Advent: Inventing Landscape, Producing the Earth

Contemporary art group exhibition “Descent” opened in Shanghai Chongming Island Outpost Village, the exhibition invited 31 domestic and international famous contemporary artists and groups to participate in the exhibition. 40 groups of paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, and earth art works “descended” in the Outpost Contemporary Art Center and the Outpost Bay Landscape Passage two areas. More than 40 groups of paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs and earth art works are displayed in the Outpost Contemporary Art Center and the Outpost Bay Landscape Passage. The exhibition makes full use of the ecological undefined nature of Outpost Bay, and strives to become an eco-theater, treating this contemporary art-ecology group exhibition as a demonstration of how to build one’s own eco-theater.
Artist Wang Jianwei’s work “Nickel, Nature and the Environment” is on display at Advent. In an interview with Phoenix Art, Wang Jianwei explained, “We all say that we have descended into nature, but I think there is a very important concept in descent, it is not that man has descended into nature, in which case man is a kind of God, nor is it that God has descended to the earth as in religion. Today’s descent is actually the descent of a worldview, where the knowledge that we humans possess does not necessarily allow us to naturally gain the right to be above any of your surroundings. So to say descent means that there has to be a renunciation in the artist’s mind of the idea of the human subject, or the artist having an idea of what the subject is that gives meaning to an environment, but rather that you as an equal to any of your environments, and that equality is actually what I mean by a real environment.”