15 December 2018 – 10 January 2019 – Curated By Xu Juan, Wang Wei
15 December 2018 – 10 January 2019 – Curated By Xu Juan, Wang Wei
In this Museum showing of works by Sándor Szász and co-curated by Xu Juan and Museum director Wang Wei, “Feelings as Facts, Memory as Identity” explores the use and role of memory, representation, desire and emotional feelings as factors which shape and influence the role of an individual and minority groiup in contemporary European society.
Szász engages his childhood memories to challenge the boundaries between reality and fiction by using art as a subversive strategy for exposing the dangers of utopia and the absurdity and overbearing of totalitarian politics.
Drawing from the perceiption of both his own identity and that of the minority group to which he belongs within an European society structure and the world at large. And it is this depth of feeling and pull that overwhelm the artist to go where many dare to go in the depth, breadth and scale of this project presented in the current epi-centre of far eastern power and geopolitical political shift.
As a Hungarian/Romanian artist with a percular history, Szasz’s identity is clearly positioned as an “Eastern Europen Artist”. And it is to this end that this project creates a deep dive into Szasz’s the inner struggles, conflicts and anxieties acknowledging the major historical transformations and uncertain identities of the members of former Eastern Block countries within an EU structure due to ongoing geopolitical change.
Many in the may point to a degree of irony that this show with it’s traces of subversion and inner conflict of the individual is being presented in China, but also have to acknowledge the fact that Hungary and China have a deep friendship, and Hungary was one of the first countries to recognize the People’s Republic of China.
©Sandor Sazsz Studio
A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine. I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents.
I should be incapable of drawing a single stroke at the present moment; and yet I feel that I never was a greater artist than now. When, while the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the inner sanctuary, I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream; and, as I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants are noticed by me: when I hear the buzz of the little world among the stalks, and grow familiar with the countless indescribable forms of the insects and flies, then I feel the presence of the Almighty, who formed us in his own image, and the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains us, as it floats around us in an eternity of blis