Pop-up Gallery Exhibition: Brave New Field

Artist list

Gaston Bertin, Paolo Gambarelli, Yajie Hu, Stacey Huang, Malgorzata Kalinska,  Hongmeng Luo, Elena Martinelli, Mineri Matsuura, Nagi Nakajima, Ruta Naujalyte, Fumiki Taguchi,  Hansel Tai,  Yuanfang Tang, Yue Tong, Yasmin Vinograd, Tina Zhao,  Dongdong Zhuang

BRAVE NEW FIELD is the first themed exhibition of “Pop-Up Gallery”, a new collaboration between NoCC and Field of Rumination.
 
Art making is a creative process. Its diversified forms provide a plethora of ways to define what art making really is. Beyond its mere aesthetic significance, art-making is also used to study and explain human and society. The key is to skillfully identify a subject for art creation. It can be out of necessity, such as the need for self-expression, the need to facilitate daily life or something required for sustainable development. Each type of needs requires an artist to identify the subject in a different way. Responding to social development through jewellery making is among these needs as designers and artists are often more sensitive and attach stronger feelings to social changes than sociologists.
 
As the first year of the second decade in the 21st century, 2020 has ushered in a series of unpredictable events, bringing various positive or negative impacts on our lives. On this front, the choice of the theme “BREAVE NEW FIELD” represents a positive attitude towards such changes. “Pop-Up Gallery” also helps establish a conversation between audience and design artists. It expounds artists’ art journey and forms of participation: when artists instil their imaginations and ideas into forms, they also need wearers to help realize and complete their works, or even unintentionally extend their possibilities. 
 
The curator of this themed exhibition carefully selected a number of exhibiting artists active in contemporary jewellery design, including Japanese artist Nagi Nakajima who champions “elegant lifestyle”; Israeli artist Yasmin Vinograd who skillfully depicts nature with fine materials; Hansel Tai, an Europe-based Chinese artist who focuses on cultures of a post-Internet era; and other avant-garde designers such as Malgosia Kalinska, Elena Martinelli, Gaston Bertin, and Paolo Gambarelli. How would they pulse social trends and cultural phenomena with their works?
 
Compared to traditional or modern jewellery, the design language of contemporary ones may vary from utterly aggressive to artful and fashionable, or to implicit and intimate. For example, Yasmin Vinograd distils natural landscape of Israel into jewel pieces to examine his memory by drawing design language from the combination of sceneries and their shadows. However, preferring jewellery as medium and a form of weapon, Young artist Hansel Tai proactively explores and lends voice to social issues with elements such as body worship, subculture symbols, and glossy metals in the post-Internet era. Such creative processes go beyond the building of form language. They are a representation of the mental exercises to balance between irrationality and reason practised time after time by artists as well as an outlook and prediction of the “brave new field” through multiple viewpoints.
 
We invite you to join our experience day event alongside the opening of the exhibition and be exposed to the diverse charm of international contemporary jewellery by appreciating and actually making them. You will be treated with exquisite afternoon tea on the opening day while learning the art of the jewellery works with our guide. During the workshop, jewellery design teacher will take you back 3,000 years to discover the embedding techniques of the ancient Rome aristocrats and make your own exclusive micro-mosaic piece with contemporary art expression.
 
Come have a date with jewellery. It can be a fashionable experience, a spiritual dialogue, a recreation of the old days or an expression beyond the daily trivial. Whatever it may be, we would like to share it with you.
 
Curator: Jie Sun (National Distinguished Expert & Professor, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University )
Art Director: Xingyun Cai

Exhibition Executive: Jia Lin
Exhibition Manager: Zirong Lee
Curation Assistant: Yihong Fang
Display Design: Zirong Lee
Graphic Design: Zaishi Luo
Workshop Moderator: Queenie Yuan

Co-sponsor: FLYING BLIND Field of Rumination, New Center of Contemporary Jewellery and Fashion Culture(NoCC) under College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University
Venue: Field of Rumination - F2, Bund Finance Center (BFC), Shanghai
 

About Field of Rumination, FLYING BLIND:
“Field of Rumination” is the fruition of the project “FLYING BLIND +” of the company. Through the incubation of multiple cultural clusters, the project is dedicated to studying the fast-developing economy, culture and technology and forming its re-practices in a “ruminating” way, thus promoting the “on site” and “on location” features of culture to further conceptualize ideas and translate them into live scenes. “Field of Rumination” attempts to create a new art creation system that is more reasonable, effective and with cultural significance while promoting diversified development of contemporary art practices and consumption patterns in appropriate, sustainable and multi-faceted ways.
 
New Center of Contemporary Jewellery and Fashion Culture (NoCC), College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University:
Led by state-level experts, the New Center of Contemporary Jewellery and Fashion Culture (NoCC) is a premium institute of culture, education and research. As the only one of its kind in China driven by the concepts of “design +” and “art +” amidst the ever-popular fashion culture, this multifunctional platform, featuring international and domestic cooperation, is dedicated to the practice, research, culture, planning and management of jewellery and other fashion types, focusing on cultivating “Creative Leadership”.
 
Established in 2016, NoCC is an educational practice platform housed in the SPace of Tongji University together with JAlab and Glass Art Laboratory. In cooperation with other advanced cultural, educational, industry and research institutes, NoCC has completed a series of important projects. Over 50 international and domestic scholars from more than 20 countries have been invited to lectures, workshops and forums organized by the Center, while over 600 artists and designers from more than 34 countries have contributed to NoCC’s exhibitions and publications. The major projects it has involved in include the “Hyper-daily-Towards Contemporaneity” International Contemporary Jewellery Symposium (2016), the Sino-Swiss Contemporary Jewellery and Accessory Design Exhibition (2018), the 4th TRIPLE PARADE Biennale for Contemporary Jewellery (2018), the 1st World Symposium Forum for Fashion, Jewellery and Accessories (2018), and the exhibition during the NYCxDesign (2019).
 
The College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University, has become one of the most prominent design colleges in China with international presence, on a par with other renowned design colleges in the world. As a “Double First-class” university directly under the Ministry of Education, Tongji University boasts Design as one of its first-class disciplines, ranking 14th in the list of “QS World University Rankings by Subject 2020: Art & Design”, the top one in Asia.