Group Exhibition Virtual Reality Art

The exhibition, Virtual Reality Art, will be exhibited in Beijing from August 27, 2017 to February 3, 2018, and will consist of 5 consecutive “sub-exhibitions” for each participating artist: Christian Lemmerz, Erik Parker, Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler and Yu Hong.

Virtual Reality has made a successful entry onto the global market at an unusually fast pace. In the art world, this medium is entering a ground-breaking period, enabling artists to cross boundaries and expand their field unlike ever before. It is impossible to do justice to Virtual Reality artworks with a mere description, which is why, in order to understand them, one must experience them first-hand. The medium, thus, literally, opens up an entirely new world for both artists and viewers.

In collaboration with Khora Contemporary, Faurschou Foundation has worked with several internationally renowned contemporary artists to create Virtual Reality art, namely Christian Lemmerz, Erik Parker, Paul McCarthy and Tony Oursler. With this new exhibition, the Foundation will also reveal a new piece by Chinese artist, Yu Hong. Each artwork will be exhibited for a one-month period with complementary sketches, books and artworks for each of the artists and their respective VR pieces.

Faurschou Foundation is glad to continue collaborating with Khora Contemporary after the successful exhibition, New Media (Virtual Reality), in connection to the Venice Biennale 2017. Khora Contemporary was established in 2016 in Copenhagen by five partners with a common passion for art, and a shared vision of VR’s significance in the art landscape of the future. Khora Contemporary conducts extensive research on this progressive medium, and specializes in translating the vision of established and emerging artists into the language of VR. This makes Khora Contemporary the first production company to focus on creating contemporary artworks in Virtual Reality.

Entering the virtual reality of Lemmerz’s La Apparizione, one encounters the “Crucified One.” A golden, tortured body, released from the cross and floating in absolute darkness, his wounds revealing flesh and blood behind the glistening, metal surface of his skin. Exposed to the viewer through the extreme visuality of the VR medium is a fusion between the suffering “Saviour” and a bodybuilder, bordering on vulgarity. In this space, between pathos and irony, between fake and real, the Silver Surfer and Jesus Christ, the bodily event of death is endured – this death that we live.

Christian Lemmerz was born in Germany in 1959. Today he lives and works in Denmark and Italy. From 1978 to 1982, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, Italy, and from 1983 to 1988 at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Lemmerz expresses himself in a variety of media, from film, performance, sculpture, drawing, painting, to installation works. Lemmerz has explored highly unconventional materials, such as his early organic sculptures made of margarine, or a work consisting of slaughtered pigs exhibited in glass cases. He also works with traditional materials, ranging from bronze to marble. Many of Lemmerz’s works focus on taboo-related themes, taken from contemporary, as well as historical events, where suffering, death, identity, and existence are central themes. The human body and the medium of sculpture have been particularly important to Lemmerz’s work, enabling the viewer to become an active participant. Lemmerz has had major solo exhibitions at Randers Art Museum (Denmark), SMK, National Gallery of Denmark, Aros (Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark), Cisternerne (Copenhagen, Denmark), and has exhibited in Stavanger, Beijing, New York and Sao Paulo.

Paul McCarthy’s Virtual Reality experiment is based on the artist’s long-term project, “Coach Stage Stage Coach”, (“CSSC”). Encompassing a wide range of different media, the project includes a new film, inspired by John Ford’s Western of the same title from 1939, starring John Wayne. Taking the form of a spin-off, a phenomenon associated with the entertainment industry, the Virtual Reality work builds on a scene from the film by the artist, involving the two characters, Mary (played by Rachel Alig) and Eve (played by Jennifer Daley). Caught in the claustrophobia of constant surveillance by the two women and their doubles, the viewer becomes part of a vicious mind game. All social conventions break down as the plot unfolds and escalates into a psychosexual trip of rape and humiliation.

Paul McCarthy was born in 1945, in Salt Lake City, USA. Today he lives and works in California. He received his BFA in painting from San Francisco Art Institute, and received his MFA at the University of Southern California, where he studied film, video, and art. From 1982 to 2002, he taught performance, video, installation, and performance art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. McCarthy's works include performance, installation, film, and other genres, best known for their highly provocative nature. McCarthy’s works often express strong criticism towards consumerism in American culture, symbolized by Disneyland, B-Movies, Soap Operas and Comics. His performance art and psychosexual events aim to test the emotional limits of both artist and viewer. His work has been shown in the 1993 Venice Biennale and in exhibitions at Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), The Guggenheim Museum Soho (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and Musee d'Art Contemporain (Lausanne, Switzerland), among many others.

