Ke Ming

Essay by Wenlu Bao

Curator Juan Puntes
Curator Lingyuan Hu
Co-Curator Wenlu Bao
February 8 – March 14, 2020

The word “cross” means so many in the language.

As a verb, “cross” refers to the notion that “to go across from one side of something to the other 1.” Just like this exhibition, which is the Chinese artist Ke Ming’s first solo show in New York City. Such a happening is not a coincidence. As a result of the world’s globalization and China’s rapid development together with the artist’s social concerns and mature artistic language, Ke Ming’s “cross” is unavoidable.

Cross aims to explore the key issues during the prompt development of China at large and the conceptual borders through Ke Ming’s creative ideas and contemporary art practices. The artist is keenly aware of society’s historical problems and the fierce collision of values. He raised the vital question: under the surface of all the social changes and economic developments, genetically, what happened to human’s legacies and civilizations?

Born in 1980, when China mainland was at the early stage of the reform and opening policy, Ke Ming is a member of his generation who has witnessed China’s exhaustive change. In 2005, Ke graduated from Oil Painting Department at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts. Soon after, he was invited to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München in Germany for further studies in art. It is worth mentioning that during Ke’s college years, he took off two years from school and spent one year working as a volunteer in a remote mountain area, and the other in China’s capital, Beijing. His experiences in different countries and regions and exposure to multiple cultures and living conditions have enriched the artist’s perspective looking at contemporary society from dynamic angles.

Ke Ming’s conceptual art has shown the roots from the past, perhaps, it is just like the artist addressed, “A bird shouldn’t need to search for food, because nature has prepared the best food possible. It should fly in order to spread seeds and sing sweet music.” One example is the work, “To Add One Meter to an Unknown Mountain,” in 2018 refers to a classic image in China’s contemporary art history, “Add one more meter to the unnamed hill” in 1995. Over two decades, some of the artists in the original 1995 version photo, now are labeled as “cultural icons”, but the nameless hill remains the same. Another work on display, “Great Wall” uses a group photo of undergraduate students of Central China Normal University in 2019 as a present notation of the ideological “Great Wall.” It questions whether most individuals, in a collectivist surrounding, are able to truly remain independent in thought and action.

In addition, as a noun, “cross” can be a written mark, “x,” which “usually used to show where something is, or that something has not been written correctly. 2 ” Hereby, this exhibition invites the viewers to decide for themselves, if there is a standard of “correct.”