An Xiaotong: WHERE AND WHEN

For the second edition of Curated by… UCCA is pleased to present Where and When, an exhibition by An Xiaotong. ''Supporting young artists is at the core of UCCA's mission and Curated by… gives young or emerging talents a first opportunity to showcase their work to a greater number of people,'' states Jerome Sans, UCCA Director.

The work of An Xiaotong builds on a symptomatic phenomenon of our time: connections between people on the internet.

New communicating mechanisms and concepts are replacing traditional means of communication; Simplicity of communication has on the one hand brought people closer together while simultaneously creating new distances. Life evolves between the virtual and the real worlds, with the former gradually replacing the latter and the concept of communication redefined by space and time.

Using images gleaned over the net: from web sites, blogs and chat rooms, An Xiaotong sets them free from the limitation of their formats and makes them her own. By enlarging these small pictures and by employing painting, the artist goes against the multiplication of images in our society and produces a unique work. An Xiaotong thereby immortalizes and exhibits people, whose status goes from being an anonymous lost into the pool of images available on the net to a celebrity that everyone in our star-obsessed society aspires to become.

Conceived as a single body of work, Where and When is exhibited in both ''White Cube and Black box'' and presents itself as a 360 degrees space crafted as a computer matrix where An Xiaotong has strategically placed her portraits of individuals.

An Xiaotong was born in Xian in 1971 and has been working as an independent artist and curator since the early 1990's, participating in collective exhibitions abroad, especially with gallery Anne de Villepoix (Pulse, New York) in 2006 and in 2005 (FIAC, Paris; Art Basel Miami 2006) and in China, noticeably with Floating city, The first Biennial of Moca Shanghai in 2006. An Xiaotong has also had a series of solo shows including Spreading at the Biennal of Busan and Virus 2006 with Miss China in Paris in 2006. Where and When at UCCA is the first solo show of the artist in Beijing since Limits of Visions at the Galerie Passage in 2000. An Xiaotong has lived in France since 2002.

An Xiaotong
WHERE AND WHEN

Kurator: Jerome Sans