Hopscotch: Curated by GAO Yumeng
BONIAN SPACE is pleased to announce the international group exhibition Hopscotch, which will run from September 28th to October 29th. Curated by Gao Yumeng, the exhibition features works from 12 artists.
The exhibition title "Hopscotch" draws inspiration from the novel of the same name by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. At the beginning, Cortázar provides a non-linear chapter reading guide, breaking the traditional closed structure of novels, by which encourages proactive and creative readers to immerse themselves in the infinite fluidity of reading, thereby keeping the theme in a perpetual state of becoming.
The goal of "Hopscotch" is to reach "heaven," the topmost square, by hopping on one foot. Freedom of movement, playfulness, chance, alternation, obliqueness, and path are the words that, according to Julio Cortázar, define the experience of life in the search for self-integration and his being. This metonymic action also resonates with individual life experiences in postmodern society, characterized by fluidity and uncertainty in identity, relationships, and values.
In the present era of rapid information flow and increasingly blurred cultural boundaries, artists perceive the material, discourse, and space of our times, constructing personalized knowledge structures and creative languages that freely extend and interact. This process generates forces that resist standardization and homogenization, giving rise to a vast spiritual phenomenon of boundless energy that hops across diverse domains.
It may involve emotion and memory, daily life and meditation; it may argue about space and matter, the microscopic and the significant; it may focus on private domains and grand history, or it may explore local consciousness and cultural reflection... It originates from individual experience yet extends to broader realms, transcending the personal boundaries of the creator and placing the viewer in a wider humanistic context, forming an unclassifiable and incommensurable landscape of individual narratives.
Thus, in a present where the "whole" is increasingly difficult to grasp, we no longer attempt to fit numerous individual cases into a single concept or homogeneous framework. Instead, we propose a game, an action-oriented approach, an open, continuously flowing, and constantly generating mode of understanding. Through this, we hope that viewers will find counterpoint melodies that interact with their own complex life threads within the folds of individual narratives constructed by the artists.
P.S. It's worth noting that Cortázar once categorized passive reading as characteristic of "female readers," for which he later publicly reflected and apologized to women worldwide. In the visual design following the exhibition theme selection, we noticed the phallic association in the formal sense of the original "hopscotch" image. Therefore, when designing the poster, we folded it along different spatial vectors, attempting to dissolve this potential implication while also alluding to the intersection and overlap of time, space, and experience in the era of globalization.