Leo Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Jiannan Wu's first solo exhibition, Carnival, in China from June 17 to July 16, 2023. The exhibition will include more than ten works from the artist's multiple series in recent years, showing the development of the artist's creative practice in a cross-cultural context from the East to the West.
Jiannan Wu excels at depicting specific cultural landscapes of contemporary life with his iconic relief sculptures, presenting diverse aspects of today's society with a realistic approach. From the Country Love series based on the namesake Chinese TV series about the charms of living in rural China to the realistic works documenting important global events - the themes of Wu's works transcend the limitations of countries, eras, and cultural backgrounds, focusing on and sorely on the stories of ‘people’ of flesh and blood. Standing in front of his reliefs, we walk through the dusty paths in the countryside of Northeast China, arrive at a lively dinner party with wine cups flashing from hand to hand, and then reminisce about TV characters engraved with the imprints of times gone by: fragments of private and public life, personal and collective memories all captured with great precision by the artist. It is these momentary fragments that construct the era we are living in - an era both mundane and grand, real and illusory, full of delight yet with an intangible ever-flowing undercurrent of tension.
These numerous drama scenes directed by Wu are like a grand carnival or a ceaselessly-changing kaleidoscope of the world. These dazzling scenes finally converge at the symbolic carousel and Ferris wheel, which cross the border between reality and imagination. Viewing Wu’s sculptures, apart from giving knowing smiles for resonating with the aspects of our everyday life that we see in his works, behind the artist's witty yet not completely worry-free tone, we may be able to re-contextualize the trajectory of individuals' fates in the torrent of the times, while once again examining our existence and the ambiguity of its narrative.