Bank
Last month, Shanghai’s Bank gallery, one of China’s leading art spaces, announced that it is opening a space in New York this spring. The gallery’s presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong, which featured a cross-section of artists from the program, should make any New Yorkers in town for the fair very excited for its arrival. Framing the entrance of the booth is Chinese artist-designer Duyi Han’s 2023 textile installation, Our Superior Algorithm, which blends together Buddhist temple banners with corporate design language and text that blurs the line between techno-optimist mantra and a marketing message. Other works on view similarly resonate with dark humor. Wenjue, another emerging Chinese artist, builds bas-relief-like sculptures out of oil paint to create absurd scenes using symbols from Chinese and Western mythology to craft allegories for global politics and human morality.
At the other end of the program are politically-tinged works by two Chinese artists from a previous generation, a 2015 ink wash scroll painting by Yun-Fei Ji, who uses classical brush strokes to depict rapid urbanization, and Tang Song’s alcohol splattered painting, W0SH12_402x292x17, which takes up an entire wall of the booth, and subtly references a certain protest movement that you cannot talk about on Chinese social media. There’s far more to be discovered at the booth, including works by Lin Ke and Patty Chang, who have solo exhibitions on view or upcoming in Shanghai and New York, respectively.
