To the Things Themselves Part I: Pop-Up Exhibition

Don Gallery Summer Pop-Up Exhibition

「To the Things Themselves」

PART I:  3 August – 22 August, 2024

PART II:  23 August – 11 September, 2024

HAI 550 L6-05, No.550 Huaihai Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai

We must abstract things from the concreteness that the document has programmed for us, and these abstractions can be reduced to one common denominator: we are not alone in this world; we are with others, and all we experience, know, and evaluate is the outcome of our agreement with others. The new path of abstraction moves away from information and toward others. In essence, "getting back to things" entails breaking the code in order to liberate ourselves and others from it.

                                                                  ——Vilém Flusser

With great pleasure, Don Gallery announces a special curatorial experiment in the soon-to-be L6-05 space at HAI550 mall. Under the title "To the Things Themselves," the five-week pop-up exhibition will leap out of the conventional white-box spatial framework and reflect on people's interest in and relationships with information, items, and others in the ultra-flat digital era in the context of real consumer scenario. Through their interventions in various mediums and materials, over ten artists will abstract the tangible interaction between objects and people from the exact theme, guiding us "to the thing themselves" and rebuilding and restoring the intimacy of everyday life. The show, which is slated to open on August 3, 2024 and continue through August 22, will include recent pieces by GAO Weigang, GUO Haiqiang, LI Shan, LIU Ren, LU Song, ZHANG Peiyun, and ZHANG Ruyi from the previous series.

In his book "Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld" from 2021, Byung-Chul Han criticises digital capitalism and laments the current status of the digital age, which is fixated on "hyperproduction" and "hyperconsumption," from the standpoint of information as "non-objects." We are progressively losing our relationship with the Other, both human and physical. Real contact and human interaction are replaced by the tap of a finger on a smartphone, and our need for transient virtual knowledge is heightened by big data's algorithmic precision and endlessly available short-form video platforms, which generate streams of image commodities that provide quick answers. We are becoming more and more engaged in consuming knowledge, as noted by Flussell, and less and less interested in possessing things. As "non-objects" increasingly make up people's environs instead of "objects", taking back control of the "lifeworld" has become an urgent existential issue…