CLC Gallery Venture is pleased to present Liu Yue’s Incarnation, the artist’s third exhibition with the gallery after the Mass in 2016, and Owl in 2018. Bringing together a substantial group of found objects and scavenged materials, Incarnation furthers the artist’s long-term project Maximized Uniqueness, and explores the constantly evolving relationship between materiality and spatiality.
Liu Yue is known for his long-term, system atic and laborious development of chiefly two projects: Cognitive Studies, and Maximized Uniqueness, both started in 2006. While the former pertains to the decontextualised specifics and the uncanny nature of the topological mundane, the latter is in conversation with the legacy of the Arte Povera movement, the history of Conceptual Art – Baldessarian or Kosuthianalike – and the spatial principles of the Minimalism, and proposes a notion of the universal that is at once fundamental and other worldly in nature. Occupying the whole of the CLC Gallery Venture space, the Incarnation consists of a number of found objects, displaced mirror glass, used kitchen ventilationpipes, and a pair of tall and short rusty, erect, metallic centerpieces; the totality of the large-scale installation with its numerous seemingly arbitrary constructs is specifically conceived for the space, evoking a certain notion of a romanticised, disproportioned Gothic aesthetics, and a manifestation of materiality where functionality and religiosity are meticulously quantified, largely erodedby the reflective elements in the exhibition, and, subsequently, consolidated in the artist’s unique fashion.
After constructing the numer oussite-specific components of the exhibition, Liu Yue pours a mix of cement, self-rising flour and plaster from the top of the structures. To the artist, essential is the universal force of gravity, as a determinant par excellence; the territorialization and solidification of the liquid ponder gravitational possibilities, and testify to the temporal aspect of a choreographed space. Over the course of the exhibition, the slimy, murky substances further navigatethe controlled environment in a dense and self-developing fashion until its finally solidified.
Liu Yue considers the work at the CLC Gallery Venture as actively countering the geometrical proposal Volume that was actualised in Shanghai earlier this year: while the Volume deals with a reductionist, abstractionist tendency in relation to the truth of a given space that was being modified at the time of the exhibition, the Incarnation, in the space of a recently re-established enterprise, counter-excavates by addressing the dynamics between natural laws and man-made structures – the monumentality of which is constantly being reiterated, yet always already collapsing.