When entering Yu Hong’s Virtual Reality experience, the viewers will witness four scenes, which follow the coming of age of a female character. As the character moves forward in her own development, the events around her flow backwards in time. Each scene is hand-painted, the first depicting the birth of the protagonist and the last ending with her burial. Whereas the birth takes place in modern times, the following scenes take the protagonist and the viewers further and further back in time, until they reach the earliest known period of Chinese history.

Yu Hong was born in 1966 in Xi’an, China. In the 1980s, she studied oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, and graduated with a post-graduate degree from the oil painting department in 1996. Since 1988, she has been a teacher in CAFA’s oil painting department. The core subject of Yu Hong’s paintings has always been human nature, with a focus on the growth and existence of a particular society and the world at large. Yu Hong’s painted figures express the feelings and self-analysis of people thrown into the reality of society. The spirit of Yu Hong’s creation most often arises from her personal life and the surroundings of quotidian existence, constructing a world which ingeniously fuses together perceptions of time and memories, as well as adeptly seizing the sporadic emotional evolution of human experience. Recent solo exhibitions include Suzhou Jinji Lake Art Museum (Suzhou, China), CAFA Art Museum (Beijing, China), and Long Museum (West Bund, Shanghai, China). Yu Hong has also had solo exhibitions at Loft Gallery (Paris, France) and Goedhuis Contemporary (New York, NY, USA), and has participated in group exhibitions around the globe.

Erik Parker's Virtual Reality piece introduces viewers to the artist’s colourful universe, previously only seen in two-dimensional form. Switchstance Bay unfolds Parker’s tropical universe from 2014, Foreign Resistance. When entering the realm of Virtual Reality, the participants find themselves in a lush surrounding with popping, unnatural colours – an artificial paradise, fresh out of Parker’s imagination. New technology finally makes it possible to create a space where the viewer may enter Parker’s fascinating, surreal world. However, the scene quickly turns into a dystopia, as one realizes this virtual reality might be our future, as a consequence of the global climate changes and environmental problems. 

Erik Parker was born in 1968, Stuttgart, Germany, but later moved to San Antonio, Texas. He currently lives and works in New York. Parker attended the University of Texas at Austin before receiving a Master of Fine Arts from Purchase College in New York. Erik Parker is known for his precisely painted and organized worlds of chaos that exist within his brightly coloured, intensely layered, highly saturated canvases, that riff on the traditional genres of portraiture and still-life. Parker draws his inspiration from diverse elements of American subculture – psychedelia, underground comic books, the Chicago Imagists, hip hop and heavy metal, as well as Picasso, Francis Bacon and Roy Lichtenstein. He was included in the first Greater New York show at MoMA PS1 in 2000, and had solo exhibitions at The Cornerhouse Gallery (Manchester, England), De Appel (Amsterdam), the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth (Texas), Colette (Paris), Honor Fraser (Los Angeles), and Galleri Faurschou (Copenhagen, Denmark).

Tony Oursler’s work is an exploration of a person’s mind and story. The viewer is invited to follow George Adamski, a “contactee,” claiming to be the first person ever to have seen and talked to aliens, and even visited other planets in the 1940s and 50s. Oursler's piece draws the viewer into a narrative of a false memory, involving UFOs and aliens, and gives the viewer a chance to explore the extended research archives of both Oursler and Adamski. The artwork, space men r My friended, arises from the path Oursler took with Imponderable and the Imponderable Archive, shown at MoMA and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, New York, and explores the interlinking characters involved with the origins of Unidentified Flying Object photography.

Tony Oursler was born in New York in 1957. He completed a BA in fine arts at the California Institute for the Arts, Valencia, California in 1979. His art covers a range of mediums working with video, sculpture, installation, performance and painting, and he has been known as a pioneering figure in new media since the 1970s. Always rooted in film and applying humour and irony to his works, Oursler creates immersive experiences using both ancient and modern technologies, and explores technology's effects on the human mind. Oursler's work has been exhibited at prestigious institutions, including the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Documenta VIII, IX (Kassel), Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), Skulptur Projekte (Münster), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington) and the Tate (Liverpool). The artist currently lives and works in New York City.