The Chinese artist Xiao Yu’s personal exhibition “A Drama of Materialistic Objects - One World, Cold or Warm” will be held during Sep 22nd and Nov 11th, 2007 in Space 2 of ARARIO BEIJING. It is his first large-scale personal exhibition in Beijing. His recent installations, paintings, and video works will be on display and the room of the exhibition hall has been rearranged according to the exhibition concepts.

Xiao Yu graduated from the Mural Painting Department of China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 1989; he started to work on modern art from the middle of 1990s, and since then he has committed himself to challenging art rules with a questioning attitude toward inertia thinking and all formulated rules. This exhibition will present to the audience a nine-scene realistic drama, which covers various times and spaces. Through jocosity, irony, and metaphors, the author in the drama makes a profound and particular criticism on the overlapping courses of history and human beings’ evolution.

Xiao Yu’s works are renowned for his great imagination and his sharp criticism on social problems. A real tridimensional theatre is made for “A Drama of Materialistic Objects - One World, Cold or Warm”. Space 2 of ARARIO BEIJING is divided into four parts which are connected by an aisle. The audience will go ahead along the one-way route designed by the artist and finally arrive at the winner’s platform of history where the whole ceremony of both magnificence and absurdity ends with a piece of light music.

Various art forms fill the exhibition with fluid and changeable elements. Combined with the participation and experiences of the audience, these elements make the exhibition viewing a repetitive and progressive process of serious interpretation and false understanding. As an artist of broad vision, Xiao Yu is good at refining on social experience and revealing the truth. Through black humor, he presents to the audience the cruel and absurd reality. Through dramas’ particular sense of ceremony, visual stimulation, and alienation effect, Xiao Yu’s artistic dramatization of history and people’s understanding of different editions of history achieve superficial unification and harmony in the following process: from the ancient times (emperor) - the modern times (hero and war) - the inside (thoughts/life), through the aisle of surrealistic color for “rest intervals”, to the mixed reality (spaceship) - construction and desire (bullion made up of super architectures/selling stars).

The concept of “A Drama of Materialistic Objects” breaks the boundary between history and reality. On the one side, there’s the absurd past. On the other side, there’s the coming future. The audience themselves participate in the action and push forward the drama to a climax. In the composite installations of the second scene “The Hero is Gone”, the audience, like ghosts, go to and fro through the muslin curtains of model drama style which have paintings of the setting sun and green pines on them, saying farewell solemnly to the heroes disappearing under the iron chains and to the idealism represented by them. There is also a series of “remnants of heroes”, such as “their favorite straw mats”, “the straw shoes they desired to wear when alive”, and “the fish bones left by them”. Here heroes become signs for entertainment, which shows the hollowness and sense of loss of the spiritual subjects in modern times. The leaning side of the white aisle connecting the fifth and sixth scenes is studded with circular glass. Going through this aisle, the audience will have an insuppressible strange feeling of transcending time and space: “history places many roads in front of us, but we can only take one”. The “future hall” made up of scene 6 to 9 shows human beings’ ambition to explore and conquer something, their strong desire, and the threat to the living environment from the high-speed and dense construction of cities. At the same time, Xiao Yu adds some details such as “the animals most suitable for being brought to the stars”, which is a continuation of his former method – to meditate on the essence of life through changing the living things’ physiological structure. Moreover, “Instructions in Selling Stars” is a thorough show of absurdism, in which the works, the collectors, and the artist achieve a plausible and strange relationship.

“One World, Cold or Warm” comes from Mao Zedong’s poem “Nian Nu Jiao · Kunlun”. But here it doesn’t mean to carry the world revolution through to the end or to achieve great harmony all around the world. Instead, it refers to the various, disordered, complicated, and confusing social realities. “All histories are a modern history.” We believe that Xiao Yu’s personal exhibition “A Drama of Materialistic Objects - One World, Cold or Warm” is not only a totally new exhibition in terms of both contents and forms, but also a periodical summary of his thinking and producing in recent years.