Active Memory brings together seven major artists from the contemporary Chinese scene and offers a renewed reading of China’s cultural heritage. Rather than opposing past and present, the works on view show that tradition does not disappear with modernity. It transforms, extends and reinvents itself.
Huang Rui, Zhang Dali and Yang Yongliang each embody a different way of activating memory. Huang Rui opens the dialogue by revisiting Chinese language and thought through his compositions. Zhang Dali turns his environment into a living material to question history in motion. Yang Yongliang transposes the classical landscape into a digital universe where mountains are made of pixels and city lights.
Technological modernity emerges fully in the work of aaajiao, a leading figure of a new generation whose works are part of the Centre Pompidou collection. His installation typeface uses a neural network trained on ancient calligraphy to generate characters that resemble a written language but no longer carry meaning. This gesture stages transmission as much as loss. Li Hongbo, on the other hand, turns to paper, an ancestral material, to create flexible sculptures inspired in part by Taihu stones, the scholar’s rocks highly prized during the Song dynasty.
Liu Bolin and Zelam Lim close the sequence by reintroducing the body and nature as spaces of reconciliation. Liu Bolin’s sculptures question visibility and erasure in a society saturated with images. Zelam Lim’s works weave together materiality, myth and organic forms to connect the intimate with inherited memory.
