Create Spaces

LUXELAKES•A4 Art Museum’s vision is to create spaces for production that exist outside the mainstream, both geographically and culturally. They are spaces for investigations: not only investigations of cultural production, but also of the possibilities for creative production in a regional setting. Starting from this cultural climate and addressing the culture of China and of the world, may also be an experiment in thinking and creating. What kind of spaces will it produce? The material, the immaterial, the memory — each can extend our thinking. Each can directly shape a lived experience.

Since the late 1970s, China’s contemporary art has been focused on discussions of the rights, freedoms, and methods of artists. During this time, the higher education system has spread the structures of Chinese contemporary art. The rise of privately-owned art museums since the mid-1990s can be seen as fulfilling certain requirements of urban construction and of the art system. How is an art space established? How does it clarify processes of exhibition, display, and cultural research? These are key aspects of establishing an art institution, a structure which differs from political or commercial management structures. How can something be built on artistic production, and how can the particularities of its construction be directed towards the present reality of art? While the answer will be based in part on methods of presentation and the spaces required by emerging artists, curators, collectors, galleries, and research organizations, it also responds to international flows and the demands of new media.

Such a space is both physical and theoretical, an amalgamation of these two aspects. Current explorations do not necessarily require an orderly, classical space. Instead, they are open to the exploration of spaces that are in motion and ceaselessly producing new possibilities. In its operation, the space functions naturally as a management mechanism. Its values correspond to the contemporary; they are based on duration, temporality, and comprehension. The space seeks therein to discover the trends of the future.