Social Man – My Ego and Alter Ego has featured He Rui’s artistic practice and thoughts since 2015, which includes Childhood, Soul Mate, Circle is Better than Square, Good Night, Sweet Dreams, A Dialogue and another two works. For the first time, the exhibition integrally achieves and presents the works made by the artist through last year. The seven exhibits involving performance, video, installation and other mediums, comprehensively present the most symbolic creations and the general production method of the artist. A number of objects, documents and pictures behind the artist’s creation are to be be juxtaposed in the exhibition. In addition to this, the artist will give a performance related to an exhibit on the opening day.
Before 2015, He Rui’s creation mainly focused on the relationship between the individual and the society, and the conflict between the living condition of individual and the reality. The characteristics in his creation were intensively shown in the exhibition Post-Poetry: Public Space and Imagination at K11 art village in 2013, through the artworks featuring symbolism, such as Touch the Sky by One Step, Profile of Celebrity and others; the artist’s introspection of individual and digitalized life emerges behind those disassembled, reconstructed keyboards. Since then, He Rui started to shift his concerns to himself progressively. With an outside-in perspective, his works began to be more “ego-oriented”. The whole creation ponders on the living state of individual, the relationship between individual and family and the connection between individual and art. In this exhibition, Childhood represents a thought of the contradiction and the conflict between an ideal life and a real life; Soul Mate reflects the painful fights between the artist and the reality; in Good Night, Sweet Dreams and Popsicle, the artist implements an emotional method to record and reflect on the relationship between him and his family by a poetic way. In all, this exhibition is a perfect presentation of the “ego” of the artist He Rui.
COLLABORATIONS