Featuring a blend of ancient Chinese cultural artifacts and the creations and collections of contemporary artist Zhao Zhao, the exhibition Co-Savor is ongoing at Aurora Museum in Shanghai.
Running through Dec 6, the exhibition leverages the museum's rich collection of artifacts, while taking a unique approach to bridging ancient and contemporary art forms.
The title, Co-Savor, is drawn from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) poet Su Shi's First Ode on the Red Cliff. With a philosopher's insight, Su celebrated the abundance and eternity inherent in nature, pointing to a harmony that transcends time, space and individual boundaries, which echoes with a profound spiritual resonance.
"We at the museum have been exploring artifacts to bring ancient societies back to life. But if we seek to truly maintain the vitality of these preserved ancient civilizations, we need to let them connect and resonate with contemporary society and its way of thinking," says Ginger XunJingyuan, curator of the exhibition and director of the museum. "Zhao's creation is a perfect fit."
Xun highlights that Zhao's art often deconstructs and reassembles established cultural symbols such as jade, ceramics and statues, and reinterprets them with a variety of media and materials including glass, cotton and painting.
Zhao keeps exploring the relationship between individuals and the rest of society. His work is developed around the subtle emotional changes of people confronted with diverse cultural influences. He has won numerous honors and awards worldwide.
A striking piece by Zhao among the exhibits is Jade Constellations, an extension of his work Constellations. The artist inlaid ancient Chinese jade bi discs into shattering points on large pieces of glass with radial cracks, resembling a violent starry sky.
As one of China's most revered cultural symbols, jade has been honored for millennia as a vessel of ritual and ceremony. Surrounded by shattered traces, the jade bi discs are symbolized as wormholes born at the instant of an extreme energy burst in the universe, which connect the ancient ritual order and the vast cosmos.
Born in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in 1982, Zhao has long explored diverse ancient cultural heritages. Despite being a contemporary artist, Zhao notes that ancient art has always been his "essence and inner core".
Inspired by his personal life experience of volunteering in the cotton fields in his childhood, the artist began creating his Sky Fire series in 2016, among which is Sky Fire — Tang Dynasty Architecture, which is primarily made of cotton.
Instead of a paintbrush or other tools, Zhao uses a lens to concentrate sunlight and guide a spark from 150 million kilometers away onto the surface of the cotton. As the heat travels across the surface of the fabric, it leaves scorched traces that gradually reveal the image of a Tang Dynasty (618-907) building. Tang architecture, largely constructed from timber, was inherently vulnerable to fire. Yet in Zhao's work, these structures undergo a paradoxical rebirth through the very forces of fire and light.
"I believe ancient and contemporary art share the same essence and are intrinsically connected. Regardless of time, space, culture or medium, it is all simply art for all humankind. It is art that makes us human," says Zhao.
The exhibition invites visitors to step into an artistic dialogue spanning a thousand years. It is more than a simple juxtaposition of past and present, but explores the enduring threads woven through Chinese civilization, reflecting on timeless themes such as heaven, humanity and morality.
"In this symphony of ancient artifacts and contemporary art, may you find a space for reflection on time, art and the essence of culture, sharing in the beauty of civilizations and co-savoring the fullness of life," reads the preface of the exhibition.
