After nine years of preparation, BY ART MATTERS opened to the public on December 25, 2021, at the OōEli campus in Hangzhou. The inaugural exhibition "A Show About Nothing" will be on view through May 8, 2022.
The inaugural exhibition of BY ART MATTERS, a contemporary art venue in Hangzhou, "A Show About Nothing" will bring together more than 30 artists, including Francis Alÿs, Maurizio Cattelan, Geng Jianyi, Robert Grosvenor, Hans Haacke, Ghislaine Leung, Li Liao, Liu Guoqiang, Cady Noland, Yoko Ono, Tino Sehgal, Rudolf Stingel, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tong Wenmin and others. With the presentation of their seminal works and newly commissioned pieces according to the venue's characteristics, the exhibition explores how contemporary Chinese and foreign artists deal with the concept of "nothingness." The exhibition concept was proposed by Francesco Bonami, director of BY ART MATTERS, curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol, a renowned Italian curator, together with Wu Tian and Sun Man.
The exhibition layout places minimal intervention to the architectural design of BY ART MATTERS. Conceived and executed by the internationally renowned RPBW (Renzo Piano Building Workshop), the space allows for a distinctive experience of the entire museum, from its fair-faced concrete, the wooden floor to the high ceiling with skylights on the first floor. When visitors walk into the gallery for the first time and traverse through the exhibition, their various ways of experiencing the space would lead them to engage with the theme of this exhibition.
“We want to do a show about nothing, and we want to do it inside a beautiful void space. We actually wish people, the guests of the exhibition to be able to understand and enjoy the difference between nothing and the void, experiencing architecture while experiencing at the same time the essential beauty of nothing.” said Francesco Bonami, director of BY ART MATTERS. This exhibition also invites visitors to get lost in the seemingly meaningless things that will eventually urge them to generate new beginnings after experiencing the absence of time, matter, and meaning.
"The idea is to open up a new art place with an exhibition that focuses not on accumulation but subtraction and erasure. Focus not on more but less. Focus not on physical spectacle, but thinking and imagination is a way to underline how art is effective if imagination and thinking are shared with the viewer." As Francesco Bonami says, "Nothing" is a collective meeting point where everyone will contribute with individual ideas about something else or maybe nothing else. We start with Nothing so that we will have lots of room to build the future. "A Show About Nothing" will stimulate the viewer's senses, rediscover the meaning of existence from what's lost, and do something on seemingly inactive things. These three intermingling paths explore the relationship between art and nothingness while proposing new ways for people to relate to the world.
"A Show About Nothing"
Date：2021.12.25 – 2022.05.08
Location：BY ART MATTERS
Address：398 Tianmushan Road, Hangzhou
Opening Hours：Tuesday - Sunday, 12:00 - 20:00
