9th JULY: PRESS PREVIEW 11:00 a.m. and OPENING 7:00 p.m.
with Birdhead, Chen Shaoxiong, Ding Yi, Guo Hongwei, He Xiangyu, Kan Xuan, Lee Kit, Li Huasheng, LiShurui, Liao Guohe, Lin Ke, Qiu Zhijie, Su Xiaobai, Tang Dixin, Wang Gongxin, Wu Chi-Tsung, Xu Zhen,Yan Pei-Ming, Zhang Enli, Zhao Zhao.
Jing Shen. The act of painting in contemporary China explores – from an innovative point of view – the emergence ofthemes and methods that are typical of classical Chinese art in the work of twenty artists from three different
generations.
Open from 10th July to 6th September, it is the first exhibition designed and curated by the PAC Curatorial Board1 forExpo 2015 and is part of Expo in Città, the schedule of cultural events planned by Comune di Milano for the sixmonth period of the Universal Exposition.
Promoted by Comune di Milano - Culture, Jing Shen is produced by PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea and by
Silvana Editoriale in cooperation with the Aurora Museum of Shanghai.
By entering into a dialogue with the mission of Expo, the exhibition deals with the topic of ‘intellectual nourishment’,exploring the way in which contemporary creativity feeds on a cultural and artistic heritage.
The exhibition expands beyond the spaces of PAC with two special projects at the Soglia Magica, which links
Malpensa airport with its railway station, and at the new exhibition space of Feltrinelli Duomo at Galleria Vittorio
Emanuele in Milan.
Moreover, thanks to the cooperation with the cutting-edge start-up Bepart – the Public Imagination Movement – Jing
Shen will be the first exhibition on display in several points throughout the city, though augmented reality.
Together with the Istituto Confucio of the Università Statale di Milano, main partner in the project, the PAC willdevelop a series of activities to introduce grown up visitors and families to Chinese art and culture; from workshops
on calligraphy to those on the art of cutting paper, from morning events devoted to taiji quan to those focussing onfood preparation rituals.
In Chinese culture, painting holds an exceptional position. One need look no further than the fact that, in China,
writing is painting. And vice versa. For artists, critics, curators, collectors and the audience, painting is and has always
been a privileged device to reflect on and understand the world and art. It is a means that still gives rise – with wellthought awareness – to broad and deeply meaningful reflections and outcomes.
__________________The PAC Curatorial Board – directed by Domenico Piraina, Director of the Polo Mostre e Musei Scientifici – is formed by Defne Ayas (director of the Witte deWith - Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam), Ilaria Bonacossa (director of the Museo di Villa Croce, Genoa), Davide Quadrio (director of Arthub Asia,Shanghai), Diego Sileo (PAC conservator) and Massimo Torrigiani (director of the new centre for contemporary arts of Bari), who coordinate the work.
1Its influence is such pervasive that it emerges and makes itself visible not only on canvas or paper, but also ininstallations, performances, sculptures, videos and digital works. Therefore, Jing Shen – The act of painting incontemporary China is not – or not only – an exhibition of paintings, but rather an exhibition on the relationship ofpainting with other media; on its fundamental role within a cultural universe.
The curators’ view on the exhibition – the originality of its approach – entails going beyond the interpretationaccording to which Chinese contemporary art is a reflection of its Western counterpart – and origin. Jing Shen argues
that classical Chinese art – not only painting, but also ceramics and woodblock printing, for instance – alreadycontains the ingredients and nutrients of thoughts, attitudes and shapes that represent the richness of contemporary
Chinese art. The dialogue with the West and with other worlds (let us not forget our marginality within the culturalgeography of China) enriches this osmosis between the past and the present, this continuity – which is sometimes
difficult – but never replaces it.
‘Jing Shen’ means ‘awareness of the gesture’, but also ‘inner strength’. It refers to the moment preceding the pictorial
act in classical painting – also of Buddhist or Taoist tradition. It is the climax of a preliminary work that occurs before
facing the creation of an image. An idea and a practice that emphasise a well-thought search for awareness and its
active outcome: the gesture, the act of painting.
A ‘proactive’ painting, which finds its original means in the liquidity of ink and in calligraphy, whose traces surface inthe most diverse ways in the selection of works and artists on display at PAC. For instance, from the way in which
pictorial works are created with the help of fate and everyday life influences (Lee Kit); to the paintings’ rejection tobecome static, maintaining their features as images of movement (Li Shurui); to obsessive reiteration as a supreme
form of change (Ding Yi); to its becoming instinctive, mimetic and spatial (Zhang Enli). All of this is the counterpointof a Western painting that has always been more solemn and iconographical.
Jing Shen also wants to suggest to what extent art and the Western avant-gardes of the second post-war period havebeen influenced by this artistic culture, by ink painting and calligraphy, and by their underlying philosophies: from
Hartung to Pollock, to Cage, to Burri, to Boetti.
And it wants to think of art as a whole, as the outcome of an exchange and continuous influence over time and space,
where the rules of interpretation can only be errant, adaptable and provisional.
In this sense, Jing Shen – The act of painting in contemporary China becomes part of the programme launched by thePAC in January 2014, with the assignment to its new Curatorial Board, which is currently at its third exhibition, with aview to exploring the main trends of current art in connection with the cultural specificities of Milan.
In this city, from the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century on, the boundaries between visual arts and othermedia – architecture, performing arts, design, publishing, literature, fashion, music, poetry, advertisement – havealways been redefined and scientifically called into question, from Marinetti to Munari to Sottsass to Cattelan. A
tendency that also arises from the openness of Milan in accepting other cultures while preserving its own one, which
considers and practises thinking and doing as two parts of the same process: learning by doing.

Milan and PAC are therefore influential points of reference for the movements that are changing the global artisticenvironment. The relationships between past and present, individual and collective, high and low, artistic andindustrial, original and copy are radically reconfiguring, often ambiguously and contradictorily, following new andunexpected paths. Contemporary art is a privileged area to produce and observe these changes.
The catalogue of the exhibition (144 colour pages), edited by Davide Quadrio and Massimo Torrigiani, members of
the PAC Curatorial Board, is designed by Tommaso Garner and published by Silvana Editoriale. Within a single threelanguage edition – Italian, English and Chinese – it presents the papers by scholar Britta Erickson, by scholar andcurator Venus Lau and by Quadrio and Torrigiani themselves.
A special section of the book collects 20th-century works and aims at defining the theme of the gesture, byemphasising the main issues of the exhibition and analysing its themes in the developments of Chinese modernism andits ambiguous – and ambivalent – relationships with Western art.
The exhibition is supported by TOD’S, sponsor of the PAC’s exhibition activity, with the contribution of Alcantara
and with the support of Vulcano.
Exhibition Press Offices
PCM Studio di Paola C. Manfredi | paola.manfredi@paolamanfredi.com +39 335 54 55 539
press@paolamanfredi.com +39 02 87 28 65 82
Silvana Editoriale | Lidia Masolini tel. 02 45395111 press@silvanaeditoriale.it
Comune di Milano | Elena Conenna elenamaria.conenna@comune.milano.it

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