At 4:00 pm on July 10, 2014, jointly planned by Zhu Liye and Duan Shaofeng, “Underground FieldTest: 10 x 1 x ∞” opened at the Yuan Art Museum, and it features the works by 11 young artists from CAFA, including Liu Fujie, Tao Duhan, Liu Runzhi, Li Di, Yang Zhou, Wang Xudong, Wang Enlai, Zhu Liye, Chen Weiqi, Li Yuanchen, Zhang Ying, dispersing their enthusiasm in Beijing on a hot and sunny day.

The purpose of this exhibition is to test an individual language without a topic or any restrictions, focusing on an open experimental exploration in artistic creation. The exhibition showcases the content of chat from the curators convening with the artists for the creation and exhibition, at the beginning of the planning of the exhibition, ten artists attended, while the eleventh one later participated in it, the exhibition title evolved into “10 x 1”, and the curators finally changed it to a completely open exhibition, without a limit on the number of exhibitors, so the title “Underground FieldTest: 10 x 1 x ∞” is created at last.

The exhibition abandons the limit of the subject which gives rise to the unconscious element of the artistic creation, and the artists finish their creation in the exhibition space of the Yuan Art Museum, using ready-made articles and a variety of media forms to install it, covering the two-dimensional and three dimensional, from installation to video, from form to concept, the discussion on the artistic possibility runs through the exhibition. The exhibiting works are not only finished on-site, but also reflect the state of an extended site, some of the creation of the works will continue to the end of the exhibition, or will extend the creation through the interaction with the audience during the exhibition, so that the artists explore a variety of artistic creative possibilities in a fully open and free environment.

Liu Fujie’s work is the continuation of the state of her studio in the exhibition hall, expressing the everyday life, apperception in the form of a creative section, preserving the creative process in the form of a video, with the finished “four-day” creation showing the exhibition opening, after the opening ended, she continued to create a section every day, to keep the whole work in a “growing” state. One of the curators Zhu Liye is also a participating artist, her exhibiting work “Work No. 3” is a new exploration based on her graduation work, using hypnosis to research the subconsciousness, pulling away her favorite level to finish the creation of “Work No.3” using ink, in order to explore the influence on creation of the original thinking and the traditional cultural roots. Chen Weiqi’s work “Come and See” makes full use of the spatial characteristic of the museum, through the pipe the viewers can see and hear what is happening outside the museum.

Most of the participating artists are from the Department of Sculpture, CAFA, and they belong to a group of dynamic and creative young artists, doing their best to break previous creative patterns, back to their favorite development of language, perhaps it is a way to pursue the ego state of the artist.

The exhibition will continue to July 15.

Text by Zhang Wenzhi, translated by Chen Peihua and edited by Sue/CAFA ART INFO

Photo by Quan Jing/CAFA ART INFO