He Xiangyu

He Xiangyu
Born	1986 Kuandian, Liaoning, China
Education	Shenyang Normal University
Known for	Painting, Installation, Sculpture
Notable work	Coca-Cola Project, Tank Project, Oral Project, Lemon Project

He Xiangyu (Chinese: 何翔宇; born 1986 in Kuandian, China) is a contemporary artist based in Berlin and Beijing.

Background

He Xiangyu graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Shenyang Normal University in 2008 with a bachelor's degree. His work has been featured in major group exhibitions worldwide, including Fire and Forget at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2015); 13e Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France (2015); Social Factory – 10th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China (2014); 28 Chinese, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA (2013); ON|OFF China’s Young Artists in Concept and Practice, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2013). His most recent solo exhibitions include Dotted Line, White Space Beijing, Beijing, China (2014); He Xiangyu, White Cube, London, UK (2014); CROSSED BELIEFS, SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan (2013).

His works have been in public collections include: Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Switzerland; Pinault Collection, France; White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Domus Collection, USA; Boros Collection, Berlin, Germany; Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Mercator Foundation, Essen, Germany; Artron Art Museum, Shenzhen, China; M WOODS Museum, Beijing, China; Sishang Museum, Beijing, China.

In 2014, He was a finalist in the "Future Generation Art Prize", Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Kiev, Ukraine

Artwork

His art is centered on investigating and engaging with the operating mechanisms and structural relationships of current social systems. He first garnered attention for his large-scale works, such as "The Coca-Cola Project" and "Tank Project", which explore both objects and symbols from everyday life. Through either a physical or conceptual transformation, his works generate a direct and provocative statement while triggering various interpretations and experiences. Since Everything We Create is Not Ourselves in 2013, He has begun to further explore his artistic experiments but from a different perspective and dimension; he has turned from the production of symbols in the visual world to the sensation and inspection of the inner world, emphasizing the universality of art based on the body and the imagination born of it.

Coca-Cola Project

The Coca-Cola Project, initiated in early 2009 and completed at the end of 2011, began when the artist bought one ton of Coca-Cola at a large supermarket. He then proceeded to construct a "kitchen" in his studio, and during this time made numerous sketches and conducted various related experiments. At the end of 2009, the artist decided to move the operation to Dandong, Liaoning Province, a city that borders North Korea. It is at this location where the artist employed ten workers who together fabricated ten iron vessels within a site structure. The structure was built using over ten tons of lumber and featured waterproof canopies. Working on the project uninterruptedly for over one and a half years, which totaled more than 6000 man-hours, the artist and his team ultimately cooked 127 tons of Coca-Cola and extracted 40 cubic meters of cooked residue. What astonished the artist was that during the process of extraction, a range of groups—which included public security, firefighters, border control, and environmental organizations—all came to investigate, inspect and collect evidence, which ultimately led to the artist incurring fees and fines.

Tank Project

Tank Project began in late 2011 and was completed in early 2013. The prototype of the tank, tank model T34, was found near an army base positioned at the frontier between North Korea and China. This specific tank model has been used as the primary tank within China's armed forces and has also been the same tank that was used during sensitive incidents in China's recent history. Since large-scale measuring tools are widely unavailable, He had to coordinate a team to sneak into the army base in the middle of the night to measure portions of the tank by hand. It took four months to determine all the measurements of the tank, culminating in corresponding plans designed from these very measurements that were detailed and meticulous enough to reproduce an actual tank. Using high grade vegetable tanned leather, an "outer-coat" was made using the dimensions and proportions from the plans slightly scaled up. Along with 35 workers, the Tank Project took two years to complete, using more than 250 full-scale leather hides and 50,000 meters of wax string. The finished work weighs over 2 tons. The Tank Project also includes the corresponding interviews, diagrams, and video.

