Yuz Museum Shanghai presents OVERPOP, a curatorial conversation between Jeffrey Deitch and Karen Smith. Jeffrey selected works from artists based in the US and Europe; Karen selected the artists based in China.
As defined by Jeffrey Deitch, OVERPOP focuses on a group of artists who are defining new contemporary aesthetics. Their work embodies an intensification of the pop tradition, portraying an enhanced reality. These artists are responding to the impact of the Internet on the visual environment, but their work is more than post-internet art. It incorporates the historical tradition of Pop Art in addition to responding to the acceleration of digital imagery. The artists emphasize precision of craft and execution. The artist’s hand is generally subsumed within an aesthetic of industrial and artisanal fabrication techniques.
For Karen Smith, if the phrase OVERPOP refers to Pop Art as a form of artistic expression that is now officially over, if it serves to demonstrate how Pop’s aesthetic critique has overtaken by the attitudes of a new generation, then China presents an interesting comparative case study. Dominating the recent exhibition scene in China is a generation of younger artists responding to concepts of reality and the internet in dynamic modes of activity; with incisive insight into the present and to the impact of context and display.
OVERPOP features: He An, Liu Yefu, Tan Tian, Tong Kunniao, Wu Di, aaajiao (Xu Wenkai), Math Bass, Ian Cheng, Samara Golden, Camille Henrot, Alex Israel, Helen Marten, Katja Novitskova, Tabor Robak, Borna Sammak, Kerry Tribe and Anicka Yi.
