From the Mundane World: Inaugural Exhibition of He Art Museum consists with two parts: the collection exhibition including Milieu in Change: He Art Museum Chinese Modern Collection Exhibition and On the Rise: He Art Museum Contemporary Art Collection Exhibition; and the thematic exhibition which has three sessions: Experience All Things, Doctrine for "Sole" Material Development and Mundane Canteen.

Milieu in Change aims to illustrate the conceptual transformation of 20th-century Chinese art in the context of Sino-Western interaction, with its position in the global cultural landscape during the dynamic transition from tradition to modernity. On the Rise mainly focuses on the collection of contemporary easel art. Samples of works focus on the certain direction/type of Chinese contemporary art creation since the 1980s is selected to from a narrative of tradition-to-modernity, and then to the world. They try to elaborate on the relatively obscure sources of creative motives, resources, and methods, and responds/continues to the notion of "The Dissemination of Western Learning" in modern China.
From the Mundane World is about all-encompassing, random, uncertain, but interdependent variables. The three thematic sessions are artistic scales for measuring people and nature, material, ecology, and even food. Through the artist's focus on the material media and the concreteness of real life, the exhibition tries to examine and explore the situation of human civilization in the laws of nature in the process of modernization. When the content of From the Mundane World extends to the awareness of issues such as society, production, consumption, desire, and environmental protection, material energy is artistically transformed into an existence that transcends material, which becomes the contemporary expression of the spirit of the time. At the same time, the artist's creation carried by the material medium reflects a special modernity characteristic in the contexts of social development, which suggests the crisis and vigilance of natural ecological identity. Thus, this inaugural exhibition empowers contemporary artists, both local and abroad, to express the necessary value of natural material and daily life experience, and present a realm of material and visual culture worth thinking about.

For the curators, this opening exhibition is different from the previous curatorial exhibitions which the museums are located in the city. It must not only satisfy the internationality, but also have the localities. This is also our effort to find the experiences of curating contemporary art exhibitions outside the first-tier cities in China. Therefore, the overview of the exhibition is the functionality and role of the non-profit private art museum established by family in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, in its activating and promoting the local economic and cultural development, and incorporating the under-recognized Shunde geo-culture into the perspective of international art scene. This has also become our basic aspiration and vision for curating.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this exhibition has been affected to varying degrees and has been continuously postponed and adjusted. At present, most of the works can only be exhibited in the form of launch exhibition, and some works have to be presented in videos, pictures, proposals and planning. We sincerely apologize to the artists and audiences for the compromised exhibition.

Feng Boyi, Chief Curator
December, 2020

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