The voice that challenges artistic and societal norms

Following "The Shape of Time," the Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project is unveiling another exhibition – "The Voice of Things."

The new exhibition features 180 artworks on loan from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, ranging from avant-garde works of the early 20th century to the most recent artistic creations that question this globalized world, reflecting the importance of the daily aesthetic in the history of modernity.

The title of the exhibition comes from the English translation of "Le parti pris des choses," the iconic collection of poems by French poet and resistance fighter Francis Ponge (1899-1988), published in 1942 during World War II. In the book, Ponge described the beauty of banality and opened up a new way of looking at things and bringing them to life.

The exhibition includes two seminal artistic styles – Dadaism and Surrealism.

Dada is the style and technique of a group of artists and writers in the early 20th century who exploited accidental and incongruous effects in their works, and challenged established canons of art, thought and morality.

Surrealism is a style of art and literature developed principally in the 20th century, stressing the subconscious or non-rational significance of imagery inspired by automatism or unexpected juxtapositions.

Major artists, in chronological order, include Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Fernand Léger (1881-1955), Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Man Ray (1890-1976) and Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), as well as some famous, modern day artists such as Tatiana Trouvé and Haegue Yang.

The first rooms are dedicated to objects representing the deconstruction of space and the expression of modern beauty.

The next section features surrealist objects – susceptible to doubts as much as dreams, offering an inexhaustible source of visual poetry alongside a return to classicism with realistic paintings in the 1950s by Bernard Buffet (1928-1999) and Jürg Kreienbühl (1932-2007).

Ti Gong

Exhibition info

Dates: Through February 5, 2022 (closed on Mondays), 10am-5pm

Tickets: 100 yuan

Venue: West Bund Museum

Address: 2600 Longteng Ave