Guest Editor: Ashley Qin
by Ashley Qin
Ashley Qin is the founder of QUALIA Art Advisory. She is a seasoned art advisor with deep experience in the global art market, specializing in contemporary art collecting and advisory services. Here's her recommendations of the recent exhibitions worth your attention!
1 exhibition
Wang Yi: Shapes from Nowhere
ASE FOUNDATION
On view May 8 – Jul 10
If you only want to see one focused and refined exhibition recently, I’d recommend Wang Yi’s solo exhibition Shapes from Nowhere, presented by ASE FOUNDATION’s Co-research Project.
Moderate in scale, the exhibition feels like a concise review of the artist’s creative methodology. From his early graduation works to the more recent Shadow series, geometric sculptures, mirror installations, and conceptual works, the exhibition space is divided into several interconnected “slices,” offering a fairly complete view of how Wang Yi has continued to work around “geometry” over the years.
The “geometry” in Wang Yi’s practice is not simply a matter of pure formal aesthetics in the modernist sense. It is more like a tool for understanding reality. Urban structures, ideology, historical experience, and even emotions and orders that cannot be directly described are eventually translated into certain “shapes.” This is also one of the most compelling aspects of the exhibition: it makes abstraction feel connected to reality again.
Wang Yi’s method of “Grand Geometry” is not only about visual language itself. It reopens questions around why abstract art emerged, what kinds of social ideals it once carried, and whether it can still exist today as a way of understanding the world. The exhibition title, Shapes from Nowhere, draws on the idea of “the land of nothingness” from Zhuangzi’s Free and Easy Wandering, while also alluding to the English title of William Morris’s News from Nowhere. In this sense, the exhibition carries a quality somewhere between utopia, conceptual experiment, and projection of reality.
After seeing the exhibition, I also highly recommend staying for a while in ASE Foundation’s art library. Compared with more functionally complex museum spaces, ASE FOUNDATION has long focused not only on exhibition research but also on the collection of art books. Here, you can find books ranging from modernism, architecture, and design to monographs on contemporary artists. Located next to SAIC Shanghai Culture Square, the foundation is a rare place in the city center where you can step away from the noise and spend a quiet moment with art.