EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS

Artists and artworks in the show will be on view in three different sections, each lasting for approximately one month.

Just Around the Corner is a group exhibition that looks at the street and hutong environment as a site for artistic creation. Marking Arrow Factory’s first group exhibition, Just Around the Corner invites international and local artists to make new projects that interact, engage, embed themselves or otherwise respond to social conditions that persist within Arrow Factory’s storefront location. Extending beyond the four walls of Arrow Factory’s space to engage more directly with the outdoor street and neighboring businesses and residents, these works wish to promote a seamless relationship with the local economies and micro-environments of hutong life.

In Beijing, a hutong is not only a corridor that runs between houses or even an alleyway that extends in all directions from the major arteries of the city; it is also the city’s sensitive nerve endings. It is where old men chat and women gossip—just like today’s internet—and where an important node of communication that transcends mainstream discourse takes root. Different kinds of businesses selling stuffed buns, pancakes, fruits, vegetables, tobacco and drinks conduct sales among the same buyers and sellers, resembling a self-sufficient system or social network until an intruder enters in to the society and changes these transactions into a genuine form of commerce. Even though modern lifestyles and new inhabitants have invaded the hutong, modern visual culture has yet to incorporate the hutong and its residents into its own horizon. By the same token, hutong residents are nonchalant when it comes to contemporary art.

In taking the hutong as site for artistic production, this exhibition is also aimed at engaging strategies of looking and visibility, especially as they pertain to our understandings of consumption and exchange in daily life. The audience at Arrow Factory is made up of immediate neighbors and residents of Jianchang Hutong, namely local residents, merchants and random passersby. Unaccustomed to the modes of visual consumption we readily associate with contemporary art, they are regular users of the space and inhabitants whose daily practice is composed of less visually oriented types of consumption—buying vegetables, cigarettes, pancake bread, etc—that permeate everyday life. The art world views its audience as the museum director, curator, collector, art researcher and art student, gradually abandoning the general public and enforcing a high-minded view of art. But what does it mean for works of art to be seen, noticed, witnessed, and felt in contexts where the modalities of art merge with everyday human experience? Are there ways to approach a particular location, like Arrow Factory Hutong, as a site for examining the systems and structures of consumption that overlap with but remain fundamentally different than those of the ‘art system’? These are some of the ideas Just Around the Corner seeks to identify and pose through its own formation and realization.