Ed Ruscha: Rooms with Words

Shuang Li</a>, featuring sculpture and video installations, commissioned in partnership with New York’s Swiss Institute. Li’s work explores how language, relationships and identities are formed and mediated through screens and the internet. For I’m Not, Li delves into her own life as a fan to ruminate on how these technologies inform the social bonds and materiality of fandom, and the complexities of building a world predicated on a fervent love of something distant. Growing up in a small town in Southeast China, Li became (and remains) an ardent fan of My Chemical Romance, a band that introduced the possibility of subcultural belonging as well as the English language into the artist’s life. MCR fandom unfolds as a case study in the exhibition for an examination of faraway bodies and displaced desires.</p><p>The exhibition features a large-scale reimagining of an architectural model, akin to those Li would see as a child on weekend visits to real estate showrooms with her parents. Coming of age during the market economy reform of the 1990s and the rapid development of real estate concurrent with the urbanization of China in the 2000s, Li witnessed the growing and bursting of the country’s real estate bubble. The gleaming towers, seemingly erected overnight, promised a future that never arrived. Left half-built and deserted when the market crumbled, their skeletons stand here as abstracted visions of home.</p><p>Embedded in one building, Déjà Vu (2022) is a silent video, composed of documentation from a performance Li made during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she was kept from entering her home country for three years due to travel restrictions, and footage from a GoPro camera worn by a duck in an animal rescue center in Geneva, where she relocated for two of those years. In subtitles, a short story describes a town where people started mixing up words, then forgetting grammar, and, ultimately, losing the ability to speak. The featured performance, Lord of the Flies (2022), was a result of Li’s not being able to attend her own opening in Shanghai due to her displacement. Outfitted as Shuang Li clones with her signature My Chemical Romance T-shirt, bangs, and platform loafers, twenty performers were locally trained to be her avatars. They were given a choreography, personalized scripts with which to talk to audience members, and goodbye letters handwritten by the artist to deliver to her close friends who attended. The shoes worn by the performers populate the gallery as vessels of Li’s absence, her existence, and her multiplicity as a fan. “There are no more copies, when there’s no more original … I can also be you,” states the silent narrator in Déjà Vu.</p><p>Fandom thrives on distance, as the chasm between an idol and its devotee enacts both yearning and creative fantasy. For the newly commissioned video I’m Not (2024), Li rewrote the lyrics to the My Chemical Romance song “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” in Mandarin Chinese and English, which was then covered by an a cappella group. In the resulting music video, a troupe dressed as an army choir conducted by a young girl melodically recites Li’s version of the emo anthem. Here, the artist, who taught herself English from MCR lyrics, gives shape and tribute to the formative years in which her teen angst was echoed in a language she did not yet speak by a band of four young men thousands of miles away. Filtered through bleachers composed of shimmering panels of colored resin, the installation is itself a work of fan art.</p><p><br></p>" />

Aspen Art Museum</a> is pleased to present ugo <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Ed-Ruscha--Rooms-with-Words/"/Artist/Ugo-Rondinone/03B49274FE43CDF5">Rondinone: the rainbow body, the artist’s (b. 1964, Brunnen, Switzerland) first major institutional show in the Western United States in a career spanning over three decades. The Museum’s second-floor gallery is recast as a prismatic arena where fluorescent, lifelike sculptures of dancers sit at rest and in waiting. In his practice at large, Rondinone is celebrated for expansive installations, working with photography, painting, poetry, outdoor sculpture, and neon rainbow signage. His visual vocabulary often incorporates the natural and primordial world, wherein rocks, clouds, trees, and the sun are recurrent motifs. Language and systems of communication such as lyrics or slogans mark other modes of exploring human subjectivity and experience.</p><p>the rainbow body considers the multivalent significance of the rainbow. This natural occurrence is at once nature’s most delicate and ephemeral phenomenon, and an emblem rife with mystical aura and political undertones. “The rainbow is a bridge between everyone and everything,” says Rondinone, “nature is not something apart from us, but intrinsic.” The exhibition’s title references a spiritual rite in Tibetan Buddhism in which the body is transformed into light upon death. This conversion is attained only by devoted practitioners and marks the highest form of realization. In this process, the human corpse and mind vanish, replaced by five-colored radiant lights.</p><p>The sixteen fluorescent, life-size wax casts of dancers in the gallery allude to this process. Averting their gazes, the hyperrealistic nude figures are impervious to viewers, but pulsing with vitality. Burned-out candles cast in bronze complete the scene, resting nearby on the bright yellow gallery floor. In Rondinone’s tableau, a stained-glass clock channels light through an adjacent nave—a lens to mark the passage of time as his dancers are captured in a state of deliberate stillness. Forging links between the natural world and the spiritual realm, here Rondinone continues his examination of the body’s dematerialization and human encounters with the sublime.</p><p><br></p>" />