2010.11.7-2011.3.27

Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino, Italy

CHINA POWER STATION, curated by Julia Peyton Jones, Gunnar B. Kvaran and Hans Ulrich Obrist, has been an evolving project, which sprang from a partnership between the Serpentine Gallery and the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. The exhibition has been staged in various venues: Part I in London in 2006 was the first stage of the project. Part II was developed for Oslo in 2007 and Part III was staged in Luxembourg in 2008.

The exploration of the collecting phenomenon brought a new kind of patronage to Turin: after producing the exhibition China Power Station in its entirety, the Astrup Fearnley collection then decided to purchase it and make it part of its permanent collection, based in the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, Norway.

Most of the works presented were created between 2005 and 2007, and it highlighted the tremendous creativity of those who are breaking new territory in the Chinese and the international contemporary art world. Installations, films, sculptures, photographs, computer graphics and paintings told stories about universal topics of power and politics, real and flowing identities, history, memory and nostalgia. Other works took abstract notions like time, unpredictability, chance and illusion.

Confirming the interest in Chinese culture, Pinacoteca Agnelli has hosted The Future of China too, a marathon event: the critic Hans Ulrich Obrist presented a dialogue with Chinese philosophers, artists and architects on the future of the world’s second largest economic power.