LAOWAI, Allegorist - Antagonist

Jul 9, 2013 - Jul 13, 2013 Group Exhibition

Artists:	Alexander Brandt , Casper Stracke , David Kelley , Girolamo Marri , Heidi Voet , Isaac Julien , Marc Lafia , MATHIEU BORYSEVICZ , MAYA KRAMER , Patty Chang , Rainer Ganahl
Address:	2013 - 2016 @ Xianggang Lu （Now Closed）

LAOWAI 老外 is a Chinese colloquial term for ‘foreigner’. For a culture that is overwhelmingly dominated by the Han Chinese
ethnicity, laowai simply denotes those who are not Chinese, and is often employed by Chinese living overseas when
speaking about locals. All of the works presented in this exhibition have been produced by laowai, or non-native-Chinese
artists within the geographical territory and/or ideological framework of China.
Comprised mostly of video and photography works by internationally acclaimed artists this exhibition is held in tandem
with a NYU symposium that “thinks through the space of Asian art within a global framework” and “the contextual framework
of the Inter-Asian art worlds”. Some of these artists have visited China on a short-term basis; others have been longterm
residents and are culturally fluent, yet all of the works engage in various aspects of China’s cultural specificity. The
exhibition explores what exactly is Chinese about art produced in China. Can a laowai make Chinese art? Is Chinese-ness
a shared condition, a visual language, a set of iconographic signifiers, a particular gamut of subject matter, or something
more profound? In an age of unprecedented inter-connectedness and multi-culturalism what is left of territorial claims?
How does the discourse of multi-culturalism or trans-culturalism pertain to the laowai artist in China?
The exhibition is divided into two types of work: allegorist- artworks that employ the tropes of China’s cultural landscape
to write narratives that are poetic, personal or political; and antagonist- artworks that probe the condition of being an
outsider in ways that are antagonistic, defensive and/or absurd.
Artists: Patty Chang & David Kelley US, Giralomo Marri IT, Isaac Julian UK, Mathieu Borysevicz US, Marc Lafia US, Caspar
Stracke DE, Heidi Voet BL, Rainer Ghanal AT, Alexander Brandt DE, Maya Kramer US.

ARTWORKS