Exhibition views Walking On the Fade Out Lines: the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Colletion, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai
Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum

Walking On The Fade Out Lines is the fruit of a fascinating collaboration and exchange with Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, one of the most renowned contemporary art institutions in Italy. Curated by Larys Frogier and Hsieh Feng-Rong, the exhibition gathers 29 works from over 23 artists from all continents, spanning such various forms as paintings, interactive installations, photography, video, among others, the works are selected from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, along with additional video works from Song Tao and new commissioned works from Zhang Ruyi, with the latter two artists originating from Shanghai and thus strengthening the rich connection to local contexts.

Walking on the Fade Out line, the title bespeaks how this exhibition, rather than offering a regulated structure of knowledge of the viewing experience, opens up the boundaries of categories and suggests new directions for ongoing explorations of the knowledge horizon. Each time when the line fades out, a new viewing angle will emerge out of the disappearing horizon.

The exhibition has been carefully designed to simultaneously tackle and open up angles of “seeing”, inviting viewers to revisit history, explore unfamiliar cities and regions.
Viewers can scrutinize how artists offer up dilemmas through creative questioning, examination, and analyses from the end of the 20th century to the present, as well as how the thinking of the “Alterity” of the trans-regional is proposed in a globalized context. Through a poetic elaboration, the exhibition attempts to transform the intrinsic understanding of cognitive structures that had gone along set paths, thereby offering up more open and plural interpretative perspectives.

As Larys Frogier states: “Walking On The Fade Out Lines whispers, listens, connects with the other, and yet there is no need to see the foreigner as the other or to travel such distances to meet with and speak on behalf of an exotic Other. Radical alterity has first to be found and cultivated into our own place, our inner self, our individual and social interaction, with all kinds of beauty, ugliness, tyranny, harmony. There is always a foreign land from where we stand”.