To commemorate Women’s History Month in March, OH Art Foundation presents the group exhibition “The Age of Liberation.” The exhibit will be held on the Volossom Gallery, third floor of the Zhou B Art Center from March 13th to April 14th.
This exhibition showcases the works of two female artists: Mo Chen 陈默, and Xiao Lu 肖鲁. They explore different media such as painting, performance, installation, and new media art. Their works of art reflect their concerns and creative inspirations related to feminism, women’s social issues, and femininity.
Mo Chen 陈默 is the curator of this exhibition. She and Xiao Lu 肖鲁 are two very different female artists who were born in different decades and are also at different stages of their artistic development. By presenting their respective concerns about women’s topics and their different attitudes towards these issues, she aims to observe the common and different social contradictions faced by the feminist movement across different countries, times, social environments, and cultural customs. These observations are intriguing and thought-provoking, and encourage us to reflect on the new and more complex moral and social issues that feminism faces in our current era: a time of greater intellectual and technological advancements and emancipation, a time of neutralized or crossing-sectional sexual identities, which she considers to be “the age of liberation”.
Mo Chen (陈默) is an accomplished artist and curator who resides in Chicago. She draws inspiration from Chinese landscape paintings and creates abstract works that explore the metaphoric mindscape in various forms. Since 2013, her art has been exhibited and collected internationally. Chen has also curated numerous influential international exhibitions in the U.S, Europe, and China.
Chen holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from Tsinghua University (清华大学), a Master of Engineering degree in Computer Science from Cornell University, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, Chen teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago and collaborates with several significant international art organizations as their chief curator, exhibition director, and writer. Her expertise in both art and technology, coupled with her passion for cultural exchange, have made her a valuable contributor to the global art community.
Xiao Lu (Chinese: 肖鲁, born 1962) is a Chinese artist who works with installation art and video art. She became famous in 1989, when she participated in the 1989 China/Avant-Garde Exhibition with her work, Dialogue. Just two hours after the exhibition opened, she suddenly shot her own work with a gun, causing an immediate shutdown of the exhibition. When the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred four months later, her actions were heavily politicized, referred to as “the first gunshots of Tiananmen”. Dialogue (1989) is often regarded as China’s first major feminist contemporary work of art.