Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website Out of the Blue, A Calligraphic Journey through Alcantara | 9 settembre - 11 ottobre 2020 | Appartamento dei Principi Palazzo Reale, Milano
october 09, 2020 - Palazzo Reale Milano

Out of the Blue, A Calligraphic Journey through Alcantara | 9 settembre - 11 ottobre 2020 | Appartamento dei Principi Palazzo Reale, Milano

Out of the Blue, A Journey into Calligraphy through #alcantara, is an exhibition promoted and produced by the Municipality of Milan – Culture Department, by the Royal Palace of Milan and by #alcantara S.p.A., devised especially for the Apartment of the Princes, open to the public free of charge from Wednesday 9 September until Sunday 11 October 2020. The access to the exhibition is limited and must be booked in advance; arrangements will be implemented in order to secure visitors’ health and safety.

The exhibition, curated by #dagmarcarnevalelavezzoli and #katiehill, is featured in the programme of the Milan Art Week 2020 (7-13 september 2020) and confirms Alcantera’s ongoing interest in the most advanced forms of contemporary creativity: Out of the Blue in fact marks a new stage in a cycle of works that since 2015 has explored the qualities of Alcantara® as a material for art and design, transforming various spaces of the Palazzo Reale in Milan into gateways to exhibition proposals of the most unusual kind, both in terms of contents and means of fruition.

With this project, the company that produces and markets Alcantara® worldwide continues this original form of research and development, once again opening up to both established and emerging creatives and collaborating with them on the creation of original works.

In Out of the Blue, six established Chinese artists – Qin Feng, Qu Lei Lei, Sun Xun, Mao Lizi, Zhang Chun Hong, Wang Huangsheng – combining the millenary tradition of their past with the latest technologies, let themselves be inspired by the specificity of a single medium and explore Alcantara® in all its declinations and potential through works that offer transversal readings, ranging from the classical to the contemporary. Using Alcantara® as a common denominator, the artists explore the versatility of this avant-garde medium to create works imbued with personal and collective memories. By integrating ancient practices with a futuristic material, China’s millennial cultural heritage acquires new expressive potential.

Calligraphy is one of the highest artistic forms in Chinese culture. After the age of technical reproducibility and the advent of the digital era, this ancient discipline still represents a vehicle of knowledge, a voice addressing topical issues, and a medium that connects an ancient past to contemporary philosophical research. Recognised by UNESCO as an element of world heritage, more than any other type of writing or ‘alphabet’, Chinese calligraphy has always been appreciated for its aesthetic and artistic value: every stroke appears to have been dictated by a soft and gentle flight, endowed with the flow of life conferred by the very instinctiveness of the gesture and its pictographic nature, for each character is a direct representation of something and its meaning. The great ‘non-action’ of Wu Wei spirituality – the practice of acting without acting, without forcing things but allowing a natural and spontaneous course to flow, to become – joins the aesthetic sphere. Hence the connection to the Tao, or rather the Dao, ‘the way’, the unfaltering principle that gives rise to the cosmos.

The Apartment of the Princes at the Royal Palace is transformed into intriguing experiences where site-specific installations respond to the aesthetics of the rooms through both affinities and visual contrasts. Ranging from digital projections to ink forests on rolls, the artists are inspired by calligraphic practice to question the nature of the relationship between man and the world around him through Taoist notions of temporality, life force and participation.

THE EXHIBITION ITINERARY

Entering the first room, visitors make their way into an immersive forest of ideograms whose calligraphic traits unfold fluidly along vertical scrolls. Qu Lei Lei elaborates and reinterprets the idea behind this ancient art of calligraphy as a multiplicity of forms evoking the proliferation and fragmentation of the information that surrounds us in our present life.

In the second room, Zhang Chun Hong presents a hybridisation that skilfully combines human elements with ones of nature. Using her leitmotiv of flowing hair painted carefully in wispy locks in the Gongbi style, the artist expresses the concept of life force through a sculptural work in which nature, body and calligraphy become an inseparable entity. Young women’s long hair is associated with life force, sexual energy, growth and beauty and, like a portrait, can express personal feelings and emotions. The artist’s work is influenced by traditional Chinese culture, including its presentation on parchment paintings, underlining the length and flow of the hair. The imposing and surreal imagery also features a threedimensional effect.

Qin Feng’s work, produced through a technique akin to dripping, made up of sketches, traces and scribbles, exploits the immediacy of the action not by presenting an idea in progress but rather momentary forms of the idea itself. There is no distance between the thought and the original gesture; the spontaneity of calligraphic movement unleashes a primordial energy, expressing itself in the Taoist philosophical principle of Wu Wei, ‘to act by not acting’. His use of tea (representing
the East) and coffee (the West) on the background of his ink paintings alludes to cultural differences and the attempt to bridge them.

In Mao Lizi’s screens, splashes of colour stand out vividly against panels, generating a strong visual rhythm with a zigzag shape to them. According to Taoist philosophy, history does not proceed in a linear fashion: it is not a vector, but develops according to the concept of synchronicity. On the horizontal line of thought about time, the artist reasons on the basis of a vertical line, thinking about various phenomena that coexist simultaneously.

In Wang Huangsheng’s digital installation, the gaze turns upwards in a continuous movement of brightness and ideograms, evoking glimmers of fleeting thoughts and reflections that flow in hypnotic forms. The activation of light and shadow coupled with the scrolls painted with dense lines, create an immersive visual experience leading the audience to interact spontaneously with the work, disorienting the gaze and refocusing it through reflections in continuous motion. The gestural lines and calligraphic practice are the foundations and necessary meeting point, condensed in works that function as written poems and abstract representations of reality.

In the work found in the final room – an immersive video projection and a long painted scroll – Sun Xun draws inspiration from the rhythm of ancient calligraphic practice to create contemporary animation featuring symbolic elements. Evoking the encounter between Western and Eastern culture, between earthly and otherworldly dimensions, the black calligraphic lines come to life here, intertwining with dreamlike visions. A surreal world with mythological creatures and mysterious landscapes opens up before the spectator, who thus becomes part of it. The artist analyses issues related to culture, memory, politics and his scepticism about official history, exploring the concepts of past versus present, often choosing to use animals and insects as protagonists instead of #people.

Out of the Blue leads visitors on a journey into calligraphy through #alcantara, the ideal medium for the creation of innovative artistic hybridisations. Combining ancient Eastern traditions with 21st-century artistic experimentation, each room offers heterogeneous interpretations of contemporary China, evoking a distant past, an unknown future and the relevance of both in the freshness of the present moment.