X Zhu-Nowell’s Top Picks from Frieze Viewing Room
The Artistic Director of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum chooses works by Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Raqs Media Collective and Bani Abidi at Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2024
The Artistic Director of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum chooses works by Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Raqs Media Collective and Bani Abidi at Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2024
Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Accumunation, 2023
Calligraphy ink on silk, 147 × 154.2 × 5 cm. Presented by Carlos/Ishikawa. $20–50k
Based in Rotterdam, Evelyn navigates her position as an immigrant artist from China, blending boundless imagination with an intimately personal narrative. Her work is intricate, fragmented and paradoxical, responding to the social context in which she finds herself. Evelyn’s oeuvre merges the emotional, poetic and autobiographical, intertwining transcendental and profound expressions with seemingly superficial, absurd and irrelevant commentaries – often tinged with sardonic wit. Accumunation, created shortly after her solo exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum, continues her ongoing dialogue with the traditions of Chinese ink painting, recontextualizing these influences from a deeply personal perspective. Her recurring use of the seal ‘Don’t take it seriously’ encapsulates the humour that permeates her practice and serves as a sharp contrast to the transcendental ambitions of modernist painters.
Isaac Chong Wai, Falling Reversely - Collective Fall 1, 2023
Archival inkjet print set of 12 framed prints, 246.5 × 188.5 × 5 cm. Presented by Blindspot Gallery. $20–50k
How does one resist falling alone? Isaac Chong Wai’s Falling Reversely - Collective Fall 1 emerges as a timely intervention, embodying gestures of care and solidarity amidst the precarious flux of our surroundings. This work probes the intricacies of collective resilience, asking how we might hold each other within the relentless shifts of our environment – how we might sense, feel and remain attuned to one another.
Bani Abidi, Still life with margins of a newspaper, 2024
Archival pigment print mounted on alu-dibond, 71.8 × 95.3 cm. Presented by Experimenter. $10–20k
I am deeply moved by this seemingly mundane image of everyday resistance, where the fragile margins and gutters of a German newspaper bear silent witness to the ongoing genocide. Here, the margins are not merely spaces to which people are relegated for survival; they also become potent, fertile grounds where strategies of resistance quietly take root and flourish. In Abidi’s work, I find a grounded practice – poetic yet polemical – where revolutionary attitudes are always submerged within the fabric of the everyday.
Sikhote-Alin Meteorite, 1947 (impact date)
10 × 12 cm. Presented by Artancient. $50–100k
Matter has been on my mind. As a stone collector, it’s only fitting that a remarkable piece of meteorite would be among my top picks!
Raqs Media Collective, Moon Clock, 2024
Aluminium, UV printing, Acrylic, paint, LED light, Foil, 65 × 65 × 13 cm. Presented by Frith Street Gallery. $20–50k
In an era when the very notion of a future has become a luxury, what we need is not just a new perspective on time, but a radical rethinking – a new politics of time itself. Raqs Media Collective’s Moon Clock and Time Devices are the instruments that we urgently require. These works challenge the linearity and rigidity of conventional timekeeping, instead transforming it into an intimate and subjective experience.
About X Zhu-Nowell
Zhu-Nowell is a curator and writer based in Shanghai and New York, currently serving as the Artistic Director of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai.
About Frieze Viewing Room
Open to all 2 – 18 October 2024, Frieze Viewing Room is the online catalogue for the fair, giving global audiences access to gallery presentations coming to Frieze London and Masters 2024. Visitors can search artworks by artist, price, date and medium, save favourite artworks and presentations, chat with galleries and much more.
Further Information
Frieze London and Frieze Masters, 9 – 13 October 2024, The Regent’s Park.
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Main Image: Isaac Chong Wai, Falling Reversely - Collective Fall 1, 2023. Archival inkjet print set of 12 framed prints, 246.5 × 188.5 × 5 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Blindspot Gallery