Oral Project: Everything We Create is Not Ourselves

Starting from 2012, He started the conceptualization of his on-going series of paintings, titled Everything We Create is Not Ourselves. The inspiration was derived from the sensation he experienced while using his tongue to touch the roof of the mouth and he attempted to visualize the sensation through a series of paintings. The artist also engaged in dialogue with psychologists, philosophers and linguists to discuss this simple but often over-looked sensory experience and how such simple sensation transcends itself into the foundation of human experience.

Because oral is intrinsically linked to the body, we know that the inside and outside is relative to each other in which both are a kind of inner joy, to mobilize your senses. For example, the senses are developed from mobilizing the substance itself to gain pleasure from Coca-Cola or olive oil, it is a kind of illusion, forged emotion or a desire stimulated within the body. This cannot control the quality of the substance, neither can control what the viewer will see or sense at particular time, but at least through this illusion we can understand the world without an exterior. Everything We Create is not Ourselves is based on experimentations of the thought of an oral organic living substance inside the body, and the artist cannot apply past experience and judgement during the experiment as an individual changes every day, just like olive oil dripping on the wall.

Lemon Project

The Lemon Project is an ongoing interdisciplinary artistic project that includes a publication (Yellow Book, 2019), an ongoing series of work on paper, and 4 short films. The project presents an artistic exploration of the utilization, representation, function and the transition of the significance of yellow and lemon in the artistc, cultural, historical, political, religious and social realms in a global context, and reveals the geopolitical and socio-economic development of the globalised world through the universal languages of color and fruit. The project examines how yellow and lemon are presented and applied in human civilization to transfigure the ideas and realities of nations, borders, economies, and multiculturalism.

Yellow Book

The Lemon Project, started in 2016, turns towards the practice of scientific research to produce an encyclopedic collection of the multitude of meanings and functions of lemons and the color yellow, leading him to immerse himself in the abyss of historical, psychological, medical, and cultural meanings associated with the color yellow. The book in a Japanese binding includes essays on the color yellow. On the inside of the uncut pages are more than 500 of He Xiangyu`s drawings entitled “Research on Yellow.” The Yellow Book is an inspiring multi-disciplinary anthology, inviting more than 16 writers and scholars from various fields - art history, art conservation, anthropology, sociology, economics, plant biology, political studies, media studies and religious studies, just to name a few - to discuss the utilization, representation, function and transformation of yellow and lemon in a global context, and reveals the geopolitical and socio- economic significance of the color and the fruit.

Films and Videos

The Swim

The Swim is He Xiangyu’s first feature-length documentary, focusing on the complex geopolitical situation along the Yalu River between China and North Korea. The artist’s hometown Kuandian is located on the north bank of the river, directly facing the border of North Korea; for five to six decades, the small town has witnessed the gradual development of Chinese Korean War veterans and North Korean defector communities. Within a two-year period the artist made records of the communities, conducted numerous interviews, and produced a piece of micro history based upon the various personal and biographical narratives in the era of post-globalization. In direct contrast with the calm northern natural landscape, are the internalised, orated experiences of war and defecting from one’s home country, emphasizing the affective and spiritual dimensions of post traumatic stress disorder, often neglected by grand narratives. Towards the end of the film, the artist re-staged, alongside a local resident, the act of swimming across the river. At once investigative and autobiographical, the film reveals the radical political aspect of everyday life; by examining transgressive acts, the film is an allegory of the future goals to overturn the national, terrestrial and aquatic boundaries, and restore the freedom to cross and to communicate that existed less than a century ago.

The Yellow Swim Caps

The Yellow Swim Caps records He Xiangyu’s performative attempts of breaking the boundary between China and North Korea. Swimming across the Yalu River 2017 illegally, He fails during his first attempt but on his second venture he successfully

Evidence

A series of delicate sculptures made from over 248 pieces of scrap copper wire, fragments of patinated tubing and pieces of ironmongery, were obtained in a black market which He Xiangyu discovered during the filming process of The Swim. Used for barter, these hand-formed objects are originally scavenged by North Koreans from machinery and buildings in North Korea, then sold to Chinese traders for small amounts of cash or goods. Born out of economic necessity, these unique objects trace a particular history and bear the imprint of strange craftsmanship: the North Koreans who must secretly cut and obtain the wires and pieces, then tie the wire into a knot as minuscule as possible to smuggle materials by attaching them physically on their bodies. For the artist the finished objects seem eerily plastic and sculptural.

He Xiangyu created several "copies” after the found objects, in order to re-create and haptically consider their complex and compressed sculptural forms. He documents the process of making these copies in the video, where one sees the hands of the artist laboriously bending, forming and configuring each metal fragment. The artist engages in the specific action of the self-imposed task to highlight wider political issues, by creating duplicates that seem both symbolic and futile. Both the sculptural endeavor and the film attempts to reveal how the transformation of material and the role of the hand in material fabrication and exchange can evoke a physiological response in the viewer. Through Evidence, He exposes our relationship to materials on both monetary and physical dimensions.

Exhibitions

Selected Solo Exhibition

Year	Title	Location
2015	Dotted Line III	WHITE SPACE BEIJING, Beijing, China
2015	New Directions: He Xiangyu	Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China
2015	He Xiangyu	Bischoff Projects, Frankfurt, Germany
2014	Dotted Line I	WHITE SPACE BEIJING, Beijing, China
2014	He Xiangyu	White Cube, London, UK
2013	CROSSED BELIEFS, SCAI	The Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan
2012	HE XIANG YU	WHITE SPACE BEIJING, Beijing, China
2012	A4 Young Artist Experimental Season 2nd Round Exhibition	A4 Contemporary Arts Center, Chengdu, China
2012	Cola Project	4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia
2011	The Death of Marat	Künstlerhaus Schloß Balmoral, Bad Ems, Germany
2010	The Coca-Cola Project	WALL Art Museum, Beijing, China
2008	The Origin of Everything	RAAB art Gallery, Beijing, China
2008	The Illusion of Dongba	Shenyang Normal University, Shenyang, China
2005	Thoughts Surging in the Heart	Shenyang Normal University, Shenyang, China

Selected Group Exhibitions

Year	Title	Location
2016	Chinese Whispers	Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland
2015	Fire and Forget. On Violence	Kunst-Werke Institute, Berlin, Germany
2013	Criss-Cross	Long Museum, Shanghai, China
2013	28 Chinese	Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA
2013	Inter-Vision. A Contemporary Exhibition Across The Strait	The National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China
2013	FUCK OFF II	Groninger Museum, Groninger, Netherland
2013	Inter-Vision. A Contemporary Exhibition Across The Strait	National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan
2013	MEMO I	WHITE SPACE BEIJING, Beijing, China
2013	ON/OFF	Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China
2012	Get it louder	The Orange at Sanlitun Village, Beijing, China
2012	2012 Shanghai Sculpture Programme---Life Latitude	Shanghai Painting & Sculpture Institute, Shanghai, China
2012	Examples to follow! Expeditions in aesthetics and sustainability	Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China
2012	Maximalism in Contrasts	Hill Wood Art Museum, Long Island University, New York, USA
2011	Shanshui – Poetry without Sound? Landscape in Chinese Contemporary Art	Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland
2011	Artistes Chinois / Artistes Marseillais / Correspondances?	L’Alcazar Bibliothèque de Marseille, France
2011	DAS ICH IM ANDEREN	Mercator Foundation, Essen, Germany MIND
2011	SPACE: Maximalism in Contrasts	Frick Art Museum, University of Pittsburgh, USA
2010	Reshaping History	Today art Museum, Beijing, China
2010	Exhibition of Asian Abstract Art	501 Art Gallery, Chongqing, China
2009	Indoor Service	Molang Art Space, Xi’an, China
2009	School of Image --Century Mind	Today Art Museum, Beijing, China
2009	Beautiful City	The International Art Exchange Center, Taipei, China
2008	Chinese Yong Artists Exhibition	Austria's Capital Shengboerteng St. City Hall, Austria
2007	The Modern Oil Painting Exhibition	Sangshan Museum, Shenzhen