SHEN YUAN
La route Paris-Luxembourg
Catalogue
June 25 - October 15, 2005
After a first presence at our gallery with her work ‘a leaf, a boat’ in 2003, we have invited the Chinese artist Shen Yuan to have her first ‘one-lady’ show in Luxembourg with two works especially conceived for beaumontpublic plus a third one dating back to 1994.
The Road from Paris to Luxembourg, made of polystyrene, was realized in China. It shows the artist’s own Opel car, without tires, with doors unhinged, body full of zippers like a big bag, a bag of 5 by 4.5 meters. She got the idea while being thoroughly and disagreeably checked by customs officers, each time she crossed the border between France and Luxembourg. Being Chinese, this always made her think of that Chinese cliché of ‘contrabande’. Hence this work surrounded by possible hide-aways for all sorts of precious objects. A video on how she worked in China on The Road from Paris to Luxembourg will be shown alongside her exhibit.
The similarity between the Great Wall of China, built from the second century BC on, and the 18th century Luxembourg fortress, inspired Shen’s work ‘Great Wall with 2005 Roots’. This serves as a sequel to the collective exhibition which Enrico Lunghi conceived for the Casino de Luxembourg (June 18th to October 9th 2005) under the heading ‘Under Bridges, along the River II’. Here, Shen shows a wall made of Lego pieces with a beautiful tree-root emerging alongside; unlike objects from the Casino exhibition, this piece comes straight from China.
A third work, shown at the request of the gallery, can be seen in the middle hall. It is called ‘Perdre sa salive (Losing one’s saliva), 1994 and was created for the group Vices&Vertues in Paris (Hou hanrou, Christina Ricupero and Caroline Schneider). In this work, we see seven deep-frozen tongues, 30 to 45 centimeters long, sticking out of the wall. When thawed, these tongues display menacing knives.
These three works are inspired by the hardships of migrants and their long haul toward bearable living conditions.