which we negotiate our binary or parallel notions of the inside and outside world. Zhang Ruyi’s Weather Detail 1 (2018), a raw concrete, hybrid cast of cacti on a wall mounted, white tile plinth assumes the role of both clinical specimen and relic from a bygone planet, a grim reminder of ongoing environmental degradation, whereas Gao Weigang’s Home (2018) embodies a bittersweet optimism as a leafless wrought iron tree stands sturdy and tall and where, within its barren limbs, a small aluminum birdhouse has nested, offering shelter for its transient inhabitants—a compelling symbol and discreet icon for the millions who are refugees of forced migration.

—Arthur Solway, Shanghai