Before the Earth Falls Down

The inaugural exhibition at the new Bund No.1 venue of Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum, “Before the Earth Falls Down,” explores the cycles of life and transformation across the living world.

How can art commemorate extinct species? How do we perceive the traces of nature embedded in time? How might we reconnect with the bonds that tie us to all forms of life? These questions, hidden within time itself, find their most moving artistic responses in this exhibition. Rejecting didactic statements, the show employs a wide range of media—including painting, installation, moving image, and sound—inviting viewers, through observation and perception, to enter into a deep dialogue with all things, and to reflect on shared global concerns from the urban vantage point of the Bund.

Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum has invited curator Jiang Jiehong to lead the exhibition, bringing together nine leading contemporary artists from around the world: AK Dolven (Norway), Ayşe Erkmen (Turkey), Félix Blume (France), Francis Alÿs (Belgium), Han Gengyu (Korea), Katie Paterson (UK), Cornelia Parker (UK), Yin Xiuzhen (China), and Zheng Bo (Hong Kong, China). Each artist brings a distinct perspective, grounded in close observation and reflection on ecological realities, and through highly site-responsive practices captures the disappearance and growth, the minute and the monumental, the fleeting and the eternal aspects of all things.