IF ONLY IT WERE TRUE / Pu Yingwei
with the collaboration of J:Gallery (Shanghai)
from June 23rd to July 13th
Pu Yingwei’s creation based on his research of literature and archive, he believes that the individual experience and memory are evidence for one exists in the world. Through different medias such as video, installation, photography, painting, and texts; the artists cross the boundaries of race, country, religion, language, finally, he created a perceptual archive and his autobiography.
Three steps construct the exhibition “If only it were true” : the dialogue with the father, the wandering through cityscapes and its relationships to architectures, and the reflexion about the hand and identity.
For his first exhibtion outside China, Pu Yingwei decide to tell his own story, the Pu Yingwei’s story :
Pu Yingwei, used name Pu Yingtong, was born in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, in 1989. He now lives and works in Lyon and Beijing. He graduated from Sichuan Fine Art Institute in 2013 and has studied at Ecole Nationale supérieur des beaux-arts de Lyon since 2014. He is the only child in an ordinary family. His mother is a doctor at a municipal hospital, she likes watching TV dramas; the fastest place his mother has been to is Hainan. Pu Yingwei’s father is a civil servant at a health supervision Institute, and he likes writing calligraphy and collecting antique, the fastest place his father has been to in Shanghai.
During Pu Yingwei’s childhood, his family lived in a fifty-square-meters two- bedroom apartment, He walked to primary school from home everyday. In 2000, his family moved to an eighty-square-meter apartment with three bedrooms, this place is distributed by his father’s employer, since then, Pu Yingwei started to go to school by bicycles. Because Pu Yingwei’s school record was barely scraped through, his father thought the reason is that Pu Yingwei’s original name “Putong” has the similar pronunciation with the word “common”. So before he got in middle school in 2002, he decided to use the new name, Pu Yingwei.
Pu Yingwei received his BFA from Sichuan Fine art Institute and the DNSEP (MFA) from École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon. He lives and works in Lyon and Beijing.
Since 2017, he exhibited his work in China : Pu Yingwei and Jim Thompson Architects, J:GALLERY, Shanghai; Roman Nomade: Pu Yingwei Solo Project, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Recent group exhibitions: Frontier: Re- assessment of Post-Globalisational Politics, Shanghai/OCAT Institute, Shanghai/ Beijing; I Do(not) Want To Be Part Of Your Celebration, Qiao Space & TANK Shanghai Project Space, Shanghai ; Reciprocal Enlightenment, CAFA, Beijing. He won the John Moores Painting Prize (2012). The article “Animism and Vulgar Materials” has been shortlisted for the IAAC ( International Awards for Art Criticism) prize (2015). His film “Interview” has been shortlisted for Caen Si Cinéma Festival (2018).
In 2016, When “post-truth” became the Word of the Year, Pu Yingwei started fictional writing, and he contends that native-tongue writing and translation is an activity of constructing identification and context-production which is set on a position as the “other”. Pu Yingwei’s works attempt to describe the reference relationship of the Chinese local situation in different cultural contexts. His first institutional solo exhibition will be held at Nouvel Institut Franco-Chinois.
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