Double Fly Art Center's new exhibition, titled 'The Bro Generation,' is showing at de Sarthe Gallery in Caochangdi until September 10. The artist collective, nine artists in total, live in various cities across China, including Hangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai.
Established in 2008, the group specializes in a variety of media and formats and is known for its live art performances. We meet Double Fly Art Center before their exhibition opening and find out the meaning behind 'The Bro Generation' and how the team makes it work long distance.
What does 'The Bro Generation' mean?
Well, in Chinese, the exhibition would actually more accurately translate to 'The Displaced Generation,' though both 'The Bro Generation' and 'The Displaced Generation' make a lot of sense for this piece. Firstly, saying a single art exhibition could represent or portray an entire generation is bullsh*t, so we’re really mocking ourselves here. We’re not labeling anything as contemporaneous or fashionable. You can think of this piece as evidence that we’ve been thinking about our generation, but we’re not trying to embody anything. A lot changed with our generation—the first or one of the first people to experience life in China after things stabilized. For our generation, there was a lot more opportunity to study or work in other cities or countries and broaden your horizons and be successful. Our generation is now middle-aged, and settled down and working or having a midlife crisis. So a part of this exhibition is a tribute to those working outside of China, or whoever feels displaced. Even if it’s by time.
What kind of thoughts or feelings do you hope to inspire in your audience?
By making sculptures of things like our fingers, teeth, thighs, butts, and whatnot, we took apart our body and had volunteer dancers rub them. Now our bodies are a sequence of things or a collection of things. Once, the children born in the 80s were the young hipsters, and now we’re middle-aged. What does this say about our bodies? There’s isn’t a set answer to it. We’re being a little existential. So we don’t hope to trigger a specific thought or feeling in our audience, but to just show them what we think and feel about being born in the 80s. It’s not like we have a goal to change the mindset of people watching our exhibition, but we are hoping our audience is absolutely willing to be there. Besides, people will have their own interpretations of an art piece, and a big part of art is being able to extract different things about it, not one thing.
With a nine-person group, how do you collaborate to put together an exhibition like this? Do you assign different responsibilities or does everyone do a little bit of everything?
It’s a little bit of both. Since it’s quite difficult to get all of us in the same place at once for a long time, some of it will be individual. Of course, we’ll have group sessions to discuss, and a couple of us might take the lead and create a conceptual framework for the piece, but after that a lot of it can be individual and it would be up to us individually to create or polish parts of the exhibition. We would often collaborate in smaller groups as well. The creating process is pretty organic, and even now it’s in progress.
What inspired you to create this exhibition in this way?
In a lot of Chinese temples and palaces, there would be a pan (a large rock, often used metaphorically as an immovable principle or belief) that you could rub for good luck. We made sculptures of our body parts for this exhibition inspired by that, and it’s sort of a homage to pan in temples or palaces. Aside from that, a lot of what we do is performance art, and a lot of what we do just happens. It’s organic, and it’s probably a product of some complex mix of emotions. The creating process is a little ineffable. For us, creating art is about constantly producing and constantly moving—it’s about laboring—but not necessarily about progressing or developing. And each time it happens, it’s different. Everything is happening for the first time, and the same applies with our performances. Every day, it’s new.
Until Sep 10; de Sarthe Gallery, see event listing.
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