062 Gallery, Chicago, USA

April 20 - May 11, 2018

Curated with Anita Chen, Yidan Pang, and Yuting He

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Artists: Judith Fang,  Kat Gu, Leah Ke Yi, Caroline Liu, Xiaotang Sun, Guanyu Xu, Wei Shen, Oltree Hui & Xiny “Frank” Meng, Elaine Hsu & Craig Stam

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Imagine an iron house without a window, and its inmates sound asleep are dying of suffocation unconsciously. This is Lu Xun’s classical metaphor of China in the early 1920s: people were suffocated by the unreasonable regime in an ignorant mind state. Lu Xun, a leading figure of Chinese modern literature, placed great hope on the light sleepers who would wake up by the slightest stir and endeavor to find the way out. The spirit has enlightened many generations to remain conscious and critical of anything unjustified.

 

Light Sleepers is an exhibition which displays works of 6-8 emerging artists
in Chicago with a Chinese cultural background. They are sensitive to common practices, stereotypes, societal trends and other invisible elements, and are displaying the struggle with such constraints of everyday life.

 

The exhibition is their manifestos to confront routines, and to reject the numbness and subjection to all kinds of structural violences. By questioning social and cultural norms, they transcend the limitation of identity and keep

exploring the possibilities to visualize individual experience in such various ways

as performances, videos, paintings, the photography and the sculpture.